May 2024
(Essays on this site are from my time at NYU. This essay was for a Psychoanalysis class at Gallatin, where I was prompted to psychoanalyze an author/artist through their work. There are limitations to filmmaking as there are to any other craft, and this essay merely aims at exploring these limits. The situation with Wiseman and most confrontational filmmakers is something I’m not totally at ease publicly psychoanalyzing in a conclusive way, like I attempted to do with here. That’s a critic’s job. However, I hope the essay can influence anyone who reads it to see as many of his movies as they can.)
In Hating In The First Person Plural, Donald Moss introduces the collection of psychoanalytic essays by drawing from personal experience in an anecdote where he describes watching newsreels of war footage as a young child. His honest account depicts a complex relationship between his younger self and the films, in which the act of identifying with jewish Holocaust victims and as a result, disidentifying with Nazi perpetrators, activated a state of “raw and hungry fascination” within him (Moss xxii). Essentially, the passage is Moss’s attempt at distilling an understanding of his own psyche, one which derived a degree of satisfaction from the otherwise traumatizing imagery, yet without necessarily condemning himself. Instead, the disidentifier is stuck between two realms, that of continuously chasing their appetite for said content and proving themselves innocent of the pseudo-sadistic voyeurism they’re possibly engaging in. This unrelaxed scenario is more commonly known today as a byproduct of morbid curiosity, a concept that dates as far back as Aristotle1 and has reached popular heights in the algorithm-reliant, viral age of Tiktok and Instagram Reels. However, in keeping with Moss’s exposure to the black and white, 16mm texture of his early years, one is reminded of the iconoclastic, underappreciated American documentarian Frederick Wiseman.
Wiseman, who boasts a filmography of forty plus documentaries, is primarily known for his observational filming style adopted relatively early on after the advent of lightweight sound and camera equipment during World War 2. Alongside Robert Drew and the Maysles brothers, he was a pioneer of what has come to be known as the direct cinema movement, in which the development of capable equipment coincided with an emerging inclination for realism in motion pictures.
With his debut film Titicut Follies (‘67), Wiseman exposed the absurd maltreatment of inmates at Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, with sequences of note depicting a force-feeding and the embalming of a patient’s corpse. It was the first American film to be banned for reasons other than obscenity, the result of a drawn out court case in which Wiseman was accused of infringing upon a subject’s right to privacy. The eventually overturned case’s subject in question was filmed naked in his cell while being taunted by guards and deemed too incompetent to provide consent for filming by the state of Massachusetts.
In his essay, Moss describes the purpose of newsreel screenings as “moral instruction…to see what had been done to people like us by people like them” (Moss xxii). The footage essentially functions as anti-Nazi propaganda, and Moss’ focus on the power of violent material’s ability to motivate viewers to disidentify with perpetrators is relevant to Massachusett’s case considering their successful banning of the film.
Wiseman had initially received approval to shoot at Bridgewater from Nixon’s future Attorney General, Elliott Richardson, who advocated that the film could convince legislatures to grant additional funding to state hospitals. Yet despite his progressive agenda, the Democrat-controlled state legislature saw the case as an opening to discredit the Republican AG for providing Wiseman unwarranted filming permissions. From the perspective of Massachusetts’ legislators, Jim (the naked subject) is the identified victim, but instead of disidentifying with the guards as one could argue Wiseman is attempting to get audiences to do, their case reframes the media/viewer dynamic so that in keeping the film obscured, the public disidentifies with the filmmaker and Richardson.
The nature of the case is interesting in that the proposed victim (identified) is Jim for both parties, yet the prosecution and defense teams cite each other as the proposed perpetrators (disidentified). Though the dis-/identification Moss describes is specifically in relation to the experience his younger self had with recorded subjects on a screen, the argument here is moreso about the relationship between the public and the vaguely negative ideology associated with Follies, Wiseman, and Richardson as a result of the case’s decision.
