Hospital [1970]

 Hospital, Frederick Wiseman’s magnificent exercise in ‘direct cinema’ – his fourth consecutive observational investigation into public institutions, but his first with an outlook permeated with radical humanism and generosity – was an audacious, bleak and absorbing essay on a massive and overcrowded general hospital that, unlike its private counterparts, is dedicated to admitting difficult and messy cases involving the underprivileged and the marginalized. The Metropolitan Hospital, located in New York’s East Harlem neighbourhood, consequently, wasn’t just a flurry of activities where the staff must continuously deal with nerve-racking emergencies, intensely stressful scenarios and complicated conversations, it also served as a sobering peek into lives mired with violent crimes, drug addictions, social ostracizations, ethnic dispossessions and class inequalities. Filmed in grainy B/W using 16mm cameras, with an unblinking gaze, and in an equanimous tone amidst the anxiety and desolation, one witnesses a young victim of gang violence, a transwoman who’s been shunned by everyone, an overworked father struggling to ensure his infant kid’s wellbeing, a former alcoholic unable to articulate his ailments, and a daughter helplessly grappling with her mom’s mortality. Through these disparate medical cases, one notices a medic expressing his annoyance at another hospital’s negligence of due process, a sympathetic physician trying in futility to get his patient on welfare, and doctors interacting with broken and panic-stricken patients with great composure. The work was especially remarkable in how Wiseman covered, through his editing, such an extraordinarily wide and disparate ground, while never rushing through any of the segments. French filmmaker Claire Simon named this as a key influence for her marvellous recent documentary Our Body, while Wiseman delved into the subject of caregiving again 19 years later with Near Death.

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Genre: Documentary

Language: English

Country: US

High School [1968]

 Frederick Wiseman, in his sophomore documentary feature High School, toned down on the scalding nature of his subject selection from his incendiary debut Titicut Follies, but retained both his formal and topical choices – viz. fly-in-the-wall observational essays on institutions, organizations and communities, which became his directorial signature – in this ‘direct cinema’ classic. Its matter-of-fact tone notwithstanding, the captivating piece, centred on the Northeast High School in Pennsylvania, comprised of pointed undercurrents, and that was discernible in the teacher-student interactions that it focussed on which were representative of power contrasts in a hierarchical structure existing at the knife-edge between progressive pedagogy and rigid discipline. One therefore sees, on one hand, a Spanish teacher explaining Sartre and existentialism, a hip literature teacher selecting Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Dangling Conversation’ for her poetry class, and a wisecracking gynaecologist providing sex education to adolescent boys; on the other hand, one finds the school’s grumpy principle instructing students on the utmost importance of obeying authority, even if that means accepting unfair reprimands, and blindly following the stringent dress codes of prom, when he’s not hunting for rulebreakers in the corridor. Ironically, the same principle then patronisingly advises a parent not to impose their desires and expectations on their children, and accepting it if they’re not the smartest kid in the block. Excellently shot in grainy B/W using a roving, curious and unobtrusive 16mm camera, the docu was therefore teasingly informed by a deadpan outlook on the uneasy juxtaposition between conformity and self-expression in the school – which attained an especially sardonic meaning given that 1968, the year in which it was made, was defined by global protests by rebellious youth – while avoiding any heavy-handed elements.

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Genre: Documentary

Language: English

Country: US

Titicut Follies [1967]

 Frederick Wiseman both decisively established his rigorous fly-in-the-wall cinematic grammar and fearlessly pushed the boundaries of art, ethics and the paradigms of documentary filmmaking with his searing and unsettling debut Titicut Follies. This powerful exercise in ‘direct cinema’ had evoked a massive legal backlash – ostensibly on questions of privacy violation and obscenity, but essentially because it revealed the grotesque inner workings within a state-run institution – which led to it being banned for 24 years. Wiseman trained his unnerving lens – through gritty, grainy, spare and haunting B/W images – on the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts, where he spent 29 days documenting the conditions inside it. What emerged through it – like a blast of cold fury – was the treatment that the inmates received from the authorities, guards and doctors, which alternated from apathy, mocking and bullying to being shorn of their autonomy, agency and dignity. The film’s most disturbing moments included men being frequently stripped naked, a doctor hideously poking out fetishes out of a sexual offender, and in what was particularly tough to sit through, an aged inmate who’s stopped eating being force-fed through a tube inserted into his nostril, while the doctor, who’s carrying it out, glibly smokes a cigarette perilously close to the feeding tube with casual indifference. These harrowing sequences were interspersed with moments of candid eloquence, as when a guy engages in a political speech that spoke to that era of anti-Vietnam War protests and civil rights movements, or a nurse fondly speaking of a letter of gratitude that she’d received from a former “patient”. The docu, ironically, began and ended on deceptively light notes, viz. the institution’s titular musical talent show.

