“The Nature of the Institution Will Have Changed”: Frederick Wiseman Describes the 4K Restoration of 33 Features

Frederick Wiseman is a pillar of American documentary, yet much of his work has historically been difficult to view in a high-quality format. For the first 40 years of his expansive career, Wiseman shot each of his deep-diving, sometimes epic-length explorations of various institutions on 16mm, not transitioning to digital until the late 2000s. Over the course of five years and in collaboration between Wiseman’s company Zipporah Films and the Library of Congress, the Harvard Film Archive, the late DuArt Film Lab, and Goldcrest Post, 33 of his features—from his debut Titicut Follies (1967) to State Legislature (2006)—received 4K restorations. 

Beyond being a vital work of preservation for one of our most important documentarians, the effort has precipitated one of the biggest repertory cinema events of the year in cities on multiple continents. The first career retrospective series showing off the restorations began in the fall in Paris at the Centre Pompidou, with its second part recently getting underway. Not long after, the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles began its own series, simply titled Frederick Wiseman. In Chicago, the Gene Siskel Film Center began its program The Worlds of Wiseman with the new year. And in New York City, Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution began January 31. 

Amidst these retrospectives, we sat down to speak with Wiseman over the phone about the restoration process, his literary influences, and how newer audiences have received his work. This conversation has been edited and condensed for time and clarity.

DOCUMENTARY: We last spoke in the fall of 2023, when you were in the process of color grading the films as part of the restoration process. What was it like revisiting all of them?

Frederick Wiseman: It was a lot of work, but I’m pleased with the results. It was interesting for me to see the films. There were many I hadn’t seen for 45, 50 years. I was very pleased to have the chance to do the color grading, and the ensemble of films looks much better as a consequence of the grading.

D: What stage of the process was the recoloring? This presumably came with sharpening the image, tinkering with the grain, and such.

FW: Yes. That was all part of the process. Jane Tolmachyov [at Goldcrest Post] made the first pass for the 4K remaster, basically cleaning up the films, then I came in and we did the rest of it together. It was just me and her. Occasionally, I did a little work on the sound. I remixed a few scenes here and there in different movies, and that involved a sound mixer as well. There’ve been a lot of developments in digital sound, and there were a few places where I thought I could improve the sound. A couple of movies I remixed completely, while there were several where I remixed a scene here and there.

D: What’s one film that was entirely remixed?

FW: High School. The building was constructed of porous concrete, so there was a lot of leakage from one classroom to another. I couldn’t do anything about it while I was filming, so I’m glad to have had a chance to remix it. Alan Gus, a sound mixer at Goldcrest, did an excellent job on the material that was remixed. 

D: When we previously discussed color grading, you also talked about how you could adjust the colors to make certain things pop more. Was there anything that was as transformative in the grading as it was in the sound?

FW: Those were smaller changes. The original grade was not bad. It’s just that the technology improved so much. You could fiddle. The look of the films is much improved. Jane did great work.

D: You’ve maintained your formal approach in shooting and editing these films over all these decades, and it was more or less there from the start with Titicut Follies. Did you discover your style in making that film, or had you already conceived of it even before then?

FW: I had an idea for my approach going into Titicut Follies. I was interested in using a novelistic technique, rather than the ways that I often saw documentary films made. I came to documentary from a study of American novels and poems. I wanted to see if I could use the same kind of telling position in making a movie that I admired in the novels or poems I liked. I had read quite extensively in college and law school. Those works influenced my approach more than previous documentary films. I hadn’t seen many documentary films.

D: Who were your favorite writers at that time?

FW: The great 19th-century Americans: Melville, Hawthorne, Poe. And I am a great admirer of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud.

D: Have the things you’ve read continued to influence you over the years?

FW: I think so. It’s not as if I can say that the way I ended a scene in Near Death is connected to a Henry James short story. It’s just generally speaking, it influenced the way I thought about my material.

D: You’ve captured so many individuals in your career. Have you ever kept in touch with anyone you met while making a film?

FW: In a few cases, not many. I’ve kept in touch with the people at the Troisgros restaurant, with one doctor from Near Death, and with several people at the Comédie-Française and the Paris Opera Ballet, because I have an interest in dance and theater.

D: These restorations will make it easier for theaters—not just those that can project 16mm—to play your earlier work. Before this, we’ve seen how most of your films being available to stream on Kanopy made them accessible to a wider audience than they historically had. Have you noticed a change in who turns out to screenings in recent years?

FW: More young people are seeing the films. I like that, obviously. The second part of the retrospective, in Paris, began the other night with Blind (1987), and the person running it called me and said there were a lot of students in the audience, which pleased me. I like the idea of people of all ages and experiences seeing the films. Sometimes in the past, the films just attracted an older audience, but now they seem to be attracting people of all ages. At least at the retrospective in Paris, it’s not only people 60 and above, but also 20 and above.

D: Each of these films is a capsule of the way its subject institution operates in the specific moment that shot it. Over time, they become historical documents. Have you considered the way they evolve? How they become windows to the past instead of the present?

FW: I hope that’s the case. In 40, 50 years—even now, some of the early films are nearly 60 years old—I hope people will want to see them, because perhaps the nature of the institutions will have changed. They obviously, inevitably become a historical record, and that’s even more true if the subjects or the nature of the place has changed. Police behavior is different, high school education has changed. The way that doctors approach medical problems. Inevitably, there are differences in language, clothes, and behavior. My hope is that people will want to see them and there will be apparent differences between the past and their present.

For additional information about Frederick Wiseman and his work, visit Zipporah Films.

Dan Schindel is a freelance critic and full-time copy editor living in Brooklyn. He has previously worked as the associate editor for documentary at Hyperallergic.