Page - 95 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

Film, Parable, Reciprocity | 95www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 69–98 this essay, in relations of doctors and patients in Near Death (1989), judge and defendant in Juvenile Court (1973), assembly line workers and cattle in Meat (1976), among others. Resistance is usually overcome by the socially powerful one in the dynamic, as we see with the researchers and the spider monkey. Yet Wiseman’s films also expose the limits of social power, manifest through physi- cal and aural “democratic noise”. The dominant ones in the relation, as we see most explicitly with the workers in the meat-processing plant, may be as be- nighted as the ones dominated. Along with witnessed moments of social grace, the camera sees something in excess of observed relations of domination in the “is-ness” of the face, alive or dead; in plaintive sounds or alarms; in shorter or longer gaps in vocalisation, between words. Wiseman’s lyric portraiture invites possibilities of transformation made by us, found by us, or that find us, suggest- ed in unlikely visual images: carcasses draped in cheesecloth become a parade of dresses (fig. 12), a vault of ribbed flesh sings with light (fig. 13). Fig. 12: Film still, Meat (Frederick Wiseman, US 1976), 00:48:16. Fig. 13: Film still, Meat (Frederick Wiseman, US 1976), 00:48:56.