The Brazilian Director Who’s Up for Multiple Oscars

 

 

 

 By Stephania Taldrid

For Kleber Mendonça Filho, filmmaking is an act of both provocation and preservation. Mendonça was born in 1968, in the early years of a ruthless military dictatorship—a time when cinema, like much else, was harshly constrained. His mother, Joselice Jucá, was a historian who studied Brazil’s abolitionist movement, and she taught him that filling gaps in the cultural memory was a way to expose concealed truths. In Mendonça’s work, memory functions as a tool of defiance.

His relationship with film is inextricably linked with his home town, Recife—a port city where attractive beaches and high-rise developments coexist with sprawling favelas and rampant crime. In his youth, Mendonça was fascinated by the city’s grand cinema palaces. He carried a Super 8 camera to the tops of marquees and shot dizzying images; he spent hours in projection booths, learning the mechanics of how films reached the screen. Over time, Mendonça watched those theatres fall into decline, an experience that he likened to being aboard a ship as it wrecked. But even as Recife lost its allure, he made the city a fixture of his films—a way of vindicating its place in history. His first narrative feature, “Neighboring Sounds,” takes place on a street where he lived as a child, a setting that he spent years documenting. Later, he made “Pictures of Ghosts,” a documentary about Recife told largely through its cinemas.

In Mendonça’s work, political commentary coincides with art-house aesthetics and elements borrowed from genre movies—science fiction, Western, neo-noir. Questions of justice and truth often play out through dark comedy. “Neighboring Sounds,” an unflinching portrait of class hierarchy in Brazil, came out in 2012 and was widely acknowledged as one of the best films of the year. It was followed in 2016 by “Aquarius,” which depicts a woman’s crusade against wealthy developers seeking to demolish her seafront home. “Aquarius” was celebrated at festivals around the world, winning prizes everywhere from Sydney to Cartagena. As Mendonça’s international reputation grew, the hard-right President Jair Bolsonaro took office in Brazil, and Mendonça used his platform to denounce the country’s democratic erosion.

His latest film, “The Secret Agent,” is set in 1977, during the era of military rule. The protagonist is a scientist named Armando Solimões, played by Wagner Moura, who has been fending off the efforts of a government-linked businessman to take control of his lab in Recife. Now Solimões is on the run, scrambling to get his young son out of the city before hitmen can catch them. The film is both an indictment of authoritarian repression and an absurdist thriller, with set pieces involving a reanimated human leg and the hulking corpse of a tiger shark. Mendonça uses these surreal flourishes to reimagine the country of his youth—a place where gruesome crimes were committed by people determined to obscure the evidence. I recently sat down with him to talk about “The Secret Agent,” which has been nominated for Best Picture and Best International Feature at the Academy Awards, and about the power of reclaiming the past. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I want to start with Recife, the setting for this film. How does your home town fit into the history of filmmaking in Brazil?

A hundred years ago, in the silent era, just before sound came, a small group of filmmakers in Recife collaborated to make thirteen feature-length films. Only six survived. The media has always been concentrated in São Paulo and Rio, two thousand kilometres away in the southeast—not only cinema but money, radio, and television. Recife is in the northeast. It had one of the first law schools in Brazil, and many names from literature and music. But not much happened from the nineteen-twenties until the nineteen-seventies, in terms of filmmaking.

In the seventies, local artists began to use Super 8 cameras to make films, and that also became an interesting moment in filmmaking. Many of those films have survived. Then, in the nineties, something really interesting happened: we had a music scene which became very strong. That’s when I was leaving college, and it really pushed me toward developing my own projects. In the past thirty years, we could draw up a list of maybe twenty-five filmmakers, men and women, who are part of a very interesting film scene in Recife. Their films are all very personal and unusual, but they also managed to establish a communication with audiences—not ever becoming blockbusters, but becoming a thing.

How has Recife traditionally been portrayed in films?

We almost never saw Recife on the screen. There was one film from 1983, shot partly in Recife—a historical film by Tizuka Yamasaki, a filmmaker from the south. But that was it, really. I grew up watching telenovelas made in Rio, and of course Hollywood films. So the connection between reality and the projected image simply did not exist in terms of Recife. But, in 2002, when I was in the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival, I saw a film by a filmmaker called Claudio Assis. For the first time, I saw Recife in wide-screen and color, and I thought, I’m finally seeing the city I know.

After that, more films were made in Recife. “Pictures of Ghosts,” the film I did before “Secret Agent,” it’s really like a family album of the city, taken from so many films—from films done a hundred years ago to Super 8 films done in the seventies, maybe some newsreels done in the fifties. And then, in the past thirty years, so many shorts and features have been shot in Recife. That’s when we began to develop what I call a microclimate of local audiences really, really supporting local films. They would play all the local films and there would be lines around the block.

Many years ago, you were among those moviegoers in Recife.

My mother was the real cinephile. I was always being taken to the cinema as a young child. We spent almost five years living in England, where my mom did her Ph.D. research, and England played an important part in my life, showing me different filmgoing experiences. But then I went back to Recife in 1986. I was eighteen, and I rediscovered the city in a completely different way. The downtown was peppered with movie palaces.

