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FREDERICK WISEMAN, FILMMAKER IN WAIT
04/09/2011
The first meeting is never forgotten. It will certainly not be forgotten by the young people taking part in the project 27 Times Cinema, who met director Frederick Wiseman, author of the documentary Crazy Horse. The meeting, moderated by “Variety” journalist Tim Gray, allowed the 27 to explore the way in which the director works, and to learn a few of the tricks of his job.
”I am interested in making films about the most representative institutions, which are present in any society”, states Wiseman, thus explaining his vocation for documentary, a genre which he has employed since the beginning of his career, in the sixties, making films about hospitals, prisons, zoos, schools, parcs... His approach to a subject is intentionally not very methodical and very creative: “I go around scouring the location for one day. The real research starts during filming”. In fact, Wiseman does not prearrange anything in his work but lets things come up spontanously; “It’s impossible to know or predict how people are going to react. That is why it is indispensible to film a lot, without ever stopping; the most important things happen precisely when the camera is switched off”.
This means, as the director poins out several times, that the most important part of his work is editing, in which the filmed material is visualised: “Crazy horse (which lasts just over two hours) is the fruit of a selection from 150 hours of filming. On average I only use 2% of what I film and I take a year to do the editing”. And it is the editing that represents, according to Wiseman, one of the best training grounds for any filmmaker; it is at that moment, in fact, that one is confronted with the requirements of cinematographic expressions and learns the difference between indispensible shots and unusable shots.
Together with the experience gathered over the years, especially thanks to editing of his own films, the director points to two further secrets of cinema know-how, that help him to find the perfect shot: “luck and having no alternative. There are times in which you are forced to place the camera in a certain position”.
However, most of the time, the world willingly chooses to show itself to Wiseman, filmmaker of the waiting game, inheritent of that wandering look which, through the Lumiere brothers, inaugurated the history of cinema.
Francesco Bonerba
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