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Voyages of Discovery

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Voyages of Discovery is the definitive account of Frederick Wiseman’s career, offering a comprehensive analysis of the work of the leading documentary filmmaker in the United States. In this update...
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  • 16 May 2023
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Frederick Wiseman is America’s foremost chronicler of public institutions. His films have focused on city, state, and local governments; hospitals; asylums; creative organizations and museums; schools; libraries; and more. In recent years, Wiseman’s work has reached a new level of popularity, with films such as In Jackson Heights (2015), Monrovia, Indiana (2018), and City Hall (2020) all earning widespread acclaim.

Voyages of Discovery is the definitive account of Wiseman’s career, offering a comprehensive analysis of the work of the leading documentary filmmaker in the United States. In this updated edition, Barry Keith Grant adds new material exploring the documentarian’s works since the 1990s, discussing every film in Wiseman’s remarkable sixty-year career. He examines the core concerns running across Wiseman’s work from the early films, which focus on documenting institutional failure, through an expanding interest in cultural institutions and ideology, to a blossoming embrace of democracy in later films. He pays particular attention to Wiseman’s strategies for involving and implicating the spectator in the institutional processes the films document. Grant also places Wiseman within the history of the documentary and other traditions of American art and considers the relationship between documentary film and authorship. Voyages of Discovery is an important book for anyone interested in Wiseman’s work or how documentary film can reveal the fabric of our shared civic life.

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Price: $35.00
Pages: 400
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: WallFlower Press
Series: Nonfictions
Publication Date: 16 May 2023
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780231206235
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

PERFORMING ARTS / Film / History & Criticism, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / Direction & Production, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / Genres / Documentary
Barry Keith Grant provides an updated version of his own singularly authoritative study of documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s astonishing range of films—from the controversial Titicutt Follies through such diverse examples as Meat, Missile, Model, Deaf, Blind, Public Housing, Ballet, and Belfast, Maine, to name a few. In his deeply informed study, Grant creates his own meticulous, yet accessible, “tapestry” of inquiry worthy of the same approach he credits Wiseman with adopting. Grant’s insightful readings of Wiseman’s carefully wrought compositions—and the happy accidents that sometimes occur—highlight colorful thematic threads woven to create the “reality fictions” Wiseman, in his own words, is producing. At the same time, Grant presents a capacious “mosaic,” placing Wiseman’s films in textured dialogue, not only with each other, but also with works of literature, art, theater, music, and dance, along with other films and Hollywood genres, that inform them. Grant explores Wiseman’s penetrating vision of institutional operations—the human interactions that sustain them and the ideological underpinnings beneath the “rules” that govern them. As Grant compellingly claims, Wiseman avoids providing viewers with easy answers. Voyages of Discovery powerfully uncovers the ambiguities inviting viewers to democratically, actively, and reflexively assess their own participation in, contributions to, and complicity within the cultural conditions Frederick Wiseman so evocatively observes.
Barry Keith Grant is professor emeritus of film studies and popular culture at Brock University. His many books include Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology (Wallflower, 2007) and, most recently, 100 American Horror Films (2022).

Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
1. Man with a Movie Camera
2. American Madness: Titicut Follies (1967), High School (1968), Law and Order (1969), Hospital (1970), Juvenile Court (1974), Welfare (1975)
3. The Big Parade: Basic Training (1971), Manoeuvre (1979), Missile (1988)
4. Blood of the Beasts: Primate (1974), Meat (1976), Racetrack (1985), Zoo (1993)
5. When Worlds Collide: Canal Zone (1977), Sinai Field Mission (1978), Model (1980), The Store (1983)
6. The Bad and the Beautiful: The Cool World (1963), Seraphita’s Diary (1982)
7. You and Me: Essene (1972), Blind (1987), Deaf (1987), Adjustment and Work (1987), Multi-Handicapped (1987), Aspen (1991)
8. Love and Death: Near Death (1989)
9. The Never-Ending Story: High School II (1994), Public Housing (1997), Domestic Violence (2001), Domestic Violence 2 (2002)
10. Playtime: Ballet (1995), La Comédie-Française, ou L’amour joué (1996), The Last Letter (2002), La Danse—Le Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris (2009), Boxing Gym (2010), Crazy Horse (2011), National Gallery (2014), A Couple (2022)
11. Our Town: Central Park (1989), Belfast, Maine (1999), State Legislature (2007), At Berkeley (2013), In Jackson Heights (2015), EX-LIBRIS: The New York Public Library (2017), Monrovia, Indiana (2018), City Hall (2020)
Filmography
Individual Awards
Retrospective Screenings
Notes
Bibliography
Index