Up close and personal with the National Gallery
In a documentary career spanning nearly half a century, Frederick Wiseman has learned one thing about people: they don’t really change. “I’ll make a pompous generalisation that I don’t think human behaviour has changed much in the last 10,000 years,” says the 84-year-old American filmmaker. “But its variety and complexity is certainly fascinating – and even though I’ve made a lot of movies, you never get it all.”
Wiseman hasn’t done too badly on this last point. Having specialised in making films about institutions since his controversial debut, Titicut Follies (1967), peeled the curtain back on a hospital for the criminally insane, he’s created a body of work – some 40 films – in which all of human life is there to be examined.
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