Five Films by Frederick Wiseman: Titicut Follies, High School, Welfare, High School II, Public Housing [Paperback]

Frederick Wiseman (Author, Foreword), Barry Keith Grant (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 13, 2006

Frederick Wiseman is among America's foremost documentary filmmakers. The recipient of many awards, including three Emmys, Wiseman has made more than thirty feature-length documentaries during a career that has spanned five decades. Together, these films provide a fascinating chronicle of American social and institutional life. This book makes available for the first time transcriptions of five of Wiseman's most important films-- Titicut Follies, High School, Welfare, High School II, Public Housing--providing all of the dialogue as well as annotations about other aspects of the soundtracks such as music and ambient noise, and notes about editing and camera movement. These scene-by-scene transcripts enable readers to scrutinize the films' complex structural patterns, recurring motifs, editing regimes, and the unscripted dialogue that makes Wiseman's cinema a rich repository of American speech. Editor Barry Keith Grant's critical introduction discusses the importance of sound in Wiseman's documentaries. Liberally illustrated with images from the films, these meticulous transcriptions are accompanied by a bibliography and filmography.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Fred Wiseman is the perfect example of someone who has created a great canon of films. He is not just a great documentary filmmaker, he is a great filmmaker and artist. He has created some of the wildest, most personal, and oddly expressionistic filmmaking around. His origins are not in the movies but in the theater of the absurd. I imagine his smile of pleasure when the man in Welfare compares his situation to Godot. It's not life imitating art, but a strange admixture of both where the boundary lines between the two are no longer visible. Ultimately, Wiseman has showed us that the ultimate institution is life itself, and properly speaking, we should all be institutionalized." - Errol Morris "Barry Grant has created a monumental resource for the study of a monumental filmmaker." - Ross McElwee, Director, Sherman's March and Bright Leaves"

From the Inside Flap

"Barry Grant has created a monumental resource for the study of a monumental filmmaker. The transcripts of these five films have been meticulously constructed without compromising the vitality and energy that characterizes the films themselves. This book should be invaluable to film scholars for as long as the films of Fred Wiseman are viewed, discussed and dissected--which we now know will be a long time indeed."--Ross McElwee, Director, Sherman's March and Bright Leaves

"Fred Wiseman is the perfect example of someone who has created a great canon of films. He is not just a great documentary filmmaker, he is a great filmmaker and artist. He has created some of the wildest, most personal, and oddly expressionistic filmmaking around. His origins are not in the movies but in the theater of the absurd. I imagine his smile of pleasure when the man in Welfare compares his situation to Godot. It's not life imitating art, but a strange admixture of both where the boundary lines between the two are no longer visible. Ultimately, Wiseman has showed us that the ultimate institution is life itself, and properly speaking, we should all be institutionalized."--Errol Morris

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 444 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (March 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520244575
• ISBN-13: 978-0520244573
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #536,932 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)