You studied journalism and became a film critic. If you had an interest in films, why not make them?

There were no film schools in Recife at the time, and journalism brought me closer to film. From the first day, I got to meet new friends who were also cinephiles, and they dreamed of making films and writing about film or music. And then, slowly, I drifted toward an idea of cinema. I also used the equipment in the school to develop little short video projects. Today, you can make something interesting with a telephone. But, at that time, I needed a Super VHS editing suite with a camera, which I didn’t have. So that’s how I began.

Tell me about a typical early short.

“Lixo nos Canais” was about television—my own take on Brazilian television at the time. Not very sophisticated, but it had some acid. It was kind of sarcastic about the state of television and how it humiliates people, how it’s prejudiced, how it portrayed women and Black people. Grotesquerie was the norm.

Was there a moment when, after years as a critic, you decided that you were ready to make your first film?

I was very happy as a critic, because I wrote a lot. I saw a lot of films and my work had a readership. Of course, I made many people very unhappy, because I would write about Brazilian cinema. I had a youthful desire to propose changes, which is something that I do not regret. I think I was quite tough on a number of films.

What needed to be reformed, in your view?

The diversity of subject matter, the way films were shot, the complete absence of any cinema outside of São Paulo and Rio. Upper-class directors making films about very impoverished regions and communities—the classic themes, hunger and violence in the favelas. You could tell the filmmakers were not really familiar with those things. They just made the films.

So all of that came without a filter. And then I became quite known—and respected and despised—in some circles. Slowly, especially with the arrival of digital, I began to really make my short films, and I spent about ten years making short films, which became very successful. I always had someone saying, “Yeah, this is really cool, but when are you gonna make a real film?” And, in my mind, a short film is a real film. I once wrote that some features should open for short films, rather than the reverse.

But then something happened: I saw “Do the Right Thing,” by Spike Lee. And that really did something to me, because I had never seen an American film, a New York film, with new faces, a new way of looking at people in society. It was set in one block, one street. And this is something that I found very attractive. That’s probably when I began to think about a story. I finally sat down in 2007 or 2008 to write “Neighboring Sounds.” Sure enough, there was a lot of “Do the Right Thing” in “Neighboring Sounds”—and, of course, a lot of myself.

Talk about how working as a critic has informed your filmmaking.

I never compartmentalized criticism, filmmaking, going to the cinema. In my mind, it was all the same thing: watching films and writing about them and trying to understand what culture is trying to say. I think that probably explains why I was so hard on some films. Because I really think that each film or book is a reaction to life in society. So I think trying to understand what artistic expression or even the industry is trying to say is an interesting way of understanding cinema. And for me, that’s doing cinema. There was never a boundary for me.

You’ve described memories of your mother, the historian, returning home with a Panasonic tape recorder and a box full of cassettes. What did her craft teach you about oral history?

She talked a lot about how interested she was in listening to people. Let’s say that you’re going to write a story about a hotel. Normally you would interview the manager, because the manager is in a position of power. She would interview the guy at the door and the waiters and the cleaning lady. And then maybe, if she had time, she would interview the manager.

This is something that I only came to realize when I was making “Pictures of Ghosts,” because I really allowed myself to actively remember my mother. I found this amazing piece of television from the archives, where she gave an interview about history and oral history. She wasn’t a filmmaker, but her interviews were very much like films, because, once you sit down and listen to them, it’s very much like a documentary. She did a series of interviews, from 1979 to 1981, with the surviving filmmakers from the nineteen-twenties. These interviews, they’re precious. They are voices from the past.

I remember one day—it must have been 1980 or 1981—she came home and said, “I just interviewed Jota Soares, the filmmaker.” And I was just a kid. I was into films, so I was a little impressed, but I had no idea of what it meant. When I listened to the interview, four years ago, it was so moving. That’s one of the ideas in “The Secret Agent,” the idea that there is somebody listening in the future.

How did listening to those recordings contribute to the making of “The Secret Agent”?

It’s everything. It’s happened three times in my life as a screenwriter, twice with my own projects: I tried to write a script—great idea, great starting point, but I couldn’t make it work. My heart wasn’t in it.

I found the heart for “The Secret Agent” making “Pictures of Ghosts”—the power of things that survive and are kept in archives. Because the archive is somebody’s proof of life. When you hear a voice recorded in 1977, that person was alive in ’77. She was in love. She had dreams or desires, or she had to deal with the traffic. Sometimes, listening to these old tapes, it’s so moving, because sometimes you hear a truck in the background. Oh, that’s a truck. How many people were in that truck? What was it carrying?

And then things just get more complex because my mother died quite young. She died at fifty-four. So there was this whole thing of someone who’s not here anymore, but her voice still is, and her work still is.