In reference to hate-fueled group-thinking, Moss elaborates that “we enlist these hatreds in a struggle for self-definition… these hatreds express a yearned-for solidarity with like-minded others,” essentially relaying that engaging in social forms of hatred occurs in an effort to define the ego (Moss xviii). Setting boundaries within one’s personal palette of values and opinions that, when observed amongst compatible individuals, creates a sense of wholeness in one’s own character. Where Moss and fellow Jews around him share their hatred for Nazi offenders, an inner wanting for social bonding is satisfied. In the same sense, Massachusetts elicits the terms of identification in their case against Follies, spun into representing privacy-infringing Republicans.
On the flip side, Moss’s essay can be referred to in an attempt to understand Wiseman’s infamously self-dissected shooting style. The filmmaker’s process is unlike most documentarians in that he does essentially no research in advance of production, refrains from facilitating interviews, and mixes sound while directing a 2-person crew. Hundreds of hours’ and tens of thousands’ of dollars worth of film is compiled and trimmed over the course of a year into a largely plotless, subjectively stylized feature. In discussing his ethical approach to filming, Wiseman explains, “I think I have an obligation to the people who have consented to be in the film, ... to cut it so that it fairly represents what I felt was going on at the time in the original event” (Poppy 1). The statement reflects a dynamic in which the filmmaker interacts and manipulates his compiled footage under the guise of identifying with his primary subjects, disidentifying with any confrontational, violent forces that confront them as he shoots, in addition to refraining from engaging in any similarly harmful exploitation as the filmmaker.
With this knowledge, Wiseman can be contextualized as the ultimate model for radical disidentifiers, having made a career out of the ceaseless observation and recording of public institutions with largely progressive social results. His avid self-awareness of the impossibility of extracting an objective document from stockpiles of footage poisoned by his own subjectivity mirrors Moss, whose writing serves as a form-following attempt to absolve himself from what most deem a mortal sin⸺arousal by “contemporary malignant social phenomena” (Moss xxv).
Considering the fact that Wiseman quit his primary occupation as a lawyer upon taking interest in directing, as well as having spent a year attempting to convince hospital administrators to grant him filming privileges, one can assume the internal self-sustenance of his passion, like many directors, was partially fueled by the innate psychological fixation that can result from documentary shooting. Films like Rear Window (‘54) and Peeping Tom (‘60) all exaggeratedly act as metaphorical portraits of this exact phenomena, where the filmmaker expresses a sense of being haunted by his own gaze, wrestled with by creating drama revolving around a characters’ observational vocation.
In a retrospective interview conducted by Vice Magazine, Wiseman described what it’s like when shooting becomes intense, prompted by the interviewer’s reference to Follies’ infamous force feeding scene, where an inmate is held down and has a feeding tube run through his nose. The filmmaker answers, “there’s a corner of my mind that’s amazed that people can treat other people this way” before continuing to explain, “when you’re in the midst of it, it’s hard to go beyond thinking, well, this is a great scene” (Pearson 2). Much like Moss, Wiseman is sharp enough to “renounce” the subject of his disidentification without transgressing himself (Moss xix). Nearly every interview with him demonstrates an intense speaker eager to discuss his work with precision.
It should be noted that he only indulged in admitting satisfaction from whatever moment of crisis a scene may be offering by initially damning the circumstances that caused the subject’s suffering in the first place. A career made out of not necessarily participating in a group’s oppression, but in seeking and engaging with spaces where such activities are rampant is the very center of Wiseman’s filmic moral fabric. When psychoanalytically inspecting him in relation to Moss’ writing, one can’t help but project the writer’s eerily thematically adjacent anxieties onto one’s understanding of Wiseman’s relationship to his own camerawork. Specifically, when Moss says “my eyes alone, and not I, were responsible” and describes “aiming for the proper ethical gaze” in reference to the visual obsession. Wiseman’s ability to detach himself from surrounding subjects prompts one to question whether his intrapersonal ethical reasoning came to fruition before or after shooting morally questionable content.
