DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
Directed by Frederick Wiseman.
USA / 2002 / 16mm
Wiseman's new documentary, Domestic Violence, is over three hours long, and is a difficult film. It is painful: in the third scene, a frail woman with a cut lip, blood all over her clothes and body, howls in pain over her shoulder as she's hoisted onto a stretcher and pulled away from her home. It is cathartic: scenes of battered woman verbally arriving at self-empowerment brought me to tears on several occasions. Wiseman's concern is not so much to offer solutions, or even to inform the audience of domestic violence, but simply to examine the system through which violence works and how it is being treated.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that I have had no prior experience with Wiseman's work. But even before I'd heard of Domestic Violence, I was reasonably well-acquainted with Wiseman's reputation as a master documentarian, an artist who looked long and hard at systems and institutions of contemporary life. This new film appears to fit the bill-it is a complex, ostensibly plain, inspection of society, and it is very likely a masterpiece. It looks at an assortment of victims and those who deal with them, centered in Tampa Bay, Florida-and especially The Spring, Florida's largest domestic abuse shelter. I say the film is ostensibly plain because I believe Wiseman's low-key aesthetic is very much one that can be overlooked.
Avoiding "mere" talking heads and shooting on 16-millimeter, Wiseman opts for a more immediate approach and tone than his peer Errol Morris, whose films are grander, more spectacular, more polished. I'd say the difference between the two is possibly that Morris makes films about subjects looking into the past, while perhaps Wiseman makes films about subjects trying to make their way into the future (as it unfolds into the present). Wiseman's scenes (although punctuated by brief shots of the city of Tampa, police cars, a playground) almost exclusively take place between strangers and near-strangers. One stranger (the victim) is on display, at utmost vulnerability, while the other stranger (the case worker, the lawyer, the police officer) is also on display, trying to negotiate their way through the threatening, bloody, or painful episodes that Wiseman records.
By explicitly including the non-vulnerable strangers (the diminutive half of an interacting pair), Wiseman automatically adds a reflective layer to the film's emotion. We, the viewers, see the case workers, lawyers, and police officers reacting much as we might (if perhaps more dispassionately), and in doing so, our awareness is heightened, so that we not only feel the visceral power of the women and children's plights, but we also think about how others' react to their plights. Thus, Wiseman subtly programs metacognition into a normal viewer response. I use the term "we" to describe my own response to the film partly as a gesture of hopeful solidarity, by the way-I'd like to think that, even if the film offers no clear optimism, it can act as a unifier among the audience. Call me an idealist, but (all politics and philosophy aside) I want to think this film can be truly meaningful. Wiseman isn't just shooting fish in a barrel by condemning spousal and child abuse; he's also pioneering new ways of understanding the problem and how we respond to the problem. This kind of perspective makes Wiseman not just a sociologist but also an anthropologist.
According to Jessica Winter's recent article on Wiseman in the Village Voice, the filmmaker's goal in creating his documentaries is "to record an experience as it took place, without any kind of intervention or mediation. I like the idea of accumulating a lot of material without knowing what the themes are going to be, and then have the final film be, in a sense, a report of what I've learned, which emerges over the long process of editing." This kind of approach seems appropriate to the kinds of subjects Wiseman tackles: it's a trust in the complexity of human emotions and the clarifying power of art to allow for themes to grow organically, rather than to impose an agenda on a film. Domestic Violence is not propaganda, yet it has a message.
Domestic Violence is also stunning storytelling: like an avant-garde assortment of images and dialogues, the structure and its cumulative effect is not too unlike Terrence Malick or David Gordon Green: building to a strange climax, and then continuing after the climax, suggesting the existence of an even more complicated world than we see. Dramatic momentum exists in Domestic Violence, but it is dwarfed by Wiseman's shrewd post-climax choices. I would say that the climax in question, for this film, is the collection of scenes in which a kind of closure exists: there have already been several scenes of battered women discussing their history with abuse, and the cathartic effect gives way to a feeling of instituitional success: the staff meetings. (Film Forum, the New York venue where Domestic Violence is currently playing, gave an intermission at the 1:45 mark, and the climax appears almost directly after the film resumes.)
Wiseman subverts this sense of resolution by following it with troubling scenes: in one, a woman who has struggled for two years to overcome abuse and start a new life finds that she has not escaped her past at all. The final scene, a tense confrontation, exists in a dimension seemingly unlike our own, and it's centered around a fierce boyfriend who reminded me of a Faulkner villain. The scene is very dimly lit, and the payoff is the sense of watching water boil over, putting a lid on the pot, and pretending nothing is happening. When Wiseman cuts away from the scene, after the police leave, it seems clear to me that he's presenting an open statement to the viewer. All he wants us to do is to think about what we've seen.
Given the extraordinary way that Wiseman operates, I think that's all we really need.