Gems from the Past: Wiseman’s Belfast, Maine (1999)
Frederick Wiseman’s vast and varied filmography includes several masterpieces, High School, Law and Order, Welfare, Public Housing, At Berkeley.
This four-hour chronicle of a New England town is vintage Wiseman, mixing sharp observation and undeniable humanism–a massive portrait of a community, the institutions that uphold it, and the individuals doing their best to survive and thrive within it.
The filmmaker’s brilliance rests in combining what he shows (a canned fish factory assembly line, house calls from sympathetic doctors and social workers, high school English teacher’s Moby-Dick lecture) and how he shows it (long unbroken takes that record work, business and leisure); and the way he assembles it all together into a tapestry with deep meaning and even mystery.
What is explored in Belfast, Maine is both despairing or inspiring, bleak or amusing, banal or extraordinary, or all those things at once.
The whole has the cumulative richness, texture, and tone of a classic novel.