Probably the strongest feeling of time travel that I have ever felt is making films and working with archives. Because time travel, as far as I know, doesn’t really exist. There is no DeLorean, no time machine. But, when you’re holding a cassette tape, it’s the actual cassette tape that was recorded in 1977 or 1974. I felt that a number of times when I went to cinematheques. You go into the restoration department, see the big scanner and the negative, and you go, “That’s the camera negative that was on the set in 1951.” It’s a historical artifact.

I worked for seven years on “Pictures of Ghosts”—a film that does not have a script. It was all driven by discoveries. This wonderful friend, a researcher who has been working with me, Karina, she calls one day and says, “I think I found 35-mm. images of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis on the Duarte Coelho Bridge.” And I go, “I think I have the film.”

All of those finds, these discoveries, they put me in the right state of mind to write “The Secret Agent.” A lot of “The Secret Agent” comes from the power of history. And the power of history has nothing to do with the way people remember history.

You met Wagner Moura at Cannes when you were a critic. And you said that the part of Armando was written for him.

It was written for him out of my admiration for him as an actor, as a person. Wagner is a good man. We happen to share many points of view on Brazil and on life. And we don’t have a problem expressing ourselves. I find myself with a microphone and somebody asks me a question, like, “What do you think of Bolsonaro?” And I say, “I don’t think he’s a good idea for Brazil.” That becomes a huge controversy—because major newspapers at the time were reluctant even to describe Bolsonaro as “far-right.”

Wagner has had his fair share of backlash and attacks from the right. And so have I. You can’t make a film and shut the fuck up—say, “Nothing to add.” “The Secret Agent” takes you many different places, but it’s very firmly grounded in historical reality. Yes, there is a cat with two heads, but that is Brazil in 1977, from the décor to the clothing to the cars to the atmosphere. So you build on realism, and then you can blur the lines on other elements.

At the beginning of the film, you describe that historical era as a “period of mischief,” which I thought was an interesting choice, considering that the word “dictatorship” is never mentioned in the film. Why?

It’s a literary way of beginning the film. I really like the classic credit roll in the beginning of a film, or maybe a card in the beginning. “Casablanca” has that. “Star Wars” has that. Of course, with Star Wars, you’re being welcomed into a completely crazy, woo-hoo world that came out of George Lucas’s mind. But I think that for a film that takes place in 1977 to start once again with the card, “There was a dictatorship taking place in Brazil”—I thought that I should really avoid that and instead grossly underplay, almost in a poetic way, the seriousness of what we were going through.

The Portuguese word is . . .

“Pirraça.” It’s a wonderful word, quite old-fashioned. It usually means someone who’s teasing someone else, in a mean-spirited way. Someone who has the power to play a prank on you. And that prank might go overboard.

I never planned the script for “The Secret Agent.” I did not have a map. I’ve seen some by colleagues and friends—it almost looks like algebra. The script wrote itself, in a way. I was sometimes surprised at some of the twists and turns that it took.

No outlines?

There were no outlines. The script stemmed from the desire to dramatize some situations and also the desire to shoot those scenes. I was salivating at even the thought of shooting the whole sequence in the registry office, with all those public servants, the wooden floors and the telephones. I just love that whole universe.

You’ve said that the film isn’t about memory—it’s about forgetting. And, in this conversation, you’ve suggested that we live in a post-truth era. How is that collective amnesia playing out in Brazil?

Unfortunately, it’s a very strong part of Brazilian life. TV has traditionally belonged to one group—the Globo group. And they have dictated, in a way, behavior and perception of truth, of politics. Globo always supported the military dictatorship, right from the beginning. In 1984, when people were fighting for general elections for the first time after the coup, Globo ignored almost a million people in downtown São Paulo. And that’s the way that society is framed, I think, in Brazil. My mother being a historian, she was always telling me where to look. But many people are not like that. And I think that we migrated from just manipulation of power to something that is completely out of control.

In a country that, for political reasons, has erased, or tried to forget, or tried not to remember important aspects of history, the mere fact of remembering something might land you an accusation of being a communist or a radical, just because you are saying, “But that’s not how it happened.” And I think there is a strong resistance against reality.

It’s happening in the U.S. It’s happening in Brazil and in Europe. There is a group of society, usually from the far right, and they are fighting reality every day. They wake up in the morning and go to sleep fighting reality. We are now entering Philip K. Dick territory—memory implants. You don’t actually have to implant a chip. You can actually choose whatever reality you want to choose.

In Brazil, we had Bolsonaro saying that COVID was nothing—“Get off your asses and go to work today. It’s nothing. If you’re an athletic type, like I am, nothing will happen to you.” It was a very dark period we went through. I’m just happy that it’s over. The right seems to be lost now. Bolsonaro is in jail. And it feels we are making more sense now as a society.

Under Bolsonaro, there was a concerted effort not to have your film submitted to the Academy.

Back in 2016, there was a clear act of sabotage against “Aquarius.” The month we premièred at Cannes in competition, the Ministry of Culture had been extinguished, because Dilma Rousseff was impeached. It was all a cynical coup d’état. [Rousseff, a former guerrilla turned politician, had been elected to succeed the longtime leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. She faced corruption charges that her supporters argued were politically motivated.] The voting in Congress was broadcast live on a Sunday afternoon—one of the most grotesque moments in Brazilian history, because it really was about the anger from the right at being shut out of power through democratic elections since 2002. Bolsonaro himself, as a congressman, dedicated his vote for impeachment to the guy whose unit tortured Dilma in prison when she was twenty-two.

