Five Films by Frederick Wiseman: Titicut Follies, High School, Welfare, High School II, Public Housing

by Frederick Wiseman, Barry Keith Grant (Editor)

Frederick Wiseman is among America’s foremost documentary filmmakers. The recipient of many awards, including three Emmys, Wiseman has made more than thirty feature-length documentaries during a career that has spanned five decades. Together, these films provide a fascinating chronicle of American social and institutional life. This book makes available for the first time transcriptions of five of Wiseman’s most important films― Titicut Follies, High School, Welfare, High School II, Public Housing ―providing all of the dialogue as well as annotations about other aspects of the soundtracks such as music and ambient noise, and notes about editing and camera movement. These scene-by-scene transcripts enable readers to scrutinize the films’ complex structural patterns, recurring motifs, editing regimes, and the unscripted dialogue that makes Wiseman’s cinema a rich repository of American speech. Editor Barry Keith Grant’s critical introduction discusses the importance of sound in Wiseman’s documentaries. Liberally illustrated with images from the films, these meticulous transcriptions are accompanied by a bibliography and filmography.

Genres: Film

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[TrumanCoyote · Rating 3 out of 5]

According to Ross McElwee on the back cover, these films have been meticulously reconstructed (or some such phrase), but in fact I found the accounts pretty threadbare, with little attempt made to pass along telling details. It would've been nice for example to have some capsule description of each of the participants, including their race, but I suppose that is deemed taboo nowadays (although I noticed that they did make an exception for the "White racist" in one of the photo captions). Still, I suppose I should count myself fortunate that they did manage to include the sex of the speakers.

Of course, even though the editor got the credit for the transcriptions, they were no doubt really the work of one or two of his graduate students. Perhaps if Wiseman were to do a documentary entitled College, we would find a number of such shenanigans.

As for the films themselves, I found Welfare quite funny after a while. And High School II was altogether a depressing experience; it was sad to see that after 20+ years little had changed (except that people had gotten much wordier). There were a number of quite ridiculous scenes (the counseling/"intercession" of the two kids who got in a fight, for example). Anyway, apparently the institution of high school remains as insular and clueless as ever regarding the real world (or perhaps it's gotten even worse).

And nobody better give that one lady in Public Housing any guff. She was definitely a formidable presence. :)