Frederick Wiseman

Frederick Wiseman (born January 1, 1930) is an American filmmaker, documentarian, and theater director. His work is "devoted primarily to exploring American institutions". He has been called "one of the most important and original filmmakers working today". Early life Wiseman was born to a Jewish family in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Gertrude Leah (née Kotzen) and Jacob Leo Wiseman. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Williams College in 1951, and a Bachelor of Laws from Yale Law School in 1954. He spent 1954 to 1956 serving in the U.S. Army after being drafted. Wiseman spent the following two years in Paris, France before returning to the United States, where he took a job teaching law at the Boston University Institute of Law and Medicine. He then started documentary filmmaking, and has won numerous film awards as well as Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. Career The first feature-length film Wiseman produced was The Cool World (1963). This was followed by Titicut Follies in 1967, which he produced and directed. He has both produced and directed all of his films since. They are chiefly studies of social institutions, such as hospitals, high schools, or police departments. All his films have aired on PBS, one of his primary funders. Wiseman's films are often described as in the observational mode, which has its roots in direct cinema, but Wiseman dislikes the term: What I try to do is edit the films so that they will have a dramatic structure. That is why I object to some extent to the term "observational cinema" or cinéma vérité, because observational cinema, to me at least, connotes just hanging around with one thing being as valuable as another, and that is not true. At least, that is not true for me, and cinéma verité is just a pompous French term that has absolutely no meaning as far as I'm concerned.