In the same article, Wiseman repeats similar rhetoric when discussing his reason for refusing to cut Jim’s scene from the final film, saying, “I wanted to show the way he was treated because this was no way to treat a human being, obviously, no matter what crime he committed” (Pearson 5). Though the filmmaker’s detached cinematic approach makes him appear to be a political sidestepper, the series of statements reveal the documentarian’s overall output as having a particularly progressive political ethos. Given the prevalence of liberal political views in the intellectual and art spheres that celebrate his work, the self-preserving nature of his film philosophy seems extra-careful. It’s as if the filmmaker feels slight discomfort that his previously misinterpreted, and therefore possibly unclear political objective reinforce the need to assert every decision behind his vast body of work, despite being extensively lauded. Thus, the magazine reader is less likely to fall under the same line of thinking as Massachusetts’s state legislators, though by now, Wiseman has nearly sixty years’ worth of praise and recognition to fall back on in the event of another witch hunt.
In his ultimate act of disidentification, Wiseman would spend the next twenty five years working to make Titicut Follies publicly available in the U.S., in addition to generating a reliable, annual output of similarly socially conscious documentaries. Not unlike the archetypal journalist or social worker, the filmmaker presents himself as more directly concerned with exposing corruption and documenting humanity in all its nuances than with adhering to any possible commercial appeal. This coupled with the fact that his works haven’t garnered much financial success offers up an image of a now 94-year-old Wiseman, unknowingly a statuesque model of Moss’ theories on hate. When Wiseman describes having “learned to pay as much attention to peripheral thoughts at the edge of my mind as to any formally logical approaches to the material” (Peploe), one can’t help but make the connection that maybe the filmmaker is clueless as to the fixation Moss seems to have come to some sort of conclusion on. Moss explains, “Fifty years later,… I still watch [the newsreels], still hope to use them self-curatively. But the cure eludes me; I remain implicated” (Moss xxv).
Wiseman’s practical philosophy to dealing with the ethical fogginess that emerges given the nature of his work is his way of going with his gut, the mere trusting of his subconscious. Meanwhile, Moss more fatalistically concludes that through endless self-investigation, the only thing he can make of his obsession is, kind of hilariously, accepting its presence in response to an overwhelming and incidental sense of inner confusion. Viewers of Wiseman’s films are left to question whether or not his and Moss’ captations2, though born under different circumstances, function as two sides of the same mental coin.
Footnotes:
1. “We enjoy and admire paintings of objects that in themselves would annoy or disgust us.” Aristotle, Poetics.
2.“In Lacan's use, the term describes the way particular images, as well as elements of external reality, can ‘catch hold’ of the psyche and become important formative agents for the subject. We approach this meaning when we speak of something ‘capturing’ our attention or "captivating" us.” https://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/lacan/terms/captation.html
Sources
1. “We enjoy and admire paintings of objects that in themselves would annoy or disgust us.” Aristotle, Poetics.
2.“In Lacan's use, the term describes the way particular images, as well as elements of external reality, can ‘catch hold’ of the psyche and become important formative agents for the subject. We approach this meaning when we speak of something ‘capturing’ our attention or "captivating" us.” https://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/lacan/terms/captation.html
Sources
- Moss, Donald. “Introduction: On Hating in the First Person Plural: Thinking Psychoanalytically about Racism, Homophobia, and Misogyny.” Other Press, New York.
- Titicut Follies. Dir. Frederick Wiseman. Zipporah Films, 1967. Film.
- Poppy, Nick. “The grandfather of cinéma vérité talks about domestic violence, Domestic Violence and the reality behind reality films.” Salon.com, 2002. Interview.
- Pearson, Jesse. “The Follies of Documentary Filmmaking.” Vice Magazine, 2007. Interview.
- Ritchie, Kevin. “11 doc lessons from Frederick Wiseman.” Realscreen.com, 2015. Article.
- Peploe, Lola. “Frederick Wiseman, The Art of Documentary No. 1.” The Paris Review, 2018. Interview.
- Cooper, Sean. “Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall.” Tablet Magazine, 2021. Article.