Imagine a city council meeting. Everything is brown or gray, and the furniture looks antique. One has members of the council, and the other has their members. These meetings take place every day around the United States, whether fewer than a dozen or hundreds of others appear. There are topics to discuss, claims to pass, and petitions to be shared. But most of all, they are boring. Isn’t they?
The Council meeting was first held in Frederick Wiseman’s 1999 four-hour film Belfast in Maine, and is not boring. Wiseman shows the obvious passion they feel for every cause, regardless of the set of issues brought about by the various citizens and how small they may seem to be to the viewer. There is an exciting debate about the zoning ordinance and the ethics of selling lots within city parks. The man, who appears to be the owner of a small business, brings a planned sewer extension. Finally, there is a controversial topic about whether it will help remove benches in certain cities to drive away young people loving around them.
Now, this may sound like a rivet, but in Wiseman’s capable hands, we feel like we are in that room.
There are many ways to represent cities, there are even more ways to represent urban life. Wiseman, a 95-year-old documentary filmmaker, has built his career in portraying American life, both in the countryside and in the city, in its diversity and contradictory complexity. It is his bread and butter to turn a typical city council meeting into an example of fascinating personality studies and functioning government excitement.
Wiseman is perhaps best known as the chronicle of the institution. His first distinctive feature, the Chicticut Folies (1967), depicts life inside Bridgewater State Hospital because of his criminal madness. Other institutions that received Wiseman treatment include Metropolitan Hospital, Neiman Marcus flagship store, Alabama School for the Blind and Deaf, University of California, Berkeley, London National Gallery, and the New York Public Library. But perhaps equally important in Wiseman’s work is that his portrayal of a particular city, town, neighborhood, and community, along with urban planning and its consequences, will lead us to play a leading role in determining how we come together, work, play, and everyday life.
These films are listed in chronological order below. Among them, the general approach as a fly in Weissman’s wall – narration, text, music cannot be identified, but with a clear perspective – even if they quipped later on how residents later came off, like Belfast, Maine. His lean style and rhythm, alongside his huge runtime (often over 3-4 hours) can bring together a lot about how communities work both within and outside the nation. Urban planning reminds us not only of architecture and infrastructure, but also of how the city and the people living within it are managed. Wiseman’s films are a lot, but he claims that he can be said to be the great chronicler of the film’s biggest urban life. Celebrations of this process, while examining its weaknesses and nuances, are one of the great documentary projects.
Welfare (1975)
An early Wiseman masterpiece on the illicit failure of the government’s bureaucracy. Access to care is not only routinely denied for reasons that a myriad of ununderstandable reasons or administrative snaphths, but is deliberately withheld by people with a distorted vision of who is considered appropriate or suitable citizens. Welfare is a sharp indication of how urban life is determined by these dull and harmful systems. In short, plans are always political.
Central Park (1989) and Aspen (1991)
These films focus on blurred lines between public and private spaces and how a particular environment is managed according to various agendas. Aspen, a ski resort town, for example, is a space designed by the wealthy people all of its elegant and indecent, and is almost completely enjoyable. Central Park, on the other hand, is well known for everyone. Not only is it a fortress of urban recreation, it is also a deeply contested socio-political space as a matter of sanitation, homelessness, and tasks necessary to maintain that leisure can often be hidden from sight. Aspen is one of Wiseman’s most pointed films. It embraces a clear satire of his documents of the rich and their clearly expressed individualism, capitalism, and his documents of self-worth. However, Central Park brings out the contrast between the image of the community and its reality. The park will come to reflect much larger discussions about the meaning of its image, both inside and outside. Both films are ultimately about the “right way” of being in public.
In this film, Wiseman addresses the central issue of housing, the heart of urban and urban planning. The film focuses on the public housing developments of Ida B. Wells in Chicago, Illinois, depicting its residents, the people who work to care for them, and those who monitor and train them. The outstanding advocate is featured by a terrifying advocate named Helen Finner, president of the Resident Association. We first see her trying to find a home for her new mother and her baby, we discuss the inexplicable vacancy in Wells on the phone with someone, “just sit there,” and “everyone has to be in the sun with someone who’s vacant in public housing… some rules are bent.” Without putting too much of a great point on that, Finner is a typical Wiseman hero, and the civil servant who has barely been named the most, goes to make life a little better for the people around him.
The film takes on the additional resonance, knowing that Wells was demolished in 2002, and little is known to us about the fate of its residents. Wiseman said the Housing and Urban Development Agency (HUD) began filming as if he had controlled the well from the Chicago Housing Authority, and the handover lasted only about seven years before the entire project was finished. But this goes beyond Wiseman’s film, but this is a variety of ways that focus on clashes between HUD and Wells residents and supporters, and the interests try to deal with poverty by steering the community or encouraging entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, we often see police floating around the community, harassing residents. Overall, Wiseman’s films show public housing as a trajectory of power with competing forces seeking ways to control urban life.
Jackson Heights (2015) and Monrovia, Indiana (2018)
One of these films focuses on a New York City neighborhood called the most diverse in the world. Together, they show two very different but connected versions of the same idea. Organizing the environment for any number of people, whether 108,000 or 1,600, leads to highly charged conflicts, whether they are aiming to become a bureaucratic state. Whether it’s a fierce battle over whether to set up benches in local libraries or repeated battles over violating gentrification, cities and towns are inevitably full of people, filled with their deep, hopelessly different desires and needs.
State Legislature (2007) and City Hall (2020)
These films are the most direct aspects of urban planning in Wiseman’s filmography. It’s the first film about the Idaho legislature and the second Boston city government. We look at zoning hearings, policy proposals, debates on environmental racism, and more. Filtered through Wiseman’s patient lens, it invites the audience to feel truly present in these meetings, highlighting how important such Nittia is to those involved. While these films want to believe in the power of democratic processes to design a better way of life, they mercilessly point to their shortcomings and limitations.
Other Movies to Check Out: Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (2017), Law and Order (1969), Berkeley (2013).
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