People who come to their calling after being in another line of work tend to cling to it all the more fervently and work at it all the more relentlessly; they express gratitude for a second chance by way of unflagging exertion. Frederick Wiseman, who died yesterday, at the age of ninety-six, is one such latecomer. Having started out in law, he made his first feature at thirty-six and thereby launched a second career, and, judging from his ample filmography, he did more than make up for lost time—he lapped it. Between 1967 and 2023, he made forty-seven features (nearly one a year), many of them running considerably more than two hours. His body of work, considered in terms of number of features and of total running time, is one that probably no one in his generation or younger can match. More important, he fused his life and his work more totally and more essentially—if also more elusively—than did any of his American contemporaries.

In 1963, Wiseman, a law professor at Boston University with an interest in movies, produced “The Cool World,” an independent feature directed by Shirley Clarke. He was so dissatisfied with the process that he realized that he, too, could—and, indeed, should—direct. (One of the marks of greatness is to take only what one needs; Clarke’s film is actually original and engrossing, but Wiseman needed to push it aside in order to clear his own path.) He wanted his law students to learn experientially, to visit places and witness activities related to the legal process. So that his students could observe the consequences of law enforcement and the ways that it might affect their future clients, he brought them to the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane; then he filmed a documentary there. That film, “Titicut Follies,” completed in 1967, reveals the harsh conditions that patients endured, and holds up the state’s medical and legal complex to scrutiny. It was banned by a Massachusetts judge on grounds that Wiseman considered a pretext for censorship.

Wiseman’s response was to dig ever deeper into coercive social forces. He planned a series of films on institutions and their official exertion of power—whether by law or knowledge, by physical discipline or administrative abstractions. The distinctive scope and focus of his rapidly growing œuvre can be seen in these films’ titles, which, by 1971, included “High School,” “Hospital,” “Law and Order,” and “Basic Training.”

The story of Wiseman’s filmmaking career is itself a Wiseman-like subject, a story of a sort that he could have told on film (and which he freely discussed in interviews, including with me). Quantity, of course, matters less than quality; Wiseman’s universe is one of the most distinctively personal ones that the American cinema has to offer, and it’s unified by a tightly bound set of ideas, styles, and methods. That fact is all the more extraordinary because all but three of his films are—may he forgive me, I was about to use the word “documentaries,” which he disliked—works of nonfiction, which he managed to turn into a form of quasi-literary exploration. Quantity and quality are connected nonetheless: the very extensiveness of Wiseman’s cinematic world (along with its intensiveness) is one of the most personal aspects of his work. Wiseman came to view the concept of an institution broadly—not only the closed spaces, early in his career, of a research facility (“Primate”), a military facility (“Missile”), and a city office (“Welfare”) but also a series of interlocking institutions unified by a theme (“Domestic Violence”), a neighborhood (“In Jackson Heights”), a town (“Monrovia, Indiana”).

His work depended on access. He filmed in hospital rooms where patients and families faced incommensurable agonies with the aid of the medical staff (“Near Death”); he filmed in administrative offices (“At Berkeley,” “Ex Libris”), in businesses (“The Store,” “Model”), in government buildings (“City Hall”). Yet people tended to speak uninhibitedly in his presence. He told me that they simply forgot he was filming there. It helps that Wiseman was slight of stature and calm of manner. It’s hard to imagine him passing unnoticed if he’d had the height and the bearing of Charlton Heston.

It’s also hard to imagine Wiseman having started a similar career a decade sooner, because his films depended, to a significant extent, on a new technology that had begun to reveal its power—a system that allowed a lightweight tape recorder and a relatively lightweight movie camera to synch up, with no cable connecting them. Such equipment proved its artistic importance in 1960, with Robert Drew’s “Primary” and, in France, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s “Chronicle of a Summer”—the early generation of films in the format called cinéma vérité, or direct cinema. Wiseman said he was inspired by Drew’s 1961 documentary “Mooney vs. Fowle,” a chronicle of a high-school-football championship game. When Wiseman got started, it was in a new field that, although burgeoning, seemed both wide open and unformed. He took hold of a still-young format and, guided from the start by an unyielding sense of principle, made a body of work so original, idea rich, and unified that it seems foreordained—a historic fusion of investigation and the inner life.