So, a few weeks later, we went to Cannes with “Aquarius.” [Kleber began to cry, then continued.] Sorry. We went to Cannes, and we did a protest on the red carpet—just holding bits of paper. We went into the theatre. Two hours and twenty minutes later, we came out, and we understood that there was a firestorm in Brazil because of the protest.

The far right just became very mad at me. And then the people who took power, who extinguished the Ministry of Culture, they were the ones who got to pick which Brazilian film to submit for the Oscars. Friends and colleagues withdrew their films in solidarity, saying there was only one film to be picked that year. And then they picked the most unknown, most mysterious film. It was a scandal.

How has “The Secret Agent” been received? Not just in Brazil but in countries like Spain, where people are also still grappling with questions of historical memory.

I went to San Sebastián, and I talked to cinephiles and critics. They feel that it’s very strong for the Spanish, particularly because of Franco. Spain still has many families that would rather not talk about what happened.

And many mass graves.

Yeah. It’s a very strong theme in Spain. It’s a very strong theme in Chile. Dilma was the one who put together a truth-and-reconciliation committee, which Bolsonaro immediately hijacked when he came into power.

Brazilian society isn’t particularly pragmatic. Some societies will say, “This is what we have to do, and we will do it.” Brazil is more, like, “Oh, I don’t know, let’s just move on and let’s not talk about unpleasant things.” I’ve heard that in family circles. I’ve heard that from politicians, and I heard that from Bolsonaro. But he didn’t put it as nicely as I just did. He said, “Only dogs look for bones.” ♦

THE NEW YORKER  

 

 

Big Change Seems Certain in Iran. What Kind Is the Question.

 

 Experts say that Iran’s clerical rulers may be too deeply entrenched for Iranians to topple them, and that the U.S. and Israeli strikes risk setting off deeper radicalization or violence.

 By Erika Solomon 

 The death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is a watershed moment in the 47-year existence of the Islamic Republic. The scenes that followed — throngs of Iranians taking to the streets to celebrate, others turning out to grieve — signal the deep uncertainty about what comes next.

There are now three key questions: How will protesters respond to President Trump’s call to take over the government? Can Iran’s authoritarian system survive? And could the attack unleash a chaotic battle for power?

Mr. Trump and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have made public appeals to Iran’s people, arguing that they have offered them a historic opportunity to topple their brutal authoritarian government. How they envision an unarmed population facing down a heavily armed, ideologically driven security force is less clear.

Though it has been only two days of strikes, some regional experts are skeptical that an aerial campaign alone could weaken Iran’s government enough that Iranians could bring it down with protests.

Nonetheless, Iran is headed toward a transformative moment, said Farzan Sabet, an analyst on Iran and Middle East politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland.

“Some kind of change will happen in the system,” he said. “But in which direction? We don’t know.”

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Iranians in Tehran took to their phones as news spread that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed.Credit...The New York Times

Could Iranian protesters topple their government?

In some ways, Iranians are ever more defiant after facing a brutal crackdown on nationwide antigovernment protests in January, in which security forces killed thousands. As the violent repression subsided, the risks were still high even before the bombardment began. Yet students still protested and held sit-ins, and the families of slain protesters used their memorial services to voice dissent.

After the authorities confirmed Ayatollah Khamenei’s death in the attack, many Iranians dared to celebrate publicly — but not to the point of risking bloodshed.

Arian, a resident of a suburb near Tehran, described seeing people “honking in the streets, shouting chants from windows.” Like all people interviewed inside the country, he asked to withhold his full name for fear of retaliation.

On Sunday morning, Arian said, he saw people dancing and singing in the streets — until they noticed the arrival of armed members of Iran’s Basij, the volunteer militia force aligned with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. “When the Basij showed up, everyone got scared and quickly scattered,” he said.

Even under aerial bombardment, Iran’s domestic security apparatus was still making a show of force. Basij forces, estimated to be around one million strong around the country, have already been mobilized around the capital.

“The brutal killing of protesters in January suggests domestic unrest will be met with an iron fist,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, deputy head of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “This time under far harsher wartime conditions.”

Some airstrikes have begun to target Basij and intelligence headquarters, but experts are divided as to whether airstrikes can inflict enough damage to weaken a deeply entrenched and complex network of security forces across such a large country.

“The problem is these are very multilayered targets,” said Abdolrasool Divsallar, an Iran expert at the Catholic University of Milan. “You hit one, but there are so many others. I am not sure how long it can be sustained, munitions wise.”

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Smoke rising over Tehran on Sunday following strikes.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Could Iran’s current regime survive?

Even as strikes wiped out several of Iran’s top political and military leaders, official statements went to great lengths to show the system was prepared for the shock and still functioning.

