The Cinematheque

“A special experience … Wiseman distills both the excitement and the emptiness.”

John J. O’Connor, The New York Times

Writing in Cahiers du cinéma, essayist Pierre Legendre singled out Frederick Wiseman’s Model as the greatest work of auteur cinema he’d ever seen. ​“A quest for the absolute,” he called it, and indeed Wiseman’s ability to track the minutest shifts in behaviour, both rehearsed and ​“natural,” meets one of its greatest subjects in New York’s Zoli Agency. This is a film of constant selection, as one sees how the industry remakes the entire world in its image, one hyperreal perfectionist shoot at a time. Model is achieved at a significant scale, with what are now Wiseman’s trademark distance-traversing pillow shots a newly prominent feature of his visual lexicon, which keep the significance of the industry’s cutting-room floor never far from sight. This is arguably his most beautiful film, with stunning portraits-within-portraits of ​“off-screen” models and crew (also, Andy Warhol cameos), and a commercial shoot that rivals the greatest long-form sequences of his career.

“Wiseman’s eye has the power to focus on something particular, to observe it and to be the means of our intelligence about it … Model is as much about methods of photography and filming which are, in varying degrees, in contrast to his own, as it is about the world of models.”

Mary Frazier, The Times Literary Supplement