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Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSHard Truths.Mike Leigh’s forthcoming Hard Truths will reunite him with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, star of Secrets and Lies (1996). It will be the British director’s first film set in the present day since Another Year (2010).Jia Zhangke has divulged some details of We Shall Be All, now in the early stages of post-production. In production off and on since 2001, the film will be his first feature since Ash Is Purest White (2018). “I travelled with actors and a cameraman to shoot, without a script, without any obvious story,” the director told Variety. “This is a work of fiction, but I have applied many documentary methods.”Robert Bresson’s rarely seen Four Nights of a Dreamer is being restored by MK2 Films, set for a spring release.

Chicago – Frederick Wiseman doesn’t pretend to be an expert on the locations that he explores in his documentaries. It’s his meticulous attention to detail during production that makes the audience feel as if they are truly immersed in the environment of Wiseman’s films. Only during the editing process does the director find the meaning within the images.

Wiseman’s approach to nonfiction cinema is utterly organic and often very revealing. His formidable filmography, comprised of 37 documentaries and two fiction works, began with 1967’s “Titticut Follies,” which took a brutally frank and vital look at the abuse inside the Massachusetts Correctional Institution Bridgewater. The director’s repeated study of disturbing subject matter led some of his peers, such as Errol Morris, to deem his work “misanthropic,” but Wiseman insists that’s not the case. His latest film, “Crazy Horse,” pays exuberant tribute to the dancers of the titular...

Ballet (1995). USA. Directed, produced, and edited by Frederick Wiseman. Courtesy of Zipporah Films. The Museum of Modern Art has recently acquired 36 new prints from octogenarian documentarian Frederick Wiseman that span his 40-year plus career making cinema verite. Wiseman has turned his unforgiving 16mm camera on institutions as varied as the ballet (La Danse, Ballet), a department store (The Store), the Us Army (Basic Training), Public Housing, and education (High School, High School II) to much acclaim. The films are unmitigated exposes of society itself. One of the MoMA's feature films in this exhibit is Wiseman's 1967 debut Titicut Follies, which remains arguably his most famous and controversial documentary. Follies shined a much-needed light on the abuses inside the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts, abuses so appalling that the documentary was banned from public showings for 24 years. As the MoMA notes, "It is still the ...

What distinguishes a "documentary" from a "narrative feature"? You might as well say, what distinguishes Michael Moore from Brad Pitt? Moore has made three of the top five grossing docs since 1982; the other two featured penguins and global warming. We tend to associate "documentary" with "truth," though the "facts" presented are often disputed, and some highly-regarded "documentaries" have staged some or all of their content. Ronald Bergen in The Guardian argues that "there has always been 'cheating' in documentaries." He concludes: "Isn't it time we drop the word 'documentary' for good?"

Filmmaker Frederick Wiseman is cited in the article as a "leading figure" of Direct Cinema, whose proponents "believed the camera could record the truth unobtrusively. But even Wiseman recognised that there is no pure documentary but all film-making is a process of imposing order on the filmed materials." Yesterday I watched part of Wiseman's The Store (1983) at AFI Dallas,...