Master documentarian Frederick Wiseman discusses his editing process and how it informed how he shot In Jackson Heights. This is an excerpt from the ebook In Their Own Words: Documentary Masters Vol. 1, purchase a copy here. The book also features interviews with Wiseman on National Gallery and Ex Libris.
“The only thought I have of the final film, in advance, is that I might make a film,” said master filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, at the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of his new documentary In Jackson Heights. “I have no idea what I’m going to find,” he continued, or “how I’m going to use [it]. In that sense, it’s always a crapshoot.” Each film is a discovery, and it’s not until Wiseman actually gets into the editing room — he spends months editing each of his films himself — that the film starts to take shape.
Wiseman’s documentaries tend to zoom in on a particular institution, whether it’s the National Gallery of London (National Gallery), the University of California at Berkeley (At Berkeley), a high school (High School and High School 2), or Central Park (Central Park). For each film, he spends several weeks immersing himself in that institution, observing its daily goings-on, filming what he sees, and trying to make sense of what he’s observed.
In Jackson Heights represents Wiseman’s largest and most expansive subject to date: an entire New York City neighbourhood. Jackson Heights is the most multicultural neighbourhood in the United States, full of different groups of people from different walks of life. One of Wiseman’s biggest challenges was figuring out where to shoot and who to talk to in order to find the most interesting and diverse material. The film touches on a panoply of topics, from dance to race to inequality, that Wiseman has explored in past films. In Jackson Heights is his most ambitious project and a culmination of his work to date.
In National Gallery and At Berkeley, some of Wiseman’s content was preordained — gallery patrons, lecturing profs — but for In Jackson Heights, whom to follow was tougher to crack. Wiseman realised early on that to get substantive content, he needed to enlist help from “community organizations, like Make the Road New York or some of the church organizations,” who pointed him toward smaller enclaves within the larger Jackson Heights community. Make the Road New York “had meetings almost every night on one subject or another — job discrimination, immigration — so I went there a lot and hung out with them. Hanging out with them led to those sequences, which I think are very important in the film.“
[clickToTweet tweet=”The best way to shoot dance was with a wide shot, because you see everything.” quote=”The best way to shoot dance was with a wide shot, because you see everything.”]
Because Wiseman has shot films on a variety of subjects, he had already developed a methodology for shooting certain types of material. When filming a local belly dancing class in a wide shot for In Jackson Heights, Wiseman drew on his previous films La Danse and Ballet. By the time he’d filmed La Danse”, Wiseman had concluded that, “the best way to shoot dance was with a wide shot, because you see everything.” He continued, “I’d seen a lot of dance films where the filmmaker used the dance in the service of his own film purposes. I think the reverse should be true. The filming should be at the service of the dance. You don’t have a zoom in your eye, [but in] a lot of dance films you see elbows, faces, toes. You don’t see the partnering. You don’t see the whole body.“
Similarly, Wiseman used a wide shot to film the Mexican Band playing in the street for In Jackson Heights. He reasoned, “If you started doing closeups, it’d be very hard to sync. You can do it sometimes, but it’d be very hard to sync up the hand movements on the instruments with a different song. Sometimes, you can fake it, but it’s very hard to do that. I think it’s a better shot, wide, because you see the whole group, and you see the group in relation to the people that are watching.”
To read the rest of the interview, purchase a copy of In Their Own Words: Documentary Masters Vol. 1 here. The book also features interviews with Wiseman on his films National Gallery and Ex Libris, plus a comparison between Wiseman’s documentary filmmaking philosophy and Gianfranco Rosi’s.
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When shooting, Wiseman tries to “anticipate, in a general way, what I’m going to need in the editing.” For In Jackson Heights, this meant accumulating ”hundreds of shots of streets, street corners, schools — really anything that interests me, knowing that the film was going to be made up of different events and different parts of Jackson Heights and knowing that I would need transitions, but also being aware of the fact that the cutaways serve other purposes, like giving a sense of the nature of the businesses, street activity, who was walking on the street, the clothes that they were wearing, businesses, street vendors, traffic signals, buses, cars. I knew I needed all that, and I needed a lot of it, not only for choice, but since the events aren’t staged.”
