The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we select three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time. This month, we’re paying tribute to Frederick Wiseman, who died last week at 96 and has a plausible claim to being the greatest documentarian who ever lived. More than 40 of his features, spanning nearly six decades, are streaming on Kanopy, which is free with many library cards and university affiliations.
‘Canal Zone’ (1977)
Wiseman was best known for his chronicles of American institutions, and his films are so intensely interlinked — his recurring subjects included education, courts, medical care and the performing arts — that it’s impossible to reduce his output to just three selections. I’ve avoided what I felt were the most obvious titles. If you’ve never seen his masterpiece “Welfare” (1975), a look at the human element of social services in New York City, for instance, best to start there. By the same token, his magisterial, six-hour “Near Death” (1989), a harrowing chronicle of end-of-life decision-making at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, demands the immersion of theatrical viewing. I’ve recommended “Hospital” (1970), “Public Housing” (1997) and “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros” (2023) to stream in the past.
“Canal Zone” sits at the apotheosis of Wiseman’s 1970s work. The specter of Vietnam (which looms over his early features “High School” and “Basic Training”) haunts the proceedings. And in the setting, the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone in 1976, shortly before two treaties established a path to turn over the area to Panama, the director finds a surreal simulacrum of American life. Wiseman repeatedly reminds us that he was shooting during the United States’ bicentennial year, and he plays on the cognitive dissonance of celebrating national values amid what critics saw as an imperial endeavor. Early on, a cleric, delivering an invocation at a Canal Zone district court, asks a divine power to move “our executive, legislative and judicial authorities to reflect on the noble motives which first inspired our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.”
This bubble of Americana worships at the twin altars of commerce and militaristic pageant. A high school student’s graduation speech on how “life in America under God is a positive experience” is overpowered by the sound of a helicopter flying overhead. The zone’s governor, Harold Parfitt, is also the president of the federally administered Panama Canal Company, which operates the waterway and generates revenue. Wiseman emphasizes the contrast between the physical landscape (the dredging, the locks, the transport of livestock) and the sterility of computers and printers. He finds institutions within the institution: The zone has its own police, firefighters, school system, hospitals and even marital-counseling sessions, along with tennis courts, a zoo, a tourism industry and movie screenings. (On the schedule: Michelangelo Antonioni’s “The Passenger” and Lynn Redgrave in “The Happy Hooker.”)
The site is hardly an idyll. Discussing the apparent prevalence of child abuse within the zone (in a scene that anticipates Wiseman’s early-2000s features on domestic violence), a representative of the police’s youth unit suggests that one cause is the high-stress atmosphere. (“We’re worried about are we going to be here next year, are we going to have a revolution, that sort of thing,” she says.) The zone also has its own brand of class conflict: A civic council member complains that military golf courses, commissaries and bowling alleys are off-limits to Panama Canal Company employees even though the company’s spaces are open to the military. That the Canal Zone might have a broader caste structure is certainly on Wiseman’s mind: The pointed final images show unidentified civilians, implied to be Panamanians, taking care of an American cemetery.
‘La Comédie-Française ou L’Amour Joué’ (1996)
Wiseman’s first feature in French is a good example of how his films always operate on at least two levels: the concrete and the metaphorical. On one hand, “La Comédie-Française” is a classic institutional portrait in which the director captures the process of mounting plays and stewarding a cultural institution. With seemingly equal curiosity, he shows rehearsals (at length), wig fitting, prop-making, costume ironing and the box office line. Offstage, administrators discuss budgetary considerations, pension plans and the perception that the Comédie-Française has more money than it does. In one amusing meeting, personnel argue over how best to respond to customers who call in to ask, “How can the Comédie-Française produce such nonsense?” Although the film encompasses several productions, Wiseman structures it to suggest the gradual process of a play taking shape: When we hear a round of applause at the three-hour mark, it is as gratifying for us as it presumably is for the hard-working actors.
But on a more abstract level, “La Comédie-Française” is clearly about the passage of time. The Comédie-Française is known as the world’s oldest continually operating repertory company, and Wiseman builds a running theme out of the exchange of ideas between the past and the present. Actors engage in a lively debate about what a phrase in Molière’s “Dom Juan” must have meant in the 17th century. The company’s doyen, Catherine Samie, who would go on to appear in Wiseman’s “The Last Letter” (2003), teaches a younger colleague about the importance of respecting every word. The key is perhaps in the finale, one of the few scenes set outside of a theater building or workshop, which shows a centennial birthday celebration for the retired actress Suzanne Nivette. Samie reads a list of Nivette’s many roles and remembers the kindness that Nivette showed her when she was coming up. Wiseman then cuts to a courtyard at the location, a home for artists, and to plaques that memorialize performers from centuries past — sealing the idea that art is eternal.
‘Boxing Gym’ (2010)
Although other Wiseman films, like “Ballet” (1995) and “La Danse” (2009), concern the human body’s relationship to music, none have the percussive rhythm that undergirds “Boxing Gym,” which is likely to have you tapping your toe through all of its 90 minutes. The movie takes place almost entirely inside Lord’s Boxing Gym in Austin, Texas. The opening moments acclimate viewers to the clamor of swinging punching bags, gloves pounding against trainers’ mitts and the high-pitched beep of an Everlast timer — an aural backdrop that seldom if ever lets up throughout the film. Wiseman, as usual, did his own sound, and the closing credits list a Dolby consultant. As much as any of his output, “Boxing Gym” is a triumph of pure form.
Wiseman often referred to his movies as “the films” and spoke of different ways in which they could be classified. In interviews at the time of release, he situated “Boxing Gym” in a long line of his work that dealt with violence, from state violence (“Basic Training”) to violence in the home (“Domestic Violence” and “Domestic Violence 2”). The twist in “Boxing Gym” is that the violence is, paradoxically, almost serene: a way of life, a means of self-improvement, an excuse to gather and socialize. “Most people here avoid fights so that they don’t get their hands broke so that they don’t have to miss out in here,” Richard Lord, the gym’s owner, tells a new patron. His gym welcomes members of all ages, races, genders and sizes, and appears as close to a pacifist enclave as existed in George W. Bush’s America. (While the movie premiered in 2010, Wiseman lets viewers deduce that it was shot in 2007.)
Bodies dip in synchronous motion. Children, including babies in carriers, hang out while their parents exercise. The rituals are ancient — the camera zooms in on a poster, patterned after Greek vases, that depicts sparring in antiquity — and their language has a poetry (“High jab, low jab, right hand, left hook”). Underscoring how the balletic scrapping at Lord’s Gym contrasts with violence in the outside world, Wiseman includes a scene of a man discussing his plans to attend the Army’s Ranger School. And late in the film, there are two jarring conversations about the Virginia Tech massacre, which has just occurred. The topic marks a sudden, unsettling intrusion from a reality beyond the gym. It’s the Wisemanian equivalent of a record scratch.
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