Frederick Wiseman’s Cosmic Joke

The Old Master of documentary film talks about tantrums at London’s National Gallery, his curiosity, and his love of janitors

By Jeremy Sigler|for Tablet Magazine

Never before has such a mixed bag of “documentaries” been so instantly available through digital streaming. But Frederick Wiseman’s films are still hard to find, and equally hard to ingest. Other documentary filmmakers associated with the Cinema Verité movement are inclined to stalk a charismatic subject until something truly unprecedented is caught on film; Wiseman, however, lets the true drama of his subject speak, even if nothing especially dramatic happens. His mastery is in capturing the uneventfulness of everyday life. (Ironically, his films are a treasure trove of mind-boggling, often hilarious occurrences.)

Wiseman is now in his eighties (born in 1930) and has made more than 30 full-length feature films, mainly ingenuously non-opinionated accounts of American institutions (public high schools, factories, the military, and hospitals), most of which originally aired on PBS. His historic contribution to the art of 20th-century cinema is a given, yet each new film retains an innocence and curiosity that thrusts us yet again into a new context. There we may witness another collection of performances by “normal” people who often don’t realize they are “acting” in a movie. In his latest slice of reality, National Gallery, Wiseman immerses his audience in a cinematic “behind the scenes” choreography of the London museum’s blockbuster Leonardo da Vinci show, as well as its magnificent collection of Old Master paintings. Never before has da Vinci been upstaged by painfully long administrative meetings; verbose docents; framers; restorers; museum workers erecting and breaking down galleries, painting walls, installing paintings, polishing floors, tilting lights, and even tending bars—and I almost forgot: hordes of art-loving, googly-eyed museum-goers.

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