Page - 71 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

Film, Parable, Reciprocity | 71www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 69–98 exchange between articulate people, may resonate for the viewer as much or more than any of the intellectual arguments presented. The limits of intellectual arguments in this and countless other sequences in Frederick Wiseman’s films suggest that his vision of art does not include the desire to provoke social change through didactic film.3 Social criticism may be an effect of Wiseman’s art, but only if this effect is understood in an expansive and elusive way – just as parables draw us toward the unknown and the irre- solvable with awakened responsiveness. As Wiseman points out, given the vast range of competing sources of information in a democratic society, a filmmaker would have to be living in a fantasy world to expect that his or her work would affect significant social change: “thousands of people aren’t that easily moved in a democratic society.”4 Animated by the strangeness of the world, Wiseman doesn’t attempt a didactic project, but simply tries to evoke the complexity of everyday life: “It’s unpredictable what people’s experiences or judgments will be. Part of the fun of making documentaries is the constant surprise, and the fact that people are always doing or saying things in a way that you wouldn’t have predicted. When you’re meeting them in the kind of situations that I’m meeting them in, it always runs counter to clichés.”5 Wiseman’s films communicate the enigmatic everyday in a “novelistic” way,6 so that “reality fictions” is a more apt term than “documentaries”, in his view.7 That is, his films’ dramatic structure, rhythm and point- or points-of-view con- vey, indirectly, his attitudes and feelings toward events and persons. He began his over 50 years in filmmaking with some fairly polemical work,8 but reflects that “my films have become less didactic … I like to think I’m better able to express complex ideas in film terms … So it’s not that I’m without, for lack of better words, ‘ideological’, conceptual views, but I try not to … exclude things that don’t fit with whatever my ideology is at the moment.”9 When interviewer Daniel Kasman interprets non-didactic to mean “open text”, Wiseman clari- fies, “Not open in the sense that it doesn’t have a point-of-view or well defined points-of-view. Whenever you deal with reality as a subject, it should be compli- cated and ambiguous, and it shouldn’t… if I could express the point-of-view of the film in twenty-five words or less I shouldn’t make the movie.”10 3 Grant 1992, 1–41. Grant refers to Wiseman’s style as “political cinema” that refuses “authorial superiority”. 4 Hamacher/Wiseman 2015; Atkins 1976, 40, 56, 79–80. 5 Ricks/Wiseman 1990, 9. 6 Kasman 2013. 7 Atkins 1976, 82. 8 Peary/Wiseman 1998. 9 Gerow/Toshifumi/Kramer/Wiseman 1997. 10 Kasman/Wiseman 2013.