Frederick Wiseman, Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, dies at 96

Frederick Wiseman, a pioneer in documentary films who won an honorary Academy Award in 2016, died on Feb. 16. He was 96.

Wiseman‘s death was announced in a joint statement by his family and by Zipporah Films, the distribution company he founded in 1971, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

“For nearly six decades, Frederick Wiseman created an unparalleled body of work, a sweeping cinematic record of contemporary social institutions and ordinary human experience primarily in the United States and France,” the statement read. “His films – from ‘Titicut Follies’ (1967) to his most recent work, ‘Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros’ (2023) – are celebrated for their complexity, narrative power and humanist gaze.

“He produced and directed all of his 45 films under the banner of Zipporah Films, Inc.”

The statement did not say where Wiseman died, but note that he considered his hometowns to be Paris; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Northport, Maine.

Wiseman’s directorial debut, 1967’s “Titicut Follies”(1967), was a harrowing portrait of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts, The New York Times reported.

It is the only film ever banned in the United States for reasons other than obscenity, immorality or national security, according to the newspaper. It was banned by Massachusetts officials who said the work violated the privacy of the inmates; the ban was lifted in 1991, the Times reported.

Wiseman would explore the life of institutions in more than 40 documentaries, Variety reported. After Titicut Follies,“ Wiseman’s works included “High School”; “Law and Order,” about the Kansas City Police Department that earned him an Emmy Award; “Hospital,” which won two Emmys; “Public Housing”; and 2020’s “City Hall.”

He also received a Peabody Award in 1991, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Born in Boston on Jan. 1, 1930, Wiseman graduated from Williams College and the Yale Law School, the Times reported.

“I don’t know if I can offer a general definition of what I’m doing,” Wiseman said about his filmmaking in 2011, according to the Times, “except to say I’m trying to create dramatic structures out of ordinary experience, under a variety of differing circumstances, so the cumulative effect will be a series of thematically interrelated films that record how people thought and lived and worked over the course of time that I made the movies. And how that behavior is in part reflected in institutions. And how institutions are to a certain extent microcosms for a larger society.

“I try to avoid definitions or theories. That’s a sort of general statement, which I don’t particularly like having made. But I just made it.”

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