All through journalism school, I never wanted to write for a newspaper. I wanted to be Frederick Wiseman.
Even back in the late ’60s before “Nightline,” “Frontline” or CNN, it was obvious television was the news medium of the future. Not the medium of record, because video is lousy at relaying the essential details of public affairs–the dates, the names, the watershed legislation and the landmark court decisions. But when it comes to emotive power, the ability to make people sit up and notice, and take sides, it’s moving pictures that move the public.
So I became a student of the television documentary. Even took up the subject in a graduate course or two. My heroes were writer-producers like Edward R. Murrow, Fred Friendly, Reuven Frank and Bill Moyers. But the guy who took my breath away–the guy I wanted to be when I grew up–was Frederick Wiseman.
Wiseman pioneered a documentary technique, since used to great effect by others (notably the makers of “Hoop Dreams,” a study of inner-city basketball recruiting) of letting the subject tell his own story. His documentaries have no script, no narration, and to a large extent, no beginning or end. Instead, Wiseman sends his cameras into a situation or institution–a high school, a welfare office, a monastery–and has his lensmen shoot hour after hour, day after day, of business as usual. He then edits out 95 percent of the footage, distilling to feature length the essential truths of the place.
Of course, as any home moviemaker knows, people don’t behave normally when they know they’re on camera. So Wiseman has been known to play a little trick. After his crews have been around a few days, or however long it takes for the novelty to wear off and for language and body language to revert to normal, the film gets loaded into the cameras.
The results border on the voyeuristic. The obnoxious assistant principal in “High School” (1968) wasn’t faking it. We’ve all had an officious teacher or boss just like him. And even monks, we learned from “Essene” (1972) are capable of the most petty jealousies.
Now comes the master, at age 67, with a new documentary that hits closer to home than a lot of Chicagoans might have liked. “Public Housing,” which airs at 9 p.m. Friday on WTTW-Ch 11, is 3 1/2 hours of pure, unflinching Wiseman.
And that could be a problem. Or at least, a challenge. This film, I fear, could do more harm than good, unless viewers–particularly white viewers–check their prejudices at the door and tune in to the underlying truths that Wiseman has dug up for our appreciation.
If you are of a mind that jobless blacks in public housing are a lazy, oversexed lot, prone to crack cocaine and gangsta rap, than you will find scenes in “Public Housing” to confirm those prejudices. This is unfortunate.
But if you keep an open mind, and if you work your eyes and ears good and hard, you will notice, amid the squalor, example after example of enormous dignity, simple kindnesses and aspirations that transcend race and class.
“Public Housing” was filmed entirely within the Ida B. Wells public housing complex on Chicago’s mid-South Side. Wiseman takes us through weedy play lots, tedious tenant meetings and street corners where tough cops roust phlegmatic drug lookouts. We sit in on a phone conversation in which Helen Finner, former president of Wells’ tenants’ council, badgers the Chicago Housing Authority to open more vacant apartments for homeless teenage mothers. Finner comes across as overbearing, wielding too much power, but how could it be otherwise when so many of the tenant-mothers at Wells are so helplessly out of power. Their vacant, listless eyes, as they sit impassively through instructional meetings about job seeking or birth control, are what really haunts.
At one point a frustrated career counselor frets, as might we all, about what will happen come December 1998, when, under welfare “reform,” the phasing out of public-aid payments starts.
And yet, Wiseman salts his film with example after example of pride and enterprise. For every long-lens shot of men on the corner snorting cocaine, there are shots of chess games, sewing circles and laundry hung lovingly on the line. For every bureaucratese-speaking clerk from CHA, there is a sympathetic plumber or a roach exterminator who can’t do enough for an appreciative tenant.
But there is always the isolation. It’s not Wiseman’s style to use a map or a helicopter shot to show how removed from the rest of the city is a CHA housing project. But when you see tenants lined up at the nearby food-and-liquor store, pushing their money through a bulletproof window and yelling what they want from the other side . . . well, you get the picture.
This is American apartheid. It is a separation enforced by ignorance and indifference on both sides. And it may get worse, soon, when the checks stop.
Frederick Wiseman, who has an eye for subtle social distinctions, bids you come with him tonight for a trip across the great divide.
Put the kids to bed early and your prejudices to sleep. If you watch hard enough, you’ll see reason for hope.
