Also this issue: Web Pierce Spider delves into a madman's mind, but leaves the door open a crack. -Sam Adams Interview: David Cronenberg -S.A Backwards Thinking Irréversible's reverse philosophy undoes the logic of vengeance. -Cindy Fuchs Screen Picks -Sam Adams New Continuing Repertory Film Showtimes

March 13-19, 2003

movies

Wide Open Spaces

Lifting the burden: An unidentified woman tells her story to the cops in Domestic Violence.

Frederick Wiseman's documentaries give reality time to breathe.

by Sam Adams

Perhaps halfway through Domestic Violence, the first of two films on the subject by documentarian Frederick Wiseman, a caseworker at The Spring, a Tampa-based shelter for victims of abuse, tells a group of women that domestic violence calls account for one-third of all police time. As domestic violence statistics go, it's not the most shocking -- according to the film's press kit, nearly one in three adult women experiences physical assault by a partner at least once in her life -- but it might be the most germane to the experience of watching Domestic Violence and Domestic Violence II, which air Tuesday and Wednesday on PBS.

For almost 40 years, Wiseman has been chronicling the lives of American institutions, and in the process, his films have grown as large as the subjects they chronicle -- nearly six hours for the combined halves of Domestic Violence. Generally speaking, Wiseman's approach allows greater complexity, and lets moments of surprise evolve naturally rather than cutting to the chase; in Domestic Violence, the film's length also serves to remind us how tortuous the process of understanding abusive relationships can be. The first film closes with a sequence where a drunk, shirtless man with a receding mane of blond hair explains to the cops, in tones befitting Southern aristocracy, how he's called them to intervene and prevent violence from breaking out. Though he might seem reasonable at first, his insistence that his girlfriend, who's been living there for nine months, be immediately escorted from the premises in the middle of the night becomes increasingly belligerent, and facts start to emerge: The woman has a painful bladder infection, the discord seems to stem from the fact that she'd rather sleep the infection off than have sex with him, and, oh yes, he shot at her with a rifle the week before. Even condensed as it is, the sequence seems to go on forever, the man talking in regal circles, the woman too overcome with pain and fear to explain the situation properly, the cops patiently asking the same simple questions over and over again, never getting the answers they need. If it's so difficult to figure out this one situation, we're left to wonder, how on earth can we begin to understand the problem as a whole?

"They're not simple issues," Wiseman says by phone from the Cambridge, Mass., offices of his production company, Zipporah Films. "The kind of emotional relationships that these men and women have with each other are enormously complicated, and not subject to easy classification. I wanted to suggest that, and to suggest what the state could and couldn't do, both from a corrective and a preventative point of view."

Wiseman's filming strategy puts the audience right alongside the judges, caseworkers and police officers whose job it is to evaluate and attempt to improve these tangled situations. In the second film, set largely in three Tampa-area courtrooms, one judge can be heard audibly exhaling in frustration, more than once cradling her head in her hands. It's not surprising when you consider some of the cases she's faced with; in one instance, involving a man who not only assaulted his ex-wife but punched the woman who'd come to help pick up her stuff in the face, the judge resolves the case by issuing an order forbidding the couple to have any contact with each other. That'll be tough, the man says, "because we're seeing each other." One woman says that in her first two years of marriage, she's left her husband 15 times, meaning she's gone back 14.

"It's a volume business," Wiseman says, a point underlined by the "TV court" where a roomful of offenders is arraigned in quick succession by a judge watching on a closed-circuit monitor. "For all those who break out of it, there are lots more coming behind it who don't. I've seen therapies that can help people in individual cases, but I don't think anything is going to eliminate the problem. [Domestic violence] seems to be a characteristic human problem, in the sense that it exists in every country, regardless of class, race, religion, economic status."

Wiseman explains his filmmaking goals simply: "What I'm trying to do is make movies about as many kinds of human experience as I can." Indeed, his extensive filmography -- which includes such titles as Public Housing (1997), Welfare (1975), Hospital (1970), Law and Order (1969) and High School (1969), filmed at Philadelphia's Northeast High -- serves as a road map to nearly four decades of American life. To show that, no matter how bleak the situation in Domestic Violence may seem, improvements have been made, you need only turn to the scene in Law and Order where a policeman dismisses a neighbor's concerns about violent abuse next door: "This is between them -- they're man and wife." One of the reasons Wiseman chose Tampa as the setting for Domestic Violence was the state law mandating arrest in all domestic violence cases, though that results in a whole new set of problems; at the beginning of the second film, a woman must be taken to jail for accidentally scratching her husband during a fight.

It's "very rare," Wiseman says, that anyone refuses to be filmed, even the women at The Spring, who pour out their tragic life stories in front of Wiseman's camera without a trace of self-consciousness. If there's a secret to getting access, Wiseman claims not to know it, or at least not to be able to articulate it. "The only thing I'm aware of doing is I try to be absolutely straightforward about what I'm doing. I say, 'I'm making this movie for PBS, it'll be on a couple of years after it's shot, I end up using about 3 percent of the material, I don't know what the themes are gonna be until I edit it.' The only safe assumption is that their bullshit meters are just as good as mine. In the same way I'm trying to size them up to figure out what to shoot, they're sizing me up to figure out if they can trust me."

Though Wiseman's often been labeled a cinéma vérité filmmaker, he balks at the classification. (He's known to use words like "pompous" and "pretentious" when the term comes up.) The work, he says, "is more novelistic than journalistic"; he avoids research, except perhaps for "a novel or something that's generally related to the subject." The research, he says, is in the shooting. "It's like notes for a book," and the editing is the writing (which explains why it takes so long: 10 months for each half of Domestic Violence).

You might expect that Wiseman's focus on institutions, which are slow-moving by nature, and often engaged in unwinnable battles, would have taken its toll in the 36 years since the onetime lawyer turned to filmmaking with Titicut Follies (1967), a portrait of a Massachusetts hospital for the criminally insane. But if Wiseman's unblinking portraits don't hold out undue hope, their very breadth leaves room for optimism. "Some aspects get depressing, but some aspects are exhilarating," Wiseman says. "For me, it's just as important to show good and kind and decent things as to show the reverse. I thought the doctors and the nurses in both Hospital and Near Death were kind, compassionate people trying to do as good a job as they could, and succeeding at it. Similarly, I thought the cops in Domestic Violence, they're quite tuned in. They were kind, they weren't cruel to people. That's what I think is important to show, because it goes against cliché, and it suggests range and diversity and complexity."

Domestic Violence and Domestic Violence II air Tue., March 18 and Wed., March 19 at 9 p.m. on WHYY.