Crazy Horse

Frederick Wiseman - 2011 - USA

Wake up, cineastes.  Frederick Wiseman is your friend.  The fact that the octogenarian documentarian makes really long non-fiction movies devoid of expository interviews or identifying subtitles does not mean that he doesn’t know what he’s doing or that he’s trying to bore you.  On the contrary, he’s treating you like you have a brain in your noggin and are capable of using it, and not only that, but will actually be turned on by the experience.  He wants you to have a sensory epiphany about film; akin to the feeling you’d have venturing out into the fresh air and sunshine after days of watching TV in a dingy basement.  There’s more to life than jock superheroes, recycled ‘comedy’ and kids’ musicals.  Film can be other things too.  To cite two extreme examples, Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol made films that force us to reconsider the very definitions of cinema and what it can do.  Maybe you’re tired of being screamed at by movies, tired of being lectured, tired of the relentless hammering of ads, tired of being yanked to and fro according to the formulae of hack filmmakers, and tired of being conned into emptying your wallets for a few hollow moments of cheap entertainment that drain you instead of inspire you.  So instead of bellyaching about being bored and about how everything you’re not used to is “slow,” why not get off your butts and seek out the films of Frederick Wiseman?  All but a handful are hard to find.  That’s called a challenge, folks; the resolution of which does your soul a lot more good than being spoon-fed.

For nearly 50 years, Wiseman has been practicing a strict style of filmmaking once known as direct cinema; producing, directing and editing a new film almost every year.  As seen in the work of his colleagues D.A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles, one of the mainstays of direct cinema has always been the performing arts, but Wiseman has only rarely trained his camera on artists, preferring instead to focus on various institutions and their bureaucracies.  As a kind of sister film to 2009’s La Danse, which was about the Paris Opera Ballet, this film visits the other side of the tracks to spend some time with another kind of dance troupe; a century-old Parisian nude revue called the Crazy Horse.  Anyone familiar with any other Wiseman films will recognize his practice of alternating at a casual pace between different kinds of scenes; managers discussing practical matters like budget and schedule, technicians figuring out various problems, artists working on the show step by step.  Direct cinema is powerful because it takes a huge risk; unlike standard documentaries, it has no assurances about where the subject is going or how exactly the film will end.  There is no guarantee of a compelling story in direct cinema.  What there is in its place is the eternally compelling observation of human behavior.  We and Wiseman see things that even the participants miss; flashes of annoyance in people’s faces and private moments of fear, anxiety or satisfaction.  The Crazy Horse show is an unabashed celebration of the female body and erotic mystique.  Through an impassive lens, Wiseman’s film inevitably shares those themes, but it also works above and beneath, exploring themes such as the voyeuristic element in theater and cinema, and the way in which art applies a veneer of beauty over reality to enhance our appreciation of it.  Wiseman’s films realign your frame of mind, for the better.  I am never necessarily in the mood for a 3-hour documentary about a subject that doesn’t especially concern me, but Wiseman’s cinema plugs into an intuitive form of drama that makes you feel connected to the passions and frustrations of your fellow beings.  It is both a meditative and a cathartic experience.