After Ayatollah Khamenei’s death, Iranian officials announced that the government would follow the constitutional framework for selecting the country’s next leader, and that a temporary leadership council would be formed.

Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council who is seen as the de facto leader behind the scenes, stressed that idea in televised comments urging unity after the ayatollah’s death.

“Throughout history, the Iranian nation has faced even greater challenges; even the Mongols plowed through the entire country, yet the people stood firm and defended their land,” he said. “Such martyrdoms make people resistant and steadfast.”

But the system could undergo a transformation from within. Mr. Larijani, seen as a pragmatist, is the type of figure observers say could potentially strike a deal with Washington now that Iran’s more ideologically driven supreme leader is gone.

Some ordinary Iranians said that such a deal, if accompanied by an easing of international sanctions on Iran, may be palatable to many residents who have suffered through so many months of instability and a collapsing economy.

“Most people aren’t chasing deep meaning,” said Payman, 45, a businessman in Tehran. “They just want a normal life: family, work, small goals. If that becomes possible, a lot of people might stop pushing for bigger change.”

But there is also the possibility Iran’s new leaders would turn the state in the opposite direction — making it even more radical. “The risk is that the more hard-line figures emerge,” Mr. Divsallar said.

The fact that the leadership change was brought about by American and Israeli attacks increases that possibility, he said. “That works completely against what people wished for,” he said.

Experts point to several appointments that could tip a transition in this direction.

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A woman holding a photo of Ayatollah Khamenei in Tehran on Sunday.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Two of the members of Iran’s interim leadership council are hard-liners. One of them, Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, is from Iran’s Council of Guardians, a powerful group of jurists. The other is Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, the head of the judiciary. The third member, President Masoud Pezeshkian, is a moderate, but had been largely sidelined before the war.

Another bellwether is the reported appointment of Gen. Ahmad Vahidi to lead the Revolutionary Guards.

“He’s an incredibly brutal person. So I think they’re not going to hesitate to use extreme violence,” said Mr. Sabet, of the Geneva Graduate Institute.

Could Iran descend into chaos?

Beyond toppling or transforming Iran’s current system is the possibility that the war unleashes chaos in a country of 90 million people that borders seven countries.

There are many potential opponents who could use violence to challenge a weakened state. Some ethnic minorities, like the Kurds and the Baluchis, already have armed opposition groups.

Mustafa Hijri, the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Iran, said that his organization was part of an alliance of groups from Iran’s ethnic minorities, and that among them were parties that “when necessary, may engage in armed resistance as part of their struggle.”

Officials from two Kurdish groups in exile, who asked not to be identified, said they were planning on trying to restart operations inside the country, aiming to encourage an uprising in Iran’s Kurdish region.

Even before the war started, many Iranians were bemoaning the increasingly polarized state of the country in the wake of the brutal crackdowns on the protests.

The government retains an ideological and religious support base that, in the current war, would be highly motivated to fight back against perceived threats. That raises the possibility of internal fragmentation and violence that spills beyond Iran’s borders.

On Sunday, Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi, an influential cleric in Iran, called for jihad against Israel and the United States, according to remarks published in the semiofficial Mehr news agency.

All of these factors create a growing risk of a dangerous insurgency should the state collapse, similar to the insurgency that broke out in Iraq after U.S. forces invaded it in 2003, said Ms. Geranmayeh, the analyst.

“This is a holy war for them — and they seem willing to burn down the country and region before surrendering,” she said. “If this air campaign succeeds in toppling Iran’s leadership, years of chaos probably lie ahead for the country and its people.”

the new york times 

 

 

Iran’s Regime May Survive, but the Middle East Will Be Changed

 

 A badly weakened Iran will no longer intimidate or threaten its neighbors in the same way. The regional impact could be comparable to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

By Steven Erlanger

 Iran’s supreme leader may be dead, but there will be another. Its slain military commanders will be replaced. A governing system created over 47 years will not easily disintegrate under air power alone. Iran retains the capacity to strike back against American and Israeli airstrikes, and the war’s trajectory is unclear.

But the Islamic Republic, already weakened and unpopular, is now further diminished, its power at home and in the region at one of its lowest ebbs since its leaders took power during the revolution that overthrew Iran’s American-backed shah in 1978-79.

Even if the regime does not fall, which remains the stated aim of President Trump, this massive attack is likely to have strategic consequences in the Middle East comparable to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader killed on Saturday morning, maintained a visceral antagonism toward Israel and the United States, which he consistently called “the Great Satan.” He built and financed a regional set of proxy militias that surrounded Israel and shared his hatred of it. Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza and the West Bank, the Houthis in Yemen — all served both to attack Israeli interests and protect Iran itself.

Iran built up its missile program and enriched uranium to nearly bomb grade, even as it denied ever wanting a bomb. It became a regional power so strong that Sunni leaders in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gulf sought to keep good ties with a Shia Islamic regime that also threatened them.

