Frederick Wiseman, the Oscar and Emmy-winning documentarian who exposed the failings of American institutions, died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the age of 96, his distribution company Zipporah Films announced Monday.
From 1967 to 2023, Wiseman made a documentary nearly every year about a wide range of topics in American culture, politics and daily life. His 1967 debut was a bombshell: “Titticut Follies,” a film that exposed the mistreatment and abuse of patient-inmates at the Bridgewater State Hopsital for the Criminally Insane.
The Massachusetts state government attempted to have every copy of the documentary destroyed, claiming it violated patient privacy laws despite having permission from the hospital superintendent to film in the facility. While the film was not destroyed, the state supreme court ruled that only medical professionals, lawyers, judges, social workers and students in those fields could see the film, keeping it from public viewing until a federal judge reversed that ruling in 1991.
Despite the legal setback from his debut, Wiseman quickly rose to prominence with his narration-free style to documentary filmmaking, simply using an observational approach that influenced the increasingly popular form of direct cinema.
Shortly after “Titticut Follies,” Wiseman won three Emmys for “Law and Order,” a film that showed the daily patrols of Kansas City police officers and infamously showed a white plainclothes officer putting a Black prostitute in a chokehold, and “Hospital,” which followed the overworked staff at Metropolitan Hospital in New York.
Not all of his films were about social issues, though. Wiseman’s camera also turned its focus on arts and literature. In 1996, he released “La Comédie-Française ou l’Amour joué,” his first French-language doc about the oldest theater troupe in the world, followed in 2009 by “La Danse,” which followed the Paris Opera Ballet over the course of seven productions. Back in the U.S., he filmed “Ex Libris,” an acclaimed look inside the New York Public Library which won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice Film Festival.
Wiseman continued working in film right up to his death. His final film in 2023,” “Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros,” went behind the scenes of a 3-star Michelin restaurant as well as the farms that provide it with ingredients. In 2025, he had a voice role as a radio announcer in the acclaimed indie baseball comedy “Eephus.”
In a 2018 interview with The Paris Review, Wiseman said that despite the wide range of subjects he has tackled, he does little to no research before starting filming.
“I like to think that I approach each subject with an open mind, because for me, there’s no reason to make a film if I already have a thesis. I don’t like to make thesis-oriented films,” he said. “In one sense, the final film is a report on what I’ve learned as a consequence of making the film.”
