For more than forty years, Frederick Wiseman has been one of the hardest-working and most respected documentary filmmakers in the world. Starting with the 1967 Titicut Follies, a look inside the Bridgewater, Mass., State Prison for the Criminally Insane that so rattled the prison administrators that they instigated legal proceedings that kept the film out of distribution for twenty-five years, he's made thirty films that examine one institution, activity, or way of life after another, mostly stamped with generic-sounding titles such as High School, Hospital, Basic Training, Welfare, Juvenile Court, Meat. Domestic Violence, and State Legislature. For most of his career, he's been dependent on public television not just for funding but for his widest national audience, and his films have remained dismayingly unavailable on home video.
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