Iran’s decline began two years ago, with Israel’s tough and sustained response to an invasion by Hamas from Gaza. It accelerated when Israel eroded Iran’s air defenses, defeated Hezbollah and profited from the Syrian revolution that overthrew Bashar al-Assad, another ally of Tehran.

But now, with the ayatollah’s death and intense destruction from the air, Iran’s regional sway has ebbed further, with uncertain consequences that will play out over months and even years.

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Strikes over Tehran on Sunday. Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

“The Islamic Republic as we know it will not survive this,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House, a London-based research group.

“The Mideast won’t be the same again,” she said. “For 47 years the Mideast has been living with a hostile regime and a destabilizing force that it has tried to first isolate and then manage.”

Now, she said, the regime might be dismantled and something new and different might emerge. That leadership may turn out to be even less friendly to Washington, particularly if dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Whoever takes charge, Iran will be badly weakened in the medium term, more inward-looking, and focused on political competition, internal security and economic chaos, Ms. Vakil said.

In the coming days, however, Iran may spread more short-term chaos as its current leadership tries to bring an end to the war while saving the regime.

Iran will try to rapidly increase the cost for Israel, the United States and its Gulf allies “to force them to back down before this succeeds in destabilizing the regime,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, deputy head of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Increasing its attacks on Arab countries in the gulf is risky but may be Iran’s best chance to shorten the war — since it could prompt the Arab world to pressure the U.S. and Israel to end their campaign.

“Iran’s aim now is to absorb U.S. and Israeli attacks, hold its position and signal expansion of war, and wait for worried regional actors to mediate a cease-fire,” said Vali Nasr, an Iran expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, on social media. “They expect that if Trump does not get a quick win then he will look for an exit, and negotiations afterwards will be different.”

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A burning building hit by an Iranian drone strike in Bahrain on Saturday. Credit...Reuters

Iran’s proxies across the Mideast could also come to Iran’s defense, increasing the price of an extended war, according to Ali Vaez, Iran project director for the International Crisis Group, a research institution.

“If Hezbollah fully engages from Lebanon, if militias strike U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria, or if the Houthis escalate in the Red Sea, this stops being a bilateral conflict and becomes a regionwide war stretching across the Middle East,” Mr. Vaez said. A wider war would have considerable longer-term impact on oil prices and inflation, especially if Iran can shut the Strait of Hormuz, a key international shipping route.

But in the longer term, an Iran that is wrapped up in its own domestic problems — trying to avoid elite fragmentation and consolidate a new leadership or even move toward a more consultative one, with less clerical influence and more power sharing — will not have the energy or the resources to meddle in the region. That could open up new opportunities for Lebanon and the Palestinians, as it has already done for the Syrians.

It leaves Israel ascendant, making it even more of an ineradicable fact in the region that the Sunni nations must accommodate. A new and more moderate government could take office in Israel after elections later this year. With Iran defanged, it may feel it has the mandate to build on the cease-fire in Gaza and negotiate seriously with the Palestinians, under pressure from Washington and the Saudis.

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sraeli security officials inspecting the ruins of a building hit by an Iranian strike on Tel Aviv on Sunday. Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times

 Israel itself would prefer regime change, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear, but would be content, analysts say, with a divided, broken and chaotic Iran wrapped up in its own problems, like Syria is now.

Presuming there is no revolution, a reconstituted Iranian government must still grapple with a powerful Israel and a United States it cannot trust. The current regime has made nuclear enrichment a key element in its efforts to cement regional power and deterrence. And it has refused to change course, even as that display of persistence seems to have brought it closer to destruction than any other policy, whether that be supporting terrorism abroad or massive repression at home.

It is unclear if even a more moderate government would make new concessions over its nuclear program under the pressure of war. It is also unclear if any Iranian leader would feel able to trust President Trump, who tore up President Obama’s nuclear deal in 2018, and now has bombed Iran twice in the middle of ongoing negotiations. Would Tehran deem it necessary to give in on the nuclear issue to survive? Or if a hard-line, more security-dominated government emerges, will it try to race toward a nuclear weapon, more convinced than ever of its need?

Despite the fierce crackdown on Iranian protesters in January that left many thousands dead, President Trump continues to encourage the Iranian people to rise up to overthrow the regime.

“Bombs will be dropping everywhere,” he said. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

But it may not go that easily or cleanly, noted Ivo H. Daalder, a former American ambassador to NATO.

In February 1991, during the first gulf war, President George H.W. Bush issued a similar call to the Iraqi people to rise up and oust Saddam Hussein.

“They did,” Mr. Daalder noted, “and the U.S. stood by as Saddam’s security forces slaughtered them in huge numbers.”

 

THE NEW YORK TIMES 

The Folly of Attacking Iran

 

 Nicholas Kristof

 We Americans have begun another Middle Eastern war based on dubious intelligence claims, and as in 2003, I fear we haven’t thought through the substantial risks and uncertain gains.

President Trump says that the aim of this “massive and ongoing” war is no less than regime change: He has vowed to devastate Iran’s military force, destroy its nuclear program (again) and topple the leadership. Lofty goals. But fundamental questions remain: How likely is it that he can achieve all of this, and at what cost and risk?

