Here is what I see when I scroll through Instagram Reels on my phone. A woman wakes up in bed, goes to the kitchen and pours coffee, inviting me to follow along with her morning routine. One swipe, and someone is making a “viral kale pasta Caesar salad.” Another swipe reveals a demonstration of “peel-and-stick stair treads,” which I can purchase on Amazon at the link in her bio. A man feeds a puppy a lemon wedge; it is not pleased. One of my own colleagues appears, explaining why we should start taking bird flu seriously.
Here’s an ad for a serum for aging skin. Here’s an ad for a nifty battery-powered sconce. Here’s someone teaching me French slang, and someone else auditioning for a Broadway show. Another morning routine, another coffee. A cat steals salami off the kitchen counter.
At some point, I must have indicated to the app that these intrigued me — that’s how “the algorithm” works. But with the possible exception of bird flu they are thoroughly ordinary versions of things I’ve already seen a hundred times.
Everyone’s social video feed is different, an infinite number of variations molded around each individual user. Yours might be much more sprightly or eccentric than mine. But all of our feeds are at their core tremendously banal: They’re just windows into what people do with themselves all day, repeated over and over again. And we watch, because, for some reason, we love watching humans be humans.
I STARTED THINKING ABOUT REELS at a screening of a Frederick Wiseman documentary the other day. (I do not think this is a sentence that has ever been written before.) It was “Aspen” (1991), which is among the 33 newly restored films and a handful of more recent ones in the series “Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution” at Lincoln Center through March 5, in an extensive retrospective that joins simultaneous retrospectives in Paris and Los Angeles.
“Aspen” peeks into daily life at the Colorado ski resort town among the wealthy, mostly white, mostly older denizens who have homes there, as well as others, mostly people of color, who live in far more modest housing. Structured as a series of scenes without any single protagonist, it seems at first like a neutral portrait. But the longer you follow it, the more you realize it’s actually about the racial, religious and economic lines along which social groups divide in a barely-post-Reagan America.
The film never says that outright, because that’s not how Wiseman works. Indisputably one of our greatest living filmmakers, the 95-year-old Boston-born director has made 44 documentaries since 1967. His devoted band of followers includes Steven Spielberg, a key participant in the restorations.
Each Wiseman documentary focuses on an institution, place or organization — they have names like “High School,” “Ballet,” “City Hall.” They’re all shot in an observational style, no talking heads or explanatory text or any of the other elements that some documentaries employ to guide audiences. You might watch a staffer at the New York Public Library sort returned books from a conveyor belt, or observe a weary welfare officer talk to someone seeking aid, or listen to old men in Indiana discussing whether the Lions Club should buy another bench for the community.
This might sound boring, but Wiseman’s films — which have a range in running time from around 80 minutes to as long as six hours — are in fact mesmerizing. The viewing experience can feel like slipping into an altered fugue state, time suspended entirely. These movies are also deceptively straightforward. You might be lured into imagining they have no point of view, but the truth is much more fun, and more intriguing: to watch a Wiseman movie is to be asked to deduce the meaning yourself.
“Aspen,” for instance, opens with a group of robed monks observing the daily office in their chapel and ends with an evangelical preacher telling a long-winded story from the pulpit. In between, older, seemingly well-off people dance at a party in the snow and take a tipsy painting lesson in a palatial house; immigrants from Mexico and South America explore assimilation in a class at the local college; a men’s Bible study group discusses divorce; and young people try (and fail) to explain meditation and global oneness in a living room. Occasionally Ronald Reagan or family values are mentioned. There’s far less skiing in the movie than you might expect. But if you’re paying attention, your brain starts to construct the story the movie is trying to tell.
Wiseman has said that he goes into each project with as blank a slate as he can muster. In 2016, while accepting an honorary Oscar, he explained: “I never start with a point of view about the subject or a thesis that I want to prove. I also don’t do any research in advance.”
Collaborating with a cameraman and another crew member, Wiseman shoots upward of 150 hours of footage. Then he locks himself in an editing room — “for eight to 10 months, getting fed intravenously,” as he put it — until he finds the movie. “The editing is an effort to impose order on the chaos” of the footage, he explained during the speech, with the goal of creating “a fictional form that provides meaning to the film.”
