Renowned documentarian Frederick Wiseman dies

Obituary: If you look closely enough you will see the truth

He portrayed the United States by filming its institutions for decades and exposing the violence behind them. The documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has died at the age of 96.

On the death of Frederick Wiseman: His documentaries have earned their reputation [premium]

He has scrutinized the USA with his camera like no other: Frederick Wiseman's documentary work stands as the ultimate antidote to the undifferentiated flood of images of our time. The great film chronicler, who had recently spent more time filming in Europe, has died at the age of 96.

Frederick Wiseman dies: Titicut Follies director dies at 96

He was among the most influential documentary filmmakers, and in his works he often portrayed everyday life in the United States. Frederick Wiseman has died at the age of 96.

Influential documentary filmmaker Wiseman let images speak for themselves

The American master of the observational documentary did not set out to reveal wrongdoing in his often long films. But this happened sometimes.

Frederick Wiseman (1930-2026): de grootste observator van de Amerikaanse samenleving

Frederick Wiseman: The end of a legendary journey in the documentary

The director died at 96, having chronicled with unique acuity the American institutions and the everyday life of American society.

Frederick Wiseman brought a uniquely empowering scale to his immersive documents of ordinary life

His maximal studies of US institutions such as welfare bureaucracy and an intensive care unit were packed with human detail and free from explicit commentary • Frederick Wiseman, prolific documentary film-maker, dies aged 96 The documentary form is often thought to be governed by a manageable feature-length high concept: the story of a person, an institution, an historical episode. The subject itself and the film’s attitude towards it, its editorial slant, are habitually plain enough and the procedure is metonymic: the camera focuses on a part, and the whole is illuminated by implication. Often they have a sexed-up, quirky story to tell, which might mean a selective and sneakily tendentious approach to editing the material. But that is not quite the case with the films of Frederick Wiseman. His colossal, immersive movies about ordinary people and ordinary lives enclosed in some kind of institution, and characterised by the absence of voiceovers, intertitles or the off-camera directorial presence of the interviewing voice, are not amenable to the elevator pitch; they are the entire elevator shaft itself, and the whole building that houses it. Whereas epic-length films might be generally held to be appropriate for big and distinctively historical subjects, such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah or Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, Wiseman applies the maximal approach to static cross-section studies of sometimes less obviously momentous topics such as Paris’s Crazy Horse nightclub or the French restaurant Le Bois Sans Feuilles . However his greatest works are top-to-bottom body-politic pictures of public institutions, huge, intricate constructions of unglamour; his movies themselves were virtual institutions, movie-edifices mirroring their subjects in architectural form and indeed almost always funded by one particular public institution: PBS, the Public Broadcasting System. Continue reading. . .

Frederick Wiseman has died: These films were never too long

Four hours was, in the end, almost normal for his documentaries. Now Frederick Wiseman, the master of institutional portraits, has died at the age of 96.