A large work on paper titled "Mt. Washington," at the Bundy Modern in Waitsfield, inventively references the notoriously fearsome weather atop New England's highest peak..
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
Institutionalized: The Films of Frederick Wiseman
Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary, City Hall, is his forty-third, but who’s counting? In the half-century since the release, and prompt two-decade ban, of
Titicut Follies (1967) his harrowing début about a prison for the criminally insane Wiseman has chronicled the myriad ways (chiefly) American life is raised up and laid low, dignified and debased, spared and squandered by institutions. With bald titles such as
High School (1968),
Near Death (1989), and
Zoo (1993), and with runtimes often reaching into the hundreds of minutes, his films may strike the uninitiated as dry, cheerless, even gruelling. To so presume, however, would be to overlook the rare offerings of one of modern life’s keenest cinematic observers one whose gaze fixes with as much care on the inner workings of institutions as on the hidden hands which make them tick.