The Cinematheque

“As surreal as Un chien andalou.”

Lisa Nesselson, Variety

Frederick Wiseman’s presence as a sound recordist is often underemphasized in his body of work. By the ​’90s, the director’s skill as a visceral, musical collagist of diegetic songs, natural ambience, and speech is unparalleled in nonfiction films. Zoo might be the high point of this development, serving as the culmination of his animal films and containing within it multiple ​“types” of films. A great deal of the film proceeds via pure Kuleshov-effect montage of animal and human gazes in the omnidirectional gallery space of the Miami Zoo. It’s also a prison film in which we see the vulnerability of animals living behind gates and bars. By withholding, until late, one crucial element from the typical Wiseman approach—the formal meeting or speech in which an institution’s ideals are declaimed—Zoo is also powerfully suspenseful, as we witness interventions with the capacity to harm, heal, promote, or end life.

Advisory: Zoo contains scenes of animal surgery and necropsy.

“Wiseman lavishes loving attention on the bounty of gorgeous creatures, but his curiosity, as always, gravitates deeper and toward more unexpected subjects … Wiseman shows, in frequently graphic detail, the work of the veterinarians and zoo staff, who don’t only care for the animals but intervene, godlike, into their life cycles.”

Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Cine-File

“Wiseman’s animal oeuvre offers the most sustained attention to the animal in the observational avant-garde … [The film] moves beyond factual meaning to provoke an unsettling existential awareness by exploring human conduct [with] animals.”

Belinda Smaill, Regarding Life: Animals and the Documentary Moving Image