David Hudson at The Current:
Whether embedded in a hospital, a high school, a zoo, a welfare center, an army training camp, a public library, a city hall, or an entire neighborhood, his films are “stylistically ur-vérité,” as Errol Morris put it in the Paris Review in 2011. “No narration. Available light. Fly-on-the-wall. But Wiseman’s films prove a simple principle. Style does not determine content. He may be a direct-cinema guy in form, but the content is not valetudinarian but visionary and dystopian. Wiseman has never been a straight vérité ‘documentarian.’ He is a filmmaker and one of the greatest we have.”Most of Wiseman’s films are “long, strange, and uncompromising,” wrote Mark Binelli. “They can be darkly comic, uncomfortably voyeuristic, as surreal as any David Lynch dream sequence. There are no voice-overs, explanatory intertitles, or interviews with talking heads, and depending on the sequence and our own sensibility, we may picture the ever-silent Wiseman as a deeply empathetic listener or an icy Martian anthropologist.”
more here.
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