Max Mueller

Perhaps the most noticeable aspect of a direct (or ‘observational’) documentary approach such as Frederick Wiseman’s is the conspicuous absence of many common documentary practices. Taking note of techniques not utilized is appropriate and at times unavoidable when analyzing the form of any documentary, but given Wiseman’s relatively narrow praxis it is an especially enticing exercise to engage in with his films. From this point of view Wiseman’s approach becomes distinct in a manner analogous to a sculptor removing excess marble from a slab as it is reduced to the form of a sculptor’s personal vision. Wiseman did in fact film traditional interviews for his first documentary feature Titicut Follies but decided to scrap them. Other standard documentary conventions that Wiseman has tossed in the waste bin include narration, descriptive text, re-enactment, produced drama (as is commonplace in reality TV or Werner Herzog’s documentaries), additional lighting, an acknowledgement of the film crew on the part of documentary subjects, and - for the most part - a musical soundtrack.  

This eschewing of common practices extends to the conceptual framework that Wiseman uses to organize the raw material - all those rolls of film, all those gigabytes of video - into a structured text. For example, though some Wiseman films incorporate the passage of time into their structure, many progress without relying on the viewer’s interpretation of film time, from sequence to sequence, as linear. Wiseman tends not to focus on the manner in which an individual's personality changes or develops under given circumstances. Most, if not all, of his films appear to avoid presenting a didactic argument that can be formulated, in good faith, into a brief written synopsis. In fact, the films are organized in a pattern that departs from a linguistics reliant on words, as applied to footage, as their guiding principle in forming an expressive statement. 

If one is to consider the absence of ordinarily ubiquitous techniques as a vacuum, it is worth taking a look at what fills the space left by them. To put it simply: What is Wiseman’s documentary methodology in positive terms? Because it is beyond the scope of this review to provide an overview of a unifying methodology throughout Wiseman’s career, this reviewer will discuss several noteworthy cinematic techniques that support a viewer’s construction of meaning in Aspen. 

Aspen is comprised of ‘scenes,’ or discrete assemblages of footage that have the appearance of unity to them. For example, following a shot of snow capped mountains and two shots of the same church building viewed from the outside, the film opens with 23 shots recognizably filmed during the beginning of a Catholic mass. Within the scene, the position of each shot in relation to the prior and subsequent shots suggests that the action being presented is occurring with a continuity of time. In the case of the Catholic mass, there is no reason to doubt that all of the shots were captured on a single Sunday morning. But it is also possible that the footage is a compilation of many Sundays, cut together to give the sense of a single continuous moment in time. The suggestion of a continuity of time is established through a continuity of place - in this case the church - and a continuity of human action - when the priests stand, subsequent shots show the priests standing as opposed to seated.  Other ‘scenes,’ though they conform to an internal unity, are decidedly discontinuous spatially, temporally, and in terms of action. For example, Wiseman compiles 7 shots of snow plows and snow groomers into a single sequence that is unified by the presence of the vehicles but is also unified in the progressive passage from day to evening with each successive shot. The scene then stands on it’s own as a unity but also serves as a bridge between a scene of skiers during the day before it and a scene of the deserted mountain at dusk that follows it. 

The principle underlying the unity of each scene changes from scene to scene but it is not the interest of this essay to create an exhaustive list of the various principles of unity that Wiseman utilizes. Rather, it is important to note that unities of various kinds form discrete scenes, and that it can be ascertained, in most cases, exactly where one scene ends and the next begins. Scenes are thus used as building blocks or morphemes in Wiseman’s filmic language. They are arranged into a pattern from which the meaning of the film is provoked in the viewer. Certain areas of interest emerge as scenes fall into particular categories. Roughly 46 minutes and 34 seconds of Aspen is devoted to religious communities, 21 minutes and 26 seconds to skiing related activities and so forth. The text can be read and the overall meaning can only be gleaned by an interpretation of the relationship between and among the scenes. 

Instead of grouping scenes that most resemble each other into a series of categorically related scenes, Wiseman arranges the scenes in a manner that forms contrast. Contrast is present right from the very beginning of the film. The opening scene of the Catholic mass, is followed by 13 shots of, or related to, a farmer tossing hay bales to cows from a truck. This is followed by 6 shots of a marriage ceremony being performed in a floating hot air balloon. The contrast between the three scenes produces a desire to make thematic connections, and to contrast the experiences that are presented one after the other. It could be said that, “the church service concerns the supernatural. The farmer is solitary and earthbound. The wedding in the clouds is surreal and frivolous.” Each of the scenes is rich with internal meaning but it is in the colliding and pulling apart that occurs when the scenes are played in sequence that Aspen will have meaning for a viewer. The film demands a reconciliation and an attempted recognition of balance, or form, on the part of the viewer in reaction to varied human behavior.  

The desired effect - that the audience constructs their own personal meaning from his text - creates the tactical necessity that Wiseman refrain from presenting a particular argument regarding the subject matter outright. It is quite a tightrope to walk. Wiseman creates a highly constructed aesthetic depiction of recognizable phenomena but his underlying rhetorical motivations remain at least partially obscured from his audience. He creates a positive negation (the vacuum of didactic argument is filled with obscurity), establishing a pattern in which the viewer is drawn into the complex world of the film without the meaning dictated to them.     

The drawing-in of the viewer is in part achieved by the penetration of a multiplicity of normally exclusive human interactions. Aspen, in many instances, permits an audience to view a drama that would normally have no audience beyond the actors involved. This can’t be said for all of the scenes. The ski race beginning around 7 minutes and 15 seconds into the film is the kind of activity that requires little penetration on the part of the filmmaker because the dynamics of a ski race allow for a naturally non-participatory audience. The race is ultimately an exception that proves the rule as Wiseman’s camera records such exclusive activities as an adult art class for the wealthy, a men’s group discussion of divorce, a wedding anniversary party, a computer assisted homeopathic consultation, a small-group game of charades, and a book club discussion of Flaubert’s A Simple Heart to list a few examples. By penetrating the implicit barriers erected around various community activities, Wiseman allows his audience to view interactions that would normally be reserved for a designated set of engaged participants. It creates the unusual perspective of being both set apart from the community and at the same time devoid of ostracization. Setting the viewer at a distance runs counter to the objectives of most nonfiction films wherein it is the aspiration of the filmmaker to provide the necessary social context of an individual/subject so as to invite the viewer's identification or sense of mastery. Wiseman’s film finds strength in its lack of social context, throwing a viewer into the midst of a social interaction for which they have not accumulated the context, and thus personal involvement, that would normally be necessary to earn the access. Wiseman bombards viewers with penetrating view, after penetrating view into the quasi-private interactions of a multitudinous panorama of social groups that share a single social space, in this case Aspen, Colorado.   

This review has intentionally neglected a written explication of Aspen. Instead, it has attempted to move beyond an emphasis on the absence of common strategies inherent in Wiseman’s filmmaking approach with the hope of illuminating the interlocking strategies that Wiseman employs as he uses the medium of film to depart from a word-based linguistics. It is through the above mentioned mutually supporting techniques, in conjunction with others, that Aspen cultivates a meaningful experience for its audience.