Filmmaking
The first feature-length film Wiseman produced was The Cool World (1963), about African-American life in the Royal Pythons, a youth gang in Harlem. The film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. This was followed by Titicut Follies (1967), which he produced and directed. Titicut Follies is one of Wiseman's best-known works and in 2022 was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Wiseman then directed High School (1968) and Law and Order (1969), the latter of which earned him the Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in News Documentary Programming.
In 1970, Wiseman directed Hospital, a documentary about the daily activities of the people at Metropolitan Hospital Center in New York City. The film won two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Achievement in News Documentary Programming – Individuals and Outstanding Achievement in News Documentary Programming – Programs. In 1994, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. The film was also selected for screening as part of the Cannes Classics section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. In 1971, Wiseman founded Zipporah Films, a film distribution company. After making several short documentaries, in 1975 he directed Welfare, a documentary about the U.S. welfare system from the viewpoint of both officials and claimants. Critics considered Welfare Wiseman's masterpiece. In 1976, Wiseman directed Meat, about the Colorado meatpacking industry.
In the 1980s, Wiseman directed Model (1981) and Missile (1988), among other documentaries. Model is about the Zoli modeling agency and Missile is about the U.S. military training and operations surrounding ICBM. In the 1990s, Wiseman directed Central Park (1990), Ballet (1995), Public Housing (1997), and Belfast, Maine (1999).
Wiseman's Domestic Violence (2000) premiered at the 58th Venice International Film Festival. In 2007, he produced State Legislature for PBS, about the workings of the Idaho Legislature. In 2009, he made La Danse, about the ballet productions of Paris Opera Ballet.
Wiseman found renewed success in the 2010s. His 2010 documentary Boxing Gym premiered at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival. His 2011 documentary Crazy Horse is about the Paris cabaret of that name, known for its stage shows performed by nude female dancers. In 2014, Wiseman's documentary National Gallery, about London's National Gallery, premiered at the 67th Cannes Film Festival and screened at other festivals, such as the New York Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival. Wiseman's 2015 documentary In Jackson Heights is regarded as one of his best. It documents events in New York's Jackson Heights neighborhood, focusing on local politics and activist organizations. It won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Non-Fiction Film in 2015. The New York Times named it the 13th "Best Film of the 21st Century So Far". Wiseman next directed Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (2017) and Monrovia, Indiana (2018). Ex Libris: The New York Public Library screened in the main competition section of the 74th Venice International Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Award. Wiseman also won the Critics' Choice Documentary Award for Best Director for Ex Libris in 2017.
Wiseman's output continued into the 2020s. City Hall (2020), produced for PBS, is about the government of Boston. Cahiers du Cinéma named it the best film of 2020. In 2022, Wiseman directed the feature-length film A Couple, his second narrative film after La Dernière Lettre (2002). In 2023, he made his final documentary, Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros, about the daily activities of the French restaurant Le Bois sans feuilles.
Wiseman's films are often described as in the observational mode, which has its roots in direct cinema, but Wiseman disliked the term:
What I try to do is edit the films so that they will have a dramatic structure. That is why I object to some extent to the term "observational cinema" or cinéma vérité, because observational cinema, to me at least, connotes just hanging around with one thing being as valuable as another, and that is not true. At least, that is not true for me, and cinéma vérité is just a pompous French term that has absolutely no meaning as far as I'm concerned.
All his films have aired on PBS, one of his primary funders. Wiseman was known to call his films "Reality Fictions". His films have also been called studies of social institutions, such as hospitals, schools, or police departments.
Wiseman worked four to six weeks in the institutions he portrayed, with almost no preparation. He spent the bulk of the production period editing the material, trying to find a rhythm for the film.
Every Wiseman film has a dramatic structure, though not necessarily a narrative arc; his films rarely have what could be considered a climax or conclusion. He liked to approach his material with no particular thesis or point of view in mind. Any suspense is on a per-scene level, not constructed from plot points, and the viewer is not expected to identify with particular characters. Nevertheless, Wiseman felt that drama was crucial for his films to "work as movies" (Poppy). The "rhythm and structure" of his films, he felt, pull the viewer into the position and perspective of the subject (human or otherwise). The viewer feels the situations' dramatic tension as various environmental forces create complications and conflicting values.
Wiseman admitted to manipulating his source material to create dramatic structure, insisting that it was necessary to "make a movie":
I'm trying to make a movie. A movie has to have dramatic sequence and structure. I don't have a very precise definition about what constitutes drama, but I'm gambling that I'm going to get dramatic episodes. Otherwise, it becomes Empire. ... I am looking for drama, though I'm not necessarily looking for people beating each other up, shooting each other. There's a lot of drama in ordinary experiences. In Public Housing, there was drama in that old man being evicted from his apartment by the police. There was a lot of drama in that old woman at her kitchen table peeling a cabbage.
Wiseman said his films' structure was important to their message:
It's the structural aspect that interests me most, and the issue there is developing a theory that will relate these isolated, nonrelated sequences to each other. That is partially, I think, related to figuring out how it either contradicts or adds to or explains in some way some other sequence in the film. Then you try to determine the effect of a particular sequence on that point of view of the film.
A distinctive aspect of Wiseman's style is the complete lack of exposition (narration), interaction (interviews), and reflection (revealing any of the filmmaking process). Wiseman once said he did not "feel any need to document [his] experience" and that he felt that such reflexive elements in films are vain.
While producing a film, Wiseman often acquired more than 100 hours of raw footage. His ability to create an engaging feature-length films without the use of voice-over, title cards, or motion graphics while still being fair is part of his reputation as a filmmaker.
This great glop of material which represents the externally recorded memory of my experience of making the film is of necessity incomplete. The memories not preserved on film float somewhat in my mind as fragments available for recall, unavailable for inclusion but of great importance in the mining and shifting process known as editing. This editorial process ... is sometimes deductive, sometimes associational, sometimes non-logical and sometimes a failure... The crucial element for me is to try and think through my own relationship to the material by whatever combination of means is compatible. This involves a need to conduct a four-way conversation between myself, the sequence being worked on, my memory, and general values and experience.
In Wiseman's view, his films are elaborations of a personal experience, not ideologically objective portraits.
In interviews, he emphasized that his films are not and cannot be unbiased. But despite the inescapable bias introduced in the process of "making a movie", he still felt he had certain ethical obligations in how he portrayed events:
[My films are] based on unstaged, unmanipulated actions... The editing is highly manipulative and the shooting is highly manipulative... What you choose to shoot, the way you shoot it, the way you edit it and the way you structure it... all of those things... represent subjective choices that you have to make. In [Belfast, Maine] I had 110 hours of material ... I only used 4 hours—near nothing. The compression within a sequence represents choice and then the way the sequences are arranged in relationship to the other represents choice.
All aspects of documentary filmmaking involve choice and are therefore manipulative. But the ethical ... aspect of it is that you have to ... try to make [a film that] is true to the spirit of your sense of what was going on. ... My view is that these films are biased, prejudiced, condensed, compressed but fair. I think what I do is make movies that are not accurate in any objective sense, but accurate in the sense that I think they're a fair account of the experience I've had in making the movie.
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.