[clickToTweet tweet=”I literally don’t do much else for months. I have to really eat, sleep, and drink the material.” quote=”I literally don’t do much else for months, because you can’t edit, or at least I can’t edit these kinds of movies with the back of my hand. I have to really eat, sleep, and drink the material.”]
For example, Wiseman knew early on that he would need many shots of the subway, at different times of day and at different angles. It wasn’t until the edit that he realised these shots serve “the literal purpose of indicating the subway goes there. It serves the editorial purpose of giving the suggestion of moving around from one part of the neighbourhood to another. Also, it provides the purpose similar to a lot of the other uses of cutaways, which is the passage of time, pauses, a little bit of rest, and also gives it a sense of the sounds you hear in the street.”
Once Wiseman begins to edit, “I have to be completely absorbed in it,” Wiseman exclaimed. “I literally don’t do much else for months, because you can’t edit, or at least I can’t edit these kinds of movies with the back of my hand. I have to really eat, sleep, and drink the material.” His first step is to put together each of the individual sequences that he might want to use in the film. “Usually, when I’m working on a sequence,” he explained, “I’ll work on it until it’s done. Sometimes, I’ll come back to it. I often will change it, when I look at it a day later or a week later, because I don’t think the rhythm works, or it’s too long or too short. Usually, I get it close to final form in the first, not necessarily the first go, but the first intensive period of concentration on it. The first go may last two days.”
[clickToTweet tweet=”I might start out the film one way, and then a week later decide that I don’t think that works.” quote=”I might start out the film one way, and then a week later decide that I don’t think that works. I change it to something else, and then by changing it to something else, it has consequences for what follows.”]
“It’s only when I have the [sequences] in close to final form,” Wiseman continued, “that I begin working on the structure. So I might start out the film one way, and then a week later decide that I don’t think that works. I change it to something else, and then by changing it to something else, it has consequences for what follows.” He continued, “sometimes, you cut a sequence with a beginning, middle, and an end. But then, when you put it in relation to other sequences, the middle of it may be better covered in another sequence, so out goes the middle. Or it may feel too long or too short depending on what it’s in relation to. Or you may discover another theme further on so you want to add something. Or you may see the same thing expressed better [elsewhere] so you take something out.”
Working out the structure involves thinking about the film in ”two paths: the literal and the abstract.” He continued, “The structure of the movie emerges from where they meet. In any movie, I’m trying to work out a dramatic narrative, so I have to think about the relationship between the talk sequences and the music sequences or the so-called action sequences, and how they fit together, both visually and thematically. A lot of the cutting in Jackson Heights was sort of at right angles, in the sense that I tried to cut it in a way so that nothing would be predictable: the next sequence was always a surprise and lifted you out of the previous sequence. After a long talk sequence, there might be some music.”
[clickToTweet tweet=”You just accumulate stuff, knowing some of it is going to be short and some of it long.” quote=”You just accumulate stuff, knowing some of it is going to be short and some of it is going to be long.”]
The length of a sequence is important when trying to find the rhythm for the film. This requires that “You just accumulate stuff, knowing some of it is going to be short and some of it is going to be long,” Wiseman elaborated. “When we’re shooting, we always try to do it so, for example, a car goes in and out of frame. But I may need a 60 frame shot when I’m editing, and it may take 97 frames for the car to go in and out of frame. So that may be OK depending on what else is going on, or I may have to cut to another car. But then it’s a question of the direction the cars are going in, the speed, so that the rhythm of the shots that are cut together feels like it works together.”
The editing process requires “a combination of trying to be very rational and also following your associations and your intuitions,” Wiseman concluded. “The latter are just as important as the former. I’ve learned over the years to pay attention to the things at the margin of my head, and they’re just as important in helping me solve a problem as the more deductive aspects. All the deductive aspects are important because at the end, I have to be able to explain to myself why each shot is there, and that is a more rational process than the way I may have sometimes arrived at the order.”
Read more: Frederick Wiseman discusses his previous film National Gallery >>
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