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Genre: Documentary

Language: English

Country: US

Accattone [1961]

 Pier Paolo Pasolini – who was already an acclaimed poet, established writer and prolific editor by then, and had also dabbled in cinema, having assisted Fellini in the screenplays of Nights of Cabiria and La Dolce Vita – made a fierce and persuasive filmmaking debut with Accattone. As a firebrand Marxist with a deeply conflicting relationship with his Catholic background, and possessing radical empathy for those who belonged to the “urban underclass”, it was only apposite that his first two films – this and his furious follow-up Mamma Roma – were both harsh portrayals and poetic paeans to pimps, prostitutes and lowlifes, with religious undertones. The film, interestingly, ostensibly bore neorealism’s social, formal and moral commitments – emphasis on everyday struggles, “real” locations, non-professional actors and gritty authenticity – while also being deliberately mannered, expressionistic and with a stirring allegiance towards an existential choice that’s fundamentally opposed to societal expectations and middle-class aspirations, which steadfastly placed it beyond neorealist boundaries; this dichotomy made this lyrical and edgy film a strikingly modernist work, despite its seemingly classical façade. Vittorio (Franco Citti, the younger brother of the film’s co-writer Sergio Citti, in his acting debut), who prefers to go by the eponymous name which means “bum”, is a pimp who lives in the working-class suburbs of Rome, and like his destitute pals, he’s proud that he doesn’t work. When the woman who supports him through prostitution gets jailed, his life becomes increasingly tough, desperate and even doomed, and more so when he becomes smitten with a naïve young woman. That said, one might say that the life of this “saint of the gutter”, like that of his fellow marginalized and delinquent drifters, was doomed to start with.

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis [1970]

 Giorgio Bassini’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece The Garden of Finzi-Continis was as much a haunting Holocaust novel as a stirring ode to unrequited love, and through the titular Finzi-Continis – a wealthy, aristocratic and intellectual family who lived a life of cultured seclusion and went to their deaths without any resistance – a lamentation on the passage of a certain way of life. Vittorio De Sica’s adaptation echoed, with a touch at once tender and wistful, the book’s understated tone, melancholy, personal heartbreak, collective loss and doomed atmosphere. The narrative began in 1938, just as Mussolini’s fascist government starts enacting oppressive and restrictive laws against Jewish-Italian citizens, and ended in 1943 when the Jews started getting rounded up and herded to death camps. That fateful stretch was evoked through the Finzi-Continis family – with their huge mansion, refined manners, sprawling gardens, and cloistered existence within large walls – and especially the enigmatic Micòl (Dominique Sanda). They’re portrayed through the eyes of Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio), a studious middle-class guy, who’s hopelessly in love with the strikingly beautiful Micòl and enamoured with the family. When Jews are banned from the local tennis club, the family’s private tennis court is opened to them – though the ones who join include non-Jews too, like the left-wing Malnate (Fabio Testi) – and when the public library becomes off-limit, Giorgio finds refuge in the family’s huge personal library. Things, unfortunately, go further downhill rapidly, as he finds Micòl becoming ever more aloof and beyond reach, and the Jewish community in Ferrara being pushed towards annihilation. Beautifully photographed in soft-focus and washed-out colours, the film – initially supposed to be directed by Valerio Zurlini – became a late-career revival for the once pioneer of Italian neorealism.

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Genre: Drama/War Drama/Romantic Drama/Holocaust Movie

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Il Posto [1961]

 Ermanno Olmi’s tender, low-key, delicately strung and achingly beautiful masterpiece Il Posto – shaped from his personal experiences – remains such an acutely evocative and vividly realized work despite hardly much happening during its runtime. Though it carried the legacy of neorealism – with its humanist story, on-location filming and non-actors – its exploration of urban loneliness in the backdrop of a rapid post-war societal shifts towards giant corporations and social mobility possibly placed it closer to similar examinations by Antonioni, Godard and Tati, even if this stood apart on account of its hushed, understated and bittersweet tone. I, instead, found it profoundly reminiscent of two Jiří Menzel masterworks – Closely Watched Trains and Larks on a String – in their shared poetic restraints while dwelling on mundane moments, blend of wry humour and absurdist irony with pathos, critiques of conformism, and muted comings-of-age of gauche, soft-spoken young guys. The said protagonist is Domenico (Sandro Panseri, whose perplexed demeanour, in turn, mirrored Václav Neckář from the two Menzel films), who follows his parents’ advice for a job at a big nameless organization. He travels from his cramped apartment in the outskirts to Milan, becomes besotted with the ethereal Antonietta (Loredana Detto, Olmi’s future wife), gets hired, is initially posted as a messenger and finally becomes a junior clerk in this vast bureaucratic setup. Gorgeously shot in grainy B/W – imbued with intimacy and melancholy – the film’s two most unforgettable segments featured the fleeting relationship between the two youngsters during the job interview, and a New Year’s Eve office event that transitioned from pensive to exuberant through droll humour and staging, and which reminded me of another Czech New Wave jewel, viz. Miloš Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball.

Director: Ermanno Olmi

Genre: Comedy-Drama/Coming-of-Age/Romantic Comedy/Social Satire

Language: Italian

Country: Italy