The wisdom of Wiseman
At 81, Frederick Wiseman is the American dean of the documentary genre known as direct cinema. Since 1967, he has made nearly a film a year — documentaries meant to reveal the diversity of experience, including tragedy, humor, humiliation, humdrum, and even horror. Wiseman, peppery and lean, was at Harvard on Dec. 1 to deliver a witty, illustrated primer on how to shoot, edit, and “read” a documentary. He spoke before a packed audience at the Radcliffe Gymnasium, delivering the Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture in Art and the Humanities, sponsored by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. You can’t get advanced training in filmmaking in an hour and 24 minutes, the time Wiseman took at the podium. But you can gain insights. For starters, don’t expect to hear any pronouncements in the language of film criticism, which he professes not to understand. “There’s an enormous amount of (expletive deleted) about documentary film,”...