“Fiction” seems like an odd word for a master documentarian to use when describing his own work. But it’s deliberate. What he means is that no movie, documentary or fiction, shows things as they really are. It’s always the product of the filmmaker’s choices: what is put in and left out, the order in which the scenes appear. One sequence follows another — a couple renews their vows in a hot-air balloon, then a cow moos in a field — but the cow might have been filmed before the balloon. The footage is simply raw material; the authorial eye is his.
And what interests his eye is human behavior in all its silly, workaday minutiae: the way people take out the trash, or decide which coat to buy at the store, or cheer a Fourth of July parade. “The variety and complexity of the human behavior observed in making one of the films and, cumulatively, all of the films is staggering,” he said in his acceptance speech. “And I think it is important to document kindness, civility and generosity of spirit as it is to show cruelty, banality and indifference.”
This open, honest curiosity accounts for his success in gaining entry to so many communities and institutions. I interviewed Wiseman in 2018, and asked whether the residents of Monrovia, Ind. — the subject of his documentary that year — liked the film even though it was created by an outsider. Yes, he said, they’d seemed to. “People like the idea that someone’s sufficiently interested in what they’re doing to make a movie, which is not an abnormal response,” he explained. Everybody wants to feel interesting.
MEANING EMERGES in a Wiseman film through the filter of Wiseman. What you’re getting is what he thinks is interesting, the story he wishes to tell. It is human civilization as Wiseman sees it, at least in that particular place and moment.
This ordering of the mundane to create meaning is why my Instagram Reels sprang to mind at the “Aspen” screening, and at subsequent movies in the series, too: “Primate,” a rather harrowing 1974 look inside the Yerkes National Primate Research Center that also seems to be about life in a surveillance state; “The Store” (1983), shot at the flagship Neiman Marcus store in Dallas; “High School,” documenting life at a Philadelphia institution in the spring of 1968. Each asks us to follow along as people participate in activities they probably forgot about by the time they got home that night. The movie trusts us to be as interested in them as Wiseman is, for the same reason we’re lured into Reels — that we are human too, and humans like to watch each other’s lives. Wiseman may have begun his work long before the advent of smartphone cameras and vertical video feeds, but his hunch that this kind of footage would resonate was clearly right.
If I sit on my couch and scroll my feed for a Wiseman-length of time — who among us hasn’t — I’m effectively watching a little documentary about human behavior, authored by me, or at least whatever interests the algorithm ascribes to me. This is cool, but it’s also scary. Working simply and nimbly his whole career, Wiseman has maintained tremendous independence; I might be tempted to think my own little documentary does the same.
But, of course, I am at best a co-director here. The choices about when clips appear and in what order is left up to the platform, which is programmed in one very particular direction: toward selling me things. Like the shopper wandering around Neiman Marcus in “The Store,” I am encountering a series of vignettes and conversations meant to direct me, ultimately, toward purchasing. A store, no matter how human the touch of the salespeople, is an ad for products. And so is my feed.
Even if I never buy anything flogged on Reels — I’m trying to avoid it — on today’s internet, I am classified, no matter what I do, as a consumer, rather than a human who’s intrigued by other people’s lives; when I succeed in the latter, it’s in spite of the former.
I think that is the reason Wiseman’s movies are so vital. His most recent documentary, “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros” (2023), illustrates why. For nearly four hours, it tracks the chef Michel Troisgros and his two sons as they run their restaurant in central France, an establishment with three Michelin stars and a high-end clientele. By following their daily operations, their conversations, their meetings with farmers and chats with the diners who do indeed spend large sums at their establishment, you slowly realize the point in it all: that making great food, and indeed any great art, requires balancing profits with attention to detail, with patience for the slow process of creating something that will nourish us and the land for generations to come.
Wiseman’s documentaries won’t ever earn blockbuster money or inspire franchises, the mark of success in the film world, and there’s no merch to purchase or brand sponsorship tickling the acquisitive part of your brain. Instead, these films ask you to redirect your attention toward fellow beings, to become curious about what the world means outside the confines of pure market logic. We might not escape our feeds entirely, where our attention is packaged and sold to advertisers — but at least we can sink blissfully into a corrective.
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