Wiseman in Monrovia

5 min readNov 18, 2018

This week: a conversation with Frederick Wiseman. Listen today at 2pm or anytime on our website.

Lots of nice fan notes for our host after this one. People responded to the hard work Chris had to do drawing Fred Wiseman into the wide open conversational space. He’s a man of many films (and many hours of many films), but not a man of many words about his films. One listener wrote us that the interview was more insightful because of the difficulty and that the “respectful tension” shone a greater light on Wiseman’s art. There you go. Two masters at work.

Fred did love the compliment Chris offered: he said he saw Fred Wiseman reenacting Chekhov from the Russia of the 1880s—the doctor making house calls in the hinterlands of an unhappy time, pre-Revolutionary Tsarist Russia, much as Fred Wiseman has been doing over a 50 year career watching and showing us America.

He’s a delightful man, and even though we didn’t hear an hour’s worth of reflections on our divided country and the people, places and institutions that make it run, we heard lots about Fred Wiseman’s work and his methods and what goes into making these gems.

Fred Wiseman’s latest film, Monrovia, Indiana, is a two and a half hour visit to the rural heartland (“Trump country,” we’d call it now), but the politics in Monrovia is all local — about land development, housing, water. We thought Richard Brody was a bit snarky in his New Yorker review, calling it “nothing less than a work of mourning for the American soul,” but what can you expect from a big city east coast elitist? In the studio after the show, we perked up when Fred called his movies “sad comedies.” That’s a better description for Fred’s latest.

Here’s the trailer:

You can catch it at the MFA in Boston next Saturday, and it opens this weekend in cities across the country. Details at zipporah.com

We binged on Wiseman movies all week; it’s a therapeutic bath of slowness, maybe the best antidote to TDS. Take 5 Wiseman movies and call us in the morning.

Our Top Five Wiseman Flicks

Leaving his legal career, Wiseman’s half century of filmmaking began with Titicut Follies—his traumatic portrait of a hospital for the criminally insane, right here in Massachusetts. Exposing the guards’ horrific abuses and the disgusting conditions of the hospital, Titicut Follies was censored until the late 1980s.

In his next film, Wiseman moved on to less controversial territory—finding mirrors of the authoritarian tendencies displayed by Titicut’s guards and psychiatrists, but this time in an ordinary New Jersey high school.

Since then, he’s made about a film a year—forty-four features, in total.

We couldn’t find a trailer for Welfare (1975), but here’s Richard Brody talking about it for a few minutes.

And Essene (1972), Wiseman told us, might be his favorite. It’s about the inner workings of a Benedictine monastery.

For something a little newer, try Ex Libris. Of this film—a loving portrait of a public library system, released in the wake of the Trump election—Manohla Dargis writes:

Mr. Wiseman never states outright what the library’s mission is; he doesn’t have to. It’s as clear as the recitations from the Declaration of Independence in one scene and in a passionate discussion of a racist textbook’s misrepresentation of the American slave trade in another. It is a soaring, Utopian mission in a documentary that builds with intellectual force and deep emotion as it shows, again and again, citizens — interested, questioning, seeking — joining together to listen to one another and to learn from one another. In “Ex Libris,” democracy is alive and in the hands of a forceful advocate and brilliant filmmaker, which helps make this one of the greatest movies of Mr. Wiseman’s extraordinary career and one of his most thrilling.

A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis have called Wiseman “one of the most important and original filmmakers working today.” Get binge-ing!

What We’re Reading:

Ronald Aronson on Sartre’s Marxism. Matt Karp on the Democrats’ “professional-class politics.” Beto does Knausgaard. AOC does it all. Jill Lepore schools The Chronicle of Higher Ed in an interview:

“When my Wonder Woman book came out, The Chronicle of Higher Education published a cartoon of me as Wonder Woman. I was appalled. It was an incredible trivialization of a female academic who writes serious intellectual and political history to depict me dressed as a character I had identified as coming from the visual culture of pornography. It remains startling to me how little many men have to do to earn intellectual authority, and how much more women have to do to earn intellectual authority. It is stolen from them, it is undermined. I began to think I shouldn’t say no when I’m asked to write a big sweeping account of American history. There can be no mistaking it for lacking ambition. Plenty of people belittle the contributions of women, but they should never take on the smaller project when the bigger one excites them.”

Boom! You go girl!

A smarter look at the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web.” Why is Yuval Noah Harari so popular in Silicon Valley? Rebecca Traister talks to Barbara Lee. Take that! The Times (finally) goes after Facebook. Interview with Pankaj Mishra. A blistering, brilliant takedown of Jill Soloway’s new memoir by Andrea Long Chu. The Nation’s (unsurprising) call for an economically progressive Democratic platform.

Tonight at long last My Brilliant Friend begins on HBO, and it’s getting rave reviews. That’s a feat.