The Cinematheque

“Wiseman’s film, over and over, [presents] an incredible, revelatory moment snatched from thin air … Its full emotional impact cannot possibly be ​‘given away’ or imagined—it must be experienced.”

Susan Gerhard, San Francisco Bay Guardian

The Spring, the largest domestic violence shelter in Tampa, Florida, is the vantage point for this portrait of the aftermath of violent abuse. Frederick Wiseman’s approach to this charged material is typically observant, a wholly integrated mix of intimate witness and hard facts. The film tours the intake process, spends as much time with children as adults, and remains close to a recurring cast of women who are healing from physical and psychological wounds. In a way, this might be the most urgent and perfected vision of education in Wiseman’s filmography, revolving around actively engaged classroom scenes where women—moving from alienation to cautious solidarity—share and attempt to master the stories of their lives. This powerful, near-theatrical process is haunted by the unseen power that circumscribes their agency and safety, and reorients our reading of the emergency calls that bookend this unflinching film about the visibility of patriarchal violence.

“[In] Domestic Violence, everything that was repressed and buried inside comes pouring out, in waves the film can barely contain … It’s difficult to think of a filmmaker whose work incorporates such a broad range of human experience.”

Jared Rapfogel, Senses of Cinema

“Harrowing yet contemplative … Like Wiseman’s Welfare, Domestic Violence is a film about language, but where in Welfare the language of the people warred with the language of bureaucracy, here institution and [survivors] strive for synthesis.”

Ronnie Schieb, Variety