The Cinematheque

“I abhor didacticism … What I hope, because I’ve read a lot of literature—the short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, then Stephen Crane, Henry James, whom I admire enormously, Nathaniel West—is that my films reflect human complexity, as novels can.”

Frederick Wiseman

Frederick Wiseman, who passed away in February, reshaped cinema as an editor, a sound recordist, and a chronicler of acts that possess vast, otherwise invisible consequences for everyday life. He worked into his 90s; City Hall was his 31st and final non-fiction collaboration with cinematographer John Davey. An analysis of political rhetoric in Boston from 2018 to 2019, Wiseman’s second-longest film is, like many of the director’s greatest works, a lesson, a fable, and a test. Marty Walsh, Boston’s mayor, is in almost every other scene. He seemingly can ​“relate” to any constituent. In and around his presence are a variety of social forums: budget presentations, emergency calls, building inspections, garbage collections, business proposals, and even a marriage ceremony. City Hall navigates between tiers of local knowledge and forms of knowledge extraction, and between our own frames of reference and the city of Wiseman’s mind.

The best film of 2020
Cahiers du cinéma

“Powerful and precise … Wiseman turns bureaucratic procedure into a kind of poetry, and finds both comedy and profundity in the banal idioms of governance.”

A.O. Scott, The New York Times