Word: documentarian
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...better part of a decade, Film Documentarian Frederick Wiseman has been sending us-mostly over the Public Broadcasting Service-a series of Goyaesque pictures from our institutions. The police, the courts, hospitals, a high school, the Army, even a monastery have given him his subjects. In almost every instance he has found them to be butterfingered bureaucracies. They show more dedication to preserving the untroubled functioning of their own administrative systems than to doing their job, which is usually supposed to be helping people. What has made these brutal films bearable is that time after time Wiseman has discovered competent...
ISRAEL WHY is a three-hour-plus French documentary that explains very little but testifies to Director Claude Lanzmann's feeling of deep kinship with the country. Lanzmann is not, like Marcel Ophuls, a film essayist of strong and disturbing insight, and he is not an especially acute documentarian either. He has caught some moments of warmth, others of search and irresolution and precipitate fulfillment, but the question posed in the title remains unanswered...
...reaction will hardly surprise Wiseman. Ever since the former Brandeis University law lecturer went with mike and camera into a Massachusetts state hospital for the criminally insane, he has been unquestionably the nation's most provocative film documentarian. That first film, Titicut Follies (1967), was banned by a state court after then-Massachusetts Attorney General Elliot Richardson argued that the film violated the privacy of inmates. Since then, Wiseman has gone from High School to Hospital to Basic Training. "Shooting these films about institutions," he has said, "is like being on the track of the Abominable Snowman...
Juvenile Court. Noted documentarian Frederick Wiseman ("Hospital," "High School") presents a two-and-a-half hour "documentary mosaic" on America's juvenile court system. Filmed in Memphis, the cinema-verite excursion looks closely at the handling of individual cases including an 11-year-old truant being brought to justice. CH. 2. 8 p.m. B-W. 2 hrs. 30 min. May be pre-empted by Watergate hearings...
...From Vietnam. Chris Marker, a leading French documentarian and former journalist, assembled and edited this film from footage given him by other important film-makers, including Joris Ivens, the Dutch artist who was one of the pioneers of documentary film, and several members of the French New Wave...