la danse

First Lévi-Strausse dies - at the mûr old age of 100 - and now Frederick Wiseman has a new movie out. Vive les vieux or, as I'm sure the French would have it, vive les vieux cons.

Wiseman began his film career alongside cinema verité filmmakers such as the Maysles brother, Pennebacker, Barbara Kopple, and the NFB greats such as Michel Brault and the Challenge for Change program. This was a direct break from the patronising documentaries of the past, where omniscient narrators reinterpreted images and where formal interviews took the place of raw emotions. These films, often in black and white and about subject matter otherwise overlooked by mainstream producers, exploded with vitality and urgency.

One of my favourite of these filmmakers is Frederick Wiseman. Perhaps more than any other filmmaker of the time, Wiseman approached his subject matter with little preconception, letting his camera be written on as if it were a blank slate, faithfully following the minutae and characters of the institutions and contexts he was exploring. A contemporary example of his method would sort of be Michael Moore - if you removed the bluster, the ego, and the ideology.

We're used to it now, cameras everywhere and reality tv bringing even the most vapid of us out onto centre stage, but back in the 60s and 70s when Wiseman plunged his camera into dark corners, passively watching and waiting, we were shocked. Some of his films anticipated if not actually inspired real social change:

Titicut Folies, 1967, about inmates in an insane asylum.
High School, 1968, student life never looked so bleak.
Hospital, 1970, you don't want to get sick.
Juvenile Court, 1973, you don't want to get arrested.

There's dozens more but those are the only ones I've seen (and all of them in film class). Other titles seem equally evocative: Welfare, Meat, Sinai Field Mission, Model, Near Death, High School 2 (1994), Domestic Violence, etc. Most compelling title of all may be the 1971 film, I Miss Sonia Henie. Now that I'd like to see.

So, glad to see he's still alive and working. Even better, that he's made a film about that hothouse topic, the ballet. And the ballet in France, no less. Oh, la, la. I love dance, but I especially love ballet. It's the posture - I just can't get enough of good posture. He made Ballet in 1995 (according to Wikipedia), so I wonder what he's doing now that he didn't do then. I'll just have to see it to find out.

I'll walk, no run, no jetée to the cinéma!