Documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, 96, died on Feb. 16. Wiseman is most famous for his 1967 Titicut Follies, which exposed the horrors at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. His many other films include Domestic Violence, High School, Hospital, Model, Central Park, Ballet, and Ex Libris: The New York Public Library. Wiseman called his films “reality fictions” (as a biographer, that very term makes my teeth hurt). He said that “What I try to do is edit the films so that they will have a dramatic structure. That is why I object to some extent to the term ‘observational cinema’ or 'cinéma vérité,’ because observational cinema, to me at least, connotes just hanging around with one thing being as valuable as another, and that is not true. At least, that is not true for me, and cinéma verité is just a pompous French term that has absolutely no meaning as far as I'm concerned” (says the man who just invented “reality fictions”).
