Five Films By Frederick Wiseman

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.

Frederick Wiseman is America’s foremost chronicler of public institutions. His films have focused on city, state, and local governments; hospitals; asylums; creative organizations and museums; schools; libraries; and more. In recent years, Wiseman’s work has reached a new level of popularity, with films such as In Jackson Heights (2015), Monrovia, Indiana (2018), and City Hall (2020) all earning widespread acclaim. Voyages of Discovery is the definitive account of Wiseman’s career, offering a comprehensive analysis of the work of the leading documentary filmmaker in the United States. In this updated edition, Barry Keith Grant adds new material exploring the documentarian’s works since the 1990s, discussing every film in Wiseman’s remarkable sixty-year career. He examines the core concerns running across Wiseman’s work from the early films, which focus on documenting institutional failure, through an expanding interest in cultural institutions and ideology, to a blossoming embrace of democracy in later films. He pays particular attention to Wiseman’s strategies for involving and implicating the spectator in the institutional processes the films document. Grant also places Wiseman within the history of the documentary and other traditions of American art and considers the relationship between documentary film and authorship. Voyages of Discovery is an important book for anyone interested in Wiseman’s work or how documentary film can reveal the fabric of our shared civic life.

Rather than write briefly about each of the many documentary films Wiseman has made over the past 20 years, Benson (rhetoric and communication arts and sciences, Pennsylvania State U.) and Anderson (communication, U. of Massachusetts-Amherst) choose a few representative examples. They interpret the films, look at the rhetorical structures, and explore the people and processes. The first edition was published in 1989. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Routledge Handbook of Health and Media provides an extensive review and exploration of the myriad ways that health and media function as a symbiotic partnership that profoundly influences contemporary societies. A unique and significant volume in an expanding pedagogical field, this diverse collection of international, original, and interdisciplinary essays goes beyond issues of representation to engage in scholarly conversations about the web of networks that inextricably bind media and health to each other. Divided into sections on film, television, animation, photography, comics, advertising, social media, and print journalism, each chapter begins with a concrete text or texts, using it to raise more general and more theoretical issues about the medium in question. As such, this Handbook defines, expands, and illuminates the role that the humanities and arts play in the education and practice of healthcare professionals and in our understanding of health, illness, and disability. The Routledge Handbook of Health and Media is an invaluable reference for academics, students and health professionals engaged with cultural issues in media and medicine, popular representations of disease and disability, and the patient/professional health care encounter.

Originally released in 1998, Documenting the Documentary responded to a scholarly landscape in which documentary film was largely understudied and undervalued aesthetically, and analyzed instead through issues of ethics, politics, and film technology. Editors Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski addressed this gap by presenting a useful survey of the artistic and persuasive aspects of documentary film from a range of critical viewpoints. This new edition of Documenting the Documentary adds five new essays on more recent films in addition to the text of the first edition. Thirty-one film and media scholars, many of them among the most important voices in the area of documentary film, cover the significant developments in the history of documentary filmmaking from Nanook of the North (1922), the first commercially released documentary feature, to contemporary independent film and video productions like Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005) and the controversial Borat (2006). The works discussed also include representative examples of many important national and stylistic movements and various production contexts, from mainstream to avant-garde. In all, this volume offers a series of rich and revealing analyses of those "regimes of truth" that still fascinate filmgoers as much today as they did at the very beginnings of film history. As documentary film and visual media become increasingly important ways for audiences to process news and information, Documenting the Documentary continues to be a vital resource to understanding the genre. Students and teachers of film studies and fans of documentary film will appreciate this expanded classic volume.

In a career that spans more than four decades, FrederickWiseman has made thirty-eight films that together form a monumental chronicle of latetwentieth- century institutional and cultural life. The dilemmasWiseman poses in his films moral, philosophical, legal, medical, technological, political, religious and aesthetic are both urgent and vexing, from his controversial debut, Titicut Follies (1967), the only American film ever censored for reasons other than national security or obscenity, to his recent critical and commercial success La Danse The Paris Opera Ballet (2009) and forthcoming film Boxing Gym (2010). FrederickWiseman, the first publication in English to provide a comprehensive overview ofWisemans work to date (including projects for theatre and opera), features original essays by a variety of distinguished writers, critics, filmmakers and actors, and byWiseman himself. Richly illustrated with stills from his films, this volume is an incisive examination of one of cinemas most fearless and innovative filmmakers.

Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader offers students an introductory and comprehensive view of perhaps the most central concept in film studies. This unique anthology addresses the aesthetic and historical debates surrounding auteurship while providing author criticism and analysis in practice. Examines a number of mainstream and established directors, including John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Douglas Sirk, Frank Capra, Kathryn Bigelow, and Spike Lee Features historically important, foundational texts as well as contemporary pieces Includes numerous student features, such as a general editor’s introduction, short prefaces to each of the sections, bibliography, alternative tables of contents, and boxed features Each essay deliberately focuses across film makers’ oeuvres, rather than on one specific film, to enable lecturers to have flexibility in constructing their syllabi

This three-volume set is a valuable resource for researching the history of American television. An encyclopedic range of information documents how television forever changed the face of media and continues to be a powerful influence on society. What are the reasons behind enduring popularity of television genres such as police crime dramas, soap operas, sitcoms, and "reality TV"? What impact has television had on the culture and morality of American life? Does television largely emulate and reflect real life and society, or vice versa? How does television's influence differ from that of other media such as newspapers and magazines, radio, movies, and the Internet? These are just a few of the questions explored in the three-volume encyclopedia TV in the USA: A History of Icons, Idols, and Ideas. This expansive set covers television from 1950 to the present day, addressing shows of all genres, well-known programs and short-lived series alike, broadcast on the traditional and cable networks. All three volumes lead off with a keynote essay regarding the technical and historical features of the decade(s) covered. Each entry on a specific show investigates the narrative, themes, and history of the program; provides comprehensive information about when the show started and ended, and why; and identifies the star players, directors, producers, and other key members of the crew of each television production. The set also features essays that explore how a particular program or type of show has influenced or reflected American society, and it includes numerous sidebars packed with interesting data, related information, and additional insights into the subject matter.