Lately I've been exploring the issue of ethics in the films of Fredrick Wiseman. In my entry on "Titticut Follies", among other things, I discussed how Wiseman's clear judgmental stance might be considered by some to be a breach of documentary ethics. Some feel that the goal of documentary is to be as objective as possible, others feels that it should be used as a tool for social change. Wiseman falls somewhere in the middle.
Wiseman has stated that with "Titticut Follies" and his next film, "High School", he had more of a fixed idea of what he was trying to go for (as opposed to his later, more thematically ambiguous films). But even so, that does not mean that the individual member of the audience cannot get what he or she wants out of what has just been seen. In a 1998 interview with "The Boston Pheonix", Wiseman stated: "When [High School] was first shown in Boston, in 1969, one of the people who saw it was
a very conservative member of the Boston School Committee. I thought she'd hate the movie. But she came up and said, 'Mr. Wiseman, that was a wonderful high school!' I thought she was kidding me until I realized she was on the other side from me on all the value questions. Everything I thought I was parodying, she thought was great. I don't think her reaction represents a failure of the film. Instead, we have an illustration that reality is ambiguous, a complex mirror that the 'real' film takes place where the mind of the viewer meets the screen. It's how the viewer interprets the events."
In the above case, it would seem that the film is only unfair if you dislike what you see. The woman disagreed with what Wiseman was saying, but she still liked the film, because she felt that the images were strong enough to counter what Wiseman's intentions for the film were. So then does it really matter if he was "parodying" his subjects?
Of course we could look deeper into a film like "High School", at more minute details, to see better, less broad examples of what could be considered unethical practices. In one scene, a teacher teaches a class and we see a close-up of her face, wearing thick, horn-rimmed glasses. About this shot, Calvin Pryluck writes, "One can wonder how the teacher in High School feels about herself since seeing herself seeing her bottle-thick eyeglass lenses larger than life on the screen." Small matters like this are important. But is the woman's appearance Wiseman's problem? Perhaps he chose the close up to emphasize the look on her face. Perhaps then if the woman feels embarrassed, then that is for her to worry about, no one else.
