After reading an excellent review of the history of the documentary, I decided to buckle down and figure out what is going on with the utter lack of Frederick Wiseman dvds. For those of you who don't know, Wiseman is of the most important figures in American film culture, a man who single-handedly redefined what we have come to consider a documentary to be, and none of his movies are available on dvd.
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He is the master of the cinéma vérité style, bringing the style so strongly to documentaries that documentaries that are not in a vérité style seem somehow inauthentic – hence all the ruckus over the "objectivity" of Michael Moore's new movie. One only has to see about 10 minutes of Wiseman's early films to realize how bogus the "vérité form = objective" argument is – nobody is objective with editing a film. Wiseman, who deals with no narration, only natural sound and long takes of people interacting with their surroundings, considers his films to be "reality fictions" – which is accurate as he can take these natural settings and make the most persuasive arguments out of them.
For instance, his documentary "High School" (1968) contains nothing but long, uninterrupted shots of people interacting in a high school. The final products leads you to believe that education functions only to push kids through a meat grinder to make them compatible with America's Cold War empire. At one point the principal reads a letter to the student body from an alumni fighting in Vietnam (off-quoted from memory here): "Without all the guidance and preparation [my high school] gave me, I don't know how I would have ever been able to serve the military in Vietnam." The pride on the principal's face makes us wonder if this is what education was all about in the first place. |
The man is still at the top of his game. In fact, two of the best movies he has done have come out in the recent past: "Public Housing" (1997) and "Domestic Abuse" (2001), like all his movies, show people trying to survive within the complex mechanisms of organized beuracracies (chicago's public housing community and abuse shelters in florida in these cases). So where are his dvds?
As a self-proclaimed movie geek, I love that almost everything is available on dvd these days. With a region-free player, a shipping address and the internet, anybody anywhere can have access to some of the best cinema once reserved for film libraries in New York and Paris. It's possible to think of movies being in the hands of the people everywhere, instead of cloistered film circles in isolated locations.
They are also changing the way film is being approached by an audience. Nobody I know has mentioned "The Day After Tomorrow" or "The Steppord Wives" – films with advertising budgets in the multi-million dollar range, but everyone I know is discussing, or trying to discuss, Outfoxed, a movie whose advertising budget consists of a series of emails and that is being mailed out on dvd.
So it pains me to learn that the (a) there are no Wiseman dvds available and (b) it is entirely his own choice. It's not being held up in litigation, no giant company is sitting on the right, or anything else that falls in the shady realm. Wiseman, having paid for the production of the movies, retains full rights to them.
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He sells them on VHS or 16mm reels (no dvd) for $400 a pop, mostly to universities or libraries (a price I imagine absurd even for a library).
| I'm drawing a line in the sand. It's weird to say this, but for christsakes, Mr. Wiseman take the money and run! Sell off the rights for Titicut Follies to Criterion, who would pick it up in a heartbeat, and let cheap dvds of your other great classic films flow free. I could not get a hold of Wiseman himself for an opinion, but Zipporah Films, the company he uses made it sound like the lack of mass availability was entirely his own choice ("this is how Mr. Wiseman has chosen to make his films available…there are no other factors outside of Mr. Wiseman compelling him in this direction"). | 
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Mr. Wiseman, your films should be standard issue for all people who want to find the best that American Cinema has to offer; even 35 years later they still evoke a very powerful statement of people trying to survive within America. They are mature works, demanding of an audience, and often produce profund emotional reactions in those who view them.
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So help out the American audience, who access to independent movie vendors who would show your films in increasingly limited, in finding your message.
If not, please consider leaving your estate to ginandtacos.com. We'll see that when the time comes, your film legacy will be carried out properly (ie used in gatorade and sedan commericals).