Legendary documentarian who made 'Titicut Follies'

Frederick Wiseman, a preeminent documentary filmmaker, has died. He was 96.

- KEVIN CRUST

FICTION FILMMAKER TOO Nathalie Boutefeu stars in "A Couple," one of Wiseman's few narrative features.

Film Forum

The filmmaker's death was announced by his family Monday in a statement released by Zipporah Films, Wiseman's distribution company.

In a career that lasted nearly 60 years, Wiseman produced and directed 45 films beginning in 1967 with "Titicut Follies," a documentary on the the patient-inmates of Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts, through Plaisirs 2023's "MenusLes Troisgros," a documentary on the Troisgros family's Michelin threestarred restaurant in Ouches, France. His final film earned universal critical acclaim and was recognized as the best nonfiction film of 2023 by the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. Awards and the National Society of Film Critics.

"Wiseman, whose observational approach has often been mischaracterized as objective or omniscient, here drops any pretense to neutrality, so potent and overpowering is his sense of kinship with a fellow artist," wrote Justin Chang in his 2023 review. "The marriage of sensibilities in front of and behind the camera is the stealthiest meeting in 'Menus-Plaisirs-Les Troisgros,' and the most unexpectedly satisfying."

The filmmaker considered both Cambridge, Mass., and Paris his homes. His films, to an extent, reflected that transatlantic residency in their freshness of perspective. They display an innate curiosity and astonishing degrees of empathy, intelligence and perceptiveness, with subjects ranging from public and social institutions to cultural and specialized spaces and the minutiae of human interactions.