Films from FREDERICK WISEMAN

For over seven decades, Frederick Wiseman observed hospitals, courthouses, schools, city halls, shopping malls, theaters, parks, barracks, libraries, and museums, and has allowed us to read these institutions as if they were novels. Always with the same patient, unhurried attention, always without explanatory voice-over commentary, talking heads, or non-diegetic musical accompaniment. From hundreds of hours of footage, Wiseman crafted precise narratives that reveal structures, power dynamics, routines, and contradictions.

In February 2026, Frederick Wiseman passed away at the age of 96. “Summer of Sadness” pays him a focused tribute, in which we are once again guided through spaces where knowledge, art, nature, and pleasure are organized, managed, sold, and defended. Wiseman is interested in the many hands that keep an institution running.

The five films demonstrate how Wiseman’s perspective has become formally more rigorous and, in terms of content, more tender over the past few years. *ZOO* (1993) observes daily life at the Miami Metrozoo and reveals the ambivalence between care and control. LA DANSE (2009) and NATIONAL GALLERY (2014) open the doors to two European cultural temples and reveal how much work, money, politics, and mediation lie behind seemingly “timeless” art. EX LIBRIS (2017) follows the New York Public Library as the democratic nervous system of a city where education and access to information are hotly contested. Finally, in MENUS PLAISIRS (2023), Wiseman shifts his institutional gaze to the world of haute cuisine and shows how tradition, family history, and class relations are inscribed in a menu.

Taken together, these films also tell Wiseman’s own story: from a skeptical analyst of American power structures to a curious chronicler of a globalized cultural economy. His quiet radicalism lies in allowing us to look long enough for processes to become stories.