Wiseman at Last

At last, Fred Wiseman comes to Austin. And with two of his vintage docs, High School (1968) and Law and Order (1969), the second and third in a 33-film oeuvre. (He arrives here from Paris, where he’s just wrapped his second fiction film.) Since his first revelatory “banned-in-Massachusetts-until-just-recently” doc, Titicut Follies (1967), about a state psychiatric institution, Wiseman’s fly-on-the-wall lens has fleshed out the drama lurking in a broad spectrum of our institutions — from hospitals, the Comedie-Francaise, and the daily life of a Benedictine monastery, to the inner workings of a Neiman Marcus store, and his most recent, a film about domestic violence.

High School, despite its age and setting at a mostly white, middle-class Philadelphia school on the cusp of the Sixties upheavals, feels hardly dated. “I’ve been told by people who’ve graduated from high school from the Twenties through the Nineties that it feels just like their high school,” says Wiseman. When it was shown in 1969, the film, which chronicles the joyless banality of the high school drill, was deemed by Newsweek “so deeply disturbing” as to require comment in two separate sections of the magazine, Education and Movies.

To shoot the Emmy-winning Law and Order, Wiseman spent six weeks with the Kansas City Police Department — at a time when, Wiseman points out, “the accepted cliché view of the police, after the Chicago riots in ’68, was that they were all ‘pigs.’ Of course, after you’d ridden around in the police cars for about 20 seconds, you realized that the piggery was in no way restricted to the police. You saw what people did to each other, which made it necessary to have police. Not to condone police misbehavior — but it was obviously part of a continuum of human behavior which is not always admirable.”

This article appears in March 29 • 2002.