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