You may recall, in the summer of 2022, I
shared the announcement that blu-ray restorations for all of
Frederick Wiseman's films shot on film were coming "by the end of the year." That year end obviously came and went, and in 2025,
it came out that he was still in the process of restoring them. But now at the top of 2026, we've finally got our first taste: five of his early works (but not, strictly speaking, his first five films) in a tight 3-disc boxed set from the BFI entitled 'Cinema Expanded: The Films of Frederick Wiseman.'
Previously, these have all only been available on DVD. In the US, they were DVD-Rs distributed by Zipporah Films, Wiseman's company, primarily sold directly through their website. There have been foreign editions of some of these, most notably in France by the label Blaq Out, though I've also seen a Korean
Titicut Follies DVD floating around. I suppose the upshot of importing those is that they'd at least be pressed discs. But as an American, I dutifully ordered my copy of each of these five films from Zipporah.
1967's
Titicut Follies is Wiseman's first, and still
probably best known, film, if only because it was banned for twenty-four years, and
so it would often show up in cult film catalogs on bootleg VHS and the like. It's the Wiseman film you might've seen even if you don't care at all about vérité documentary or academic cinema. It's certainly chock full of full frontal male nudity (atypical of Wiseman's oeuvre) and deeply disturbing images of death and, arguably, torture. But the reason it was banned was because of how awful it made its subject, Bridgewater State Hospital of Massachusetts, look (stay tuned after the credits for a pair of amusing disclaimers), which is ironic, because these places only ever agree to let Wiseman film in them because they think it's going to be a boon to their public image. But that dichotomy between the horrors onscreen and the enactors' confidence in their own nobility is what makes this film so fascinating.
Wiseman's second film, 1968's
High School, didn't get banned, but Philadelphia's North East High
wasn't much happier with the final product of their film. Still, this is a much more relatable, normal look at the typical drudgeries of the American public high school experience. What stands out the most about this one today is how dated the period has become. I'm not exactly gen Z, and even I couldn't believe it when one of the teachers organized a fashion show by and for her female students, pointing out which ones have a "weight problem" or "too heavy" legs. Even the filmmakers themselves are uncomfortably leering at the underage girls' gym class bodies. Tensions are also subtly rising as issues of the day involving the Vietnam war and assassination of
Martin Luther King Jr. seep into the school. It's certainly interesting to compare, and see how much things have changed, by the time of Wiseman's
High School II in 1994.
His next film was
Law & Order, but the BFI now skips ahead to his 1970 film
Hospital for their next inclusion. Wiseman's catalog generally gets less and less controversial as it goes forward, to the point where is modern documentaries could be said to be the very picture of milquetoast. Even as early as 1970, you feel Wiseman has turned the corner from exposing his subjects to being firmly on their side. I mean,
Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros is virtually a four-hour advertisement. If you screenshot the closing credits and show it to them on your phone, the staff at Le Bois sans feuilles have probably been instructed to give you a 5% discount. But in
Hospital, there are several points where you'll be grateful for the black and white photography, because he doesn't shy away from some grisly and upsetting images that fall before his lens. Still, this is mostly valuable as a detail rich look at how a modern (for 1970) metropolitan hospital works, and the people you'll find there. And this is where he won two of his three Emmy Awards (the BFI-skipped
Law & Order being the third).
But they skip several more films now to arrive at 1973's
Juvenile Court. This is the film, beyond all the others i his long career, that really had my jaw dropping at the access he was granted. At one point, he's filming a hearing about child sexual abuse, and they decide to move the toddlers' testimony to the judge's private chambers to protect their privacy from the rest of the courtroom staff. And his cameras follow them right in! I don't know if we should be seeing all this, but these stories are all fascinating. And I guess that explains the shift in Wiseman's body of work. He's got so much material you just couldn't imagine cutting out, so while all of his previous films had been coming in at 90 minutes or less,
Juvenile Court jumps to almost three hours, an indulgence in length that would persist through his documentary work for the next 50+ years. His longest,
Near Death, is a whopping six hours. But I wouldn't cut a second out of any of them... well, at least until the 2010s. I wouldn't mind a breezier
Boxing Gym. But here, every second is riveting.
Finally, we jump over
Primate to land on 1975's
Welfare, a bureaucratic purgatory constantly sending people up and downstairs like a two circled
Dante's Inferno. There's one scene where an employee feels like a damn Homeric hero when he goes upstairs himself to sort out an error on a poor soul's behalf. Otherwise, this is a harrowing testament to how heartlessly this country treats our poor and disabled. And I have to credit the booklet that comes with this set for a fascinating discovery here. I've seen these films several times over the years (after all, I am double-dipping my DVDs for these blus), and I never realized that the
Mrs. Hightower we meet in this film is the same Mrs. Hightower who was stonewalling the social worker over the phone five years prior in
Hospital. It's a small, cruel world, but another fascinating doc.
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Zipporah DVRs top; BFI BDs bottom; films in sequential order.
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So, I'm lumping these comparisons together because it's essentially the same story every time. All of these discs present the films in their original 1.33:1 aspect ratios, except for
Titicut Follies and
Welfare, where the DVRs (which to be clear, means yes, they're consumer-grade burned discs) is 1.30:1, and the BDs has been slightly widened out to the more correct 1.37:1, revealing a little extra on the sides. All of these BDs have been restored in 4k from the original 16mm camera negatives and look fantastic. Grain is perfectly captured, detail is clearer and the fuzzy edges of the old discs have been sharpened right up. Also, all of the DVRs are interlaced for every two out of six frames - you can see an example in the first set of shots from
Titicut Follies at the top, above. There's also what looks like some unwelcome edge enhancement or unsharpening tool used on Zipporah's
Welfare that the BFI has dropped. Contrast levels are more pleasing across the board, too, with the DVRs looking a little washed out in comparison. Furthermore, you can see the restorations have cleaned up print damage, like those white spots in the
High School and
Juvenile Court comparisons above. In short, these are truly impressive, massive upgrades, which blow the old and frankly disappointing Zipporah discs out of the water.
All of the Zipporah discs just offer the basic, though reasonably clear and strong, mono audio tracks in Dolby Digital 2.0. BFI has restored them all and included them in LPCM, with optional English subtitles.
Extras aren't much, but they're not nothin'. Well, on the DVRs they
are a hundred percent barebones. But BFI has included two new
featurettes, a first for a filmmaker who previously
went out of his way to forbid special features from appearing on his releases. The first is a nice visual essay by
Ian Mantgani,
which serves as a strong introduction to Wiseman's work. I only wish
it was longer, but maybe BFI are holding out for a second volume. The
other is a twenty-minute panel discussion by BFI's Southbank curator and
a couple of people... frankly none of whom have anything interesting to
say about Wiseman's work. They take one question from the audience and
don't know the answer. Feel free to skip that one. We do also get the
nice booklet I mentioned earlier, though, which includes seven essays
by different experts, including the hosts of
The Wiseman Podcast. The three discs are packaged in a standard amary case housed in a stylish slipbox.
So, I sure hope there's going to be a Volume 2 and beyond, though
the fact that they skipped some films rather than just tackling the
first five in a row suggests they're not aiming to be comprehensive and
give us all of these restorations on blu. Maybe another label in
another region will pick up the slack. But if we're going to be stuck
with the DVDs for the rest, at least we got some of his heaviest hitters here.