The Cinematheque

“Frederick Wiseman takes yet another long stride toward what might be called the purification of his filmmaking form … A superb human comedy—funny, pathetic, touching, absurd, moving.”

John J. O’Connor, The New York Times

The first and most contained of Frederick Wiseman’s community films, Essene is set at an Anglican monastery in Michigan, a place where people search for serenity, complain about petty conflicts, and yearn for transcendence beyond material existence. Though he can elsewhere treat religion with a glaze of irony, here Wiseman is attracted to a cast of believers because they represent an unstable group, one bound by belief that can be shaken or questioned at any moment. Is this merely a workplace? An ideal site of learning? A way to temporarily hide from the world? Many profess to feeling in touch with holy possibility, but the secular world is also apparent, with analogies to group therapy, Vietnam War resistance, and the intractability of human conflict (as seen in one of the director’s great unintentional villains, the anti-social Brother Wilfred). The speaking modes of prayer, confession, and allegory continue to be essential to Wiseman.

“Wiseman has made an engrossing, provocative, and emotionally moving film … As a person who lives an utterly non-religious life, I was simply struck by the moments when I felt I might say to these men, I am not far from you.”

Jane Shapiro, Village Voice