War is uncertain. Sometimes it goes as smoothly as the Persian Gulf war of 1991, and sometimes you find yourself mired in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq. I’ve reported from Iran over the years, and I’ve seen the popular resentment against the government, so maybe the attacks will lead Iran’s government to collapse the way its allies in Syria did in 2024.

But air wars alone have a poor record of overthrowing leaders: The United States under Presidents Joe Biden and Trump spent more than $7 billion bombing Yemen and couldn’t dislodge even the weak, unpopular and poorly armed Houthis.

In general, American military interventions have a better record of success when they have a precise, limited objective — like the operation in Venezuela to seize President Nicolás Maduro. This war with Iran appears the opposite, aiming for nothing less than the overthrow of a government of more than 90 million people.

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Trump may have too sunny a view of what war with Iran would entail because Iran barely responded to the assassination of Qassim Suleimani in 2020 or to the bombing of nuclear sites last year. My guess is that Iran feels it now must re-establish deterrence and will continue to respond aggressively — not just attacking United States military bases but also perhaps striking ships in the Strait of Hormuz (through which one-fifth of the world’s oil passes) or organizing future terror attacks against American targets worldwide.

The point of military action is to make us safer, but Iran didn’t appear to be in a position to pose a substantial threat to America in the coming years. Despite claims by Trump or his aides, its missiles probably won’t soon be able to reach the United States, and its nuclear program is entombed and apparently on pause. By attacking Iran, I fear we increased risk rather than reduced it. Another cost of the war is that it will deplete munitions, such as Tomahawk missiles and various interceptors already in short supply, and divert us from America’s long-term strategic challenges in Asia. We will be degrading our military capacity to address the next crisis.

Like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Iran has a repressive and unpopular government that is a malign influence on the region. Iran just massacred thousands of protesters — at least 6,800 civilians and perhaps many more, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency. The regime is a pillar of misogyny, supports bad actors throughout the Middle East and holds back millions of well-educated people.

And as with Iraq in 2003, a war is not necessarily the best tool to deal with a brutal and hostile government. There are more problems in international relations than solutions, and in the past the illusion of an easy military answer has repeatedly caused tragedy for ourselves as well as for others.

I reached out on the eve of the war to a heroic Iranian human rights lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, whose courage and defiance of the regime have periodically landed her in jail. She told me that the best time for military strikes would have been January, when they might have stopped the slaughter in the streets.

Sotoudeh, like some other Iranians, seemed ambivalent about military action today. Before the massacres, she said, her position was, “You can’t bomb your way to democracy.” Afterward, repulsed by the massacres, she said she favored outside humanitarian intervention to protect protesters — but not unilateral military attacks by Trump.

Some wars are necessary; by contrast, this is a war of choice. There was a diplomatic path that showed promise in addressing Iran’s nuclear program. It appeared that Iran was willing to offer a deal that suspended uranium enrichment for several years and after that limited enrichment to very low levels under rigorous inspections, while also diluting its stockpile of highly enriched uranium.

That would have been an unsatisfying solution, for it would not have addressed Iran’s missiles or its repression; diplomatic solutions often are unsatisfying, because they are the result of compromise. But Trump created a nuclear crisis with Iran in part by tearing up the imperfect nuclear accord that President Barack Obama had reached with the ayatollahs; if we had remained in the deal, it seems to me we would be in a safer place today — and at peace.

To undermine the Iranian government and bring about change, we had other approaches that would not have involved war. The United States could have tried to knit together the fragmented opposition and worked to destabilize the militias. It could have smuggled in many more Starlink terminals so that Iranians could communicate. The intelligence community could have prioritized investigations of the corruption of the leadership; I’d love to see leaks illuminating the wealth of top Iranian officials or reports of their children and grandchildren enjoying their sybaritic lifestyles at home and abroad. The United States can still do these things.

Arguably one of the factors that undermined the Iranian leaders the most last year was not a bomb but a video showing the lavish wedding of an Iranian hard-liner’s daughter, as she wore a strapless, low-cut dress; it went viral in Iran and underscored the hypocrisy and double standards of leaders who inflict on the public rules that they don’t follow themselves. We need more of those videos leaked.

All this is less dramatic than blowing up naval stations or oil refineries. But remember that in 1979 it was not machine guns and bombs that toppled the shah, but rather smuggled cassette tapes of sermons and songs. I question whether a bombing campaign can topple the ayatollahs, but they are so unpopular, I believe that at some point they can and will be ousted by a more organized and better-funded opposition.

Look, we all need some humility about what lies ahead. Doves like me have been right about some uses of force (such as the Iraq war) but wrong about others (such as the Iraq war surge). As I weigh the benefits and costs of this new war with Iran, I fear that we have sleepwalked into yet another perilous folly in the Middle East.

When you’ve witnessed the horror of war, you believe it should be a last resort — not an abyss we tumble into without legal basis or clear objectives, pushing us all unnecessarily into a riskier world in which the only certainty is bloodshed.

