UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State University Libraries’ Open Publishing program has released “Making Documentary Film: Frederick Wiseman and His Collaborators,” a new monograph by Thomas W. Benson, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Rhetoric Emeritus at Penn State, and Carolyn Anderson, professor emerita of communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Wiseman’s films, the subject of scholarly books and articles, have been broadcast on public television for decades and honored at retrospectives worldwide. According to Benson and Anderson, “Making Documentary Film” takes a new approach to considering the work of one of the world’s most influential filmmakers by placing the focus on Wiseman’s collaborators.
The two previously published “Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman” (1989, 2nd ed. 2002) and “Documentary Dilemmas: Frederick Wiseman’s ‘Titicut Follies’” (1991) about the iconic filmmaker.
“Frederick Wiseman has been a distinguished documentary filmmaker for more than 50 years,” wrote the monograph’s authors in a joint statement. “He has often talked in general terms about his production process, but never in any detail about his collaborations with cinematographers and others who have enabled his career as a producer, director, editor and, for most of the films, sound recordist.”
The monograph contains transcriptions of interviews with Wiseman’s collaborators conducted by the authors in the United States, Canada and England, and is available on the Open Publishing website and as a downloadable PDF. The transcribed interviews emphasize the filmmakers’ relationships with his cinematographers and his advocate at WNET-Channel 13 before, during and after filmmaking, building on the authors’ extensive research into and criticism of Wiseman’s films and working methods.
According to Benson and Anderson, “Making Documentary Film” explores Wiseman’s working methods as seen by his closest collaborators and sponsors, all of whom testify to his artistic distinction. They added that his collaborators show us a Wiseman who can be charming, enigmatic, controlling, tactically angry and eloquent in pursuit of his emerging vision. With this monograph, the authors add a deeper understanding and dimension to the study of Wiseman’s work, reminding students and scholars of the importance of collaboration in documentary filmmaking.
“Libraries Open Publishing makes these reflections of Wiseman’s colleagues freely available to filmmakers, journalists, critics and students as an e-book with an accessible and permanent home in the library catalog,” wrote Benson and Anderson, “thus providing a newly detailed account of how his documentaries were created and circulated.”
Libraries Open Publishing, the University Libraries’ Open Access imprint, is a unit within the Research Informatics and Publishing department. Libraries Open Publishing provides tools and support for Penn State-affiliated authors and groups to publish full-featured electronic scholarly journals, searchable annotated bibliographies and monographs using various digital platforms. All publications are free to view online and download. Copyright is retained by the individual authors where possible, or by the journals or sponsoring entity. Almost all are licensed for use under a Creative Commons license.
For more information about the program, visit openpublishing.psu.edu or contact the Open Publishing team at openpublishing@psu.edu.