Wiseman brought intellectual form to nonfiction through the single word “institutions,” a concept that carried the philosophical heft of the contemporaneous work of Michel Foucault; Wiseman similarly probed the intersections of systems of knowledge and power, and drew attention to the physical authority that ultimately backs up the abstract determinations of administrative rules. Where Foucault exhumed a hidden historical archive, Wiseman created a new one, in real time. He also created an institution of his own, Zipporah Films, to distribute his work. (Founded in 1971, it was named for his wife, Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman, who was also a law professor; she died in 2021.)

He was a true independent whose method was as rigorous and as singular as his intellectual focus. On location, he worked with a spare crew comprising a cinematographer (from 1980 to 2020, John Davey) and a camera assistant; Wiseman himself carried the tape recorder and wielded the microphone until, for his last documentary, “Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros,” from 2023, he could no longer do so.

As the literal bearer and the first hearer of his films’ sound, Wiseman was also the immediate receiver of the subjects’ discourse in its most concentrated form, on headphones, and his material relationship to these voices is embodied in the work. Much of the action is in the form of talking, which the incisively analytical images parse with the emotional precision of dramatic stagings, lending the talk a sort of emphatic onscreen incarnation. Filming with his ears and listening visually, Wiseman constructed mighty grids of connections and implications, long-term dramas on vast architectural frameworks as if they were cinematic operas. “Welfare” feels both colossal and brisk at two and three-quarter hours; “Central Park” is nearly three; “La Comédie-Française” approaches four; “Menus-Plaisirs” hits four; “Belfast, Maine,” “At Berkeley,” and “City Hall” exceed four. “Near Death” (which I consider a supreme masterwork, alongside “Welfare” and “In Jackson Heights” and the early, more journalistic “Hospital” and “Law and Order”) runs two minutes short of six hours.

Neither the dramatic element nor the operatic scope should come as a surprise after a glance at the fuller range of Wiseman’s activities. He was indeed fascinated by theatre and dance, filming the former (in the Comédie-Française film) and the latter (in “Ballet,” “Crazy Horse,” and even “Boxing Gym”)—and also directing a batch of stage productions, from 1988 to 2012 (including an adaptation for opera of his film “Welfare”). He foregrounded the personalities and presences of his films’ subjects with as keen a conception of performance as any director of scripted movies could boast—and he carried that sensibility over to his direction of three fiction films, most recently, “A Couple,” based on writings by Sophia Tolstoy, the novelist’s wife. Wiseman filmed it months after the death of Zipporah, and it’s both an agonizing tribute to an artist’s long-suffering wife and yet another of the director’s unsparing analyses of an institution: marriage.

In his nonfictions, Wiseman was just as much of a personal filmmaker. The first-person adventure of his career is both in the depth of individual films and in the expanse of places, people, institutions, and historical phenomena that he explored. Cinéma vérité is an immersive form of filmmaking which, for some filmmakers, has meant self-questioning reflexivity, and, for others, has meant onscreen participation with subjects. For Wiseman, who doesn’t appear in his nonfictions and doesn’t conduct interviews, the format meant something different altogether. It was an intellectual engagement—a virtual presence achieved in the choice of what to film, how to film it, and what to include in the edit—which produced a paradox: total creativity involving activities that he had no hand in creating. With these films, Wiseman looks passionately at the activities at hand, widely at their vast implications, and deeply into himself. The greatness of his work isn’t only in its documentation of extraordinary events but in the fervor with which Wiseman himself experiences them. As much as with any director of the most intimate personal fictions, Wiseman’s nonfictions could be laid end to end and viewed in continuity, like the story of an extraordinary life. ♦