THE NEW YORK TIMES 

 

 

What if the Great American Novelist Doesn’t Write Novels?

 

 

 

Frederick Wiseman’s documentary films offer an unparalleled, panoramic vision of society. His 45th feature, “City Hall,” is on PBS this month — and he’s eager to get back to work. 

 

By Mark Binelli

 

i gave Frederick Wiseman a call on the morning of Election Day. It was 3 in the afternoon his time, in Paris, where he keeps a small apartment at Les Récollets, a Franciscan friary built in 1603 and converted four centuries later into housing for visiting artists and scholars. Wiseman’s home — and wife, Zipporah, and production company, also named Zipporah — all remain in Cambridge, Mass. But he has found Paris, a city he has been enamored of since the 1950s, when he enrolled in law classes at the Sorbonne to secure an early Army discharge, amenable to his creative process, and he has edited several of his films there. In mid-March, he finished the sound mix for “City Hall,” his 45th feature, just as Emmanuel Macron announced a national lockdown. As fall arrived, with his new four-and-a-half-hour documentary opening at largely virtual film festivals (Venice, New York, Toronto) to rapturous reviews, Wiseman, who in a normal year would have walked one or more of the red carpets, remained sidelined in France, thousands of miles from his family and unable to begin his next project. It was the first time in 55 years he hadn’t been working on a film, Wiseman told me. When I asked how he’d been holding up, he noted flatly, “Well, in addition to being scared, I’m bored.” His doctors had advised him not to fly, “primarily,” he said, “because I’m of the age Covid likes.” Wiseman will celebrate his 91st birthday on New Year’s Day.

The fact that Wiseman’s half-century-long project is a series of cinéma-vérité documentaries about American institutions, their titles often reading like generic brand labels — “High School,” “Hospital,” “The Store,” “Public Housing,” “State Legislature” — makes its achievement all the more remarkable but also easier to overlook. Beginning with “Titicut Follies” (1967), a portrait of a Massachusetts asylum for the criminally insane that remains shocking to this day, Wiseman has directed nearly a picture a year, spending weeks, sometimes months, embedded in a strictly demarcated space — a welfare office in Lower Manhattan, a sleepy fishing village in Maine, the Yerkes Primate Research Center at Emory University, the flagship Neiman Marcus department store in Dallas, the New York Public Library, a shelter for victims of domestic violence in Tampa, Fla., a Miami zoo — then editing the upward of a hundred hours of footage he brings home into an idiosyncratic record of what he witnessed. Taken as a whole, the films present an unrivaled survey of how systems operate in our country, with care paid to every line of the organizational chart.

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“Titicut Follies,” 1967.Credit...Zipporah Films

They also represent the work of an artist of extraordinary vision. The films are long, strange and uncompromising. They can be darkly comic, uncomfortably voyeuristic, as surreal as any David Lynch dream sequence. There are no voice-overs, explanatory intertitles or interviews with talking heads, and depending on the sequence and our own sensibility, we may picture the ever-silent Wiseman as a deeply empathetic listener or an icy Martian anthropologist.

Wiseman has given hundreds of interviews over the years while remaining fairly circumspect about the meaning of his work. An essay he contributed to the catalog of his 2010 Museum of Modern Art retrospective begins: “I do not like to write about myself or my films. I am not sure I understand the films, and I know that I do not understand myself.” Over the course of multiple conversations, Wiseman insisted he had no special knowledge about American politics or our recent period of institutional precarity — that indeed he possessed no penetrating insights regarding institutions, plural, aside from the places he’s actually filmed. “Almost everything runs counter to cliché,” he said. “So I’m reluctant to utter my profundities unless I have some experience.”

There’s a way, though, to look at three of his most recent films as a loose trilogy about our current state of national affairs. For “In Jackson Heights” (2015), Wiseman spent weeks in the Queens neighborhood, one of the most ethnically diverse in the United States, where by some estimates 167 different languages are spoken. “Monrovia, Indiana” (2018), on the other hand, took him to the sort of red-state town where coastal reporters like to visit the local diner to talk to natives about their exotic voting preferences, though Wiseman does none of that (and national politics never even directly comes up in the film). And then there’s “City Hall,” which will premiere on PBS on Dec. 22, and which offers what amounts to, by the standards of a Wiseman film, a fairly conspicuous rebuke of the past four years of White House iniquity, simply by presenting municipal employees at every level of a local government — switchboard operators, sanitation workers, building inspectors, parking-ticket adjudicators, an eviction-prevention task force, a justice of the peace — fulfilling their duties with modesty, a baseline of professionalism and no obvious grift.

When Wiseman’s face came onto my laptop screen for the first time, he appeared to be in a garret. In the background, I could make out rough-hewed ceiling beams, a window, a messy bookshelf. His friend and longtime Cambridge neighbor Christopher Ricks, the English literary scholar and critic, told me he’d once heard Wiseman described as a Jewish leprechaun. I could see it. The sly expression, the slightness of stature, the ears befitting a fable. We spoke for nearly two hours that day, and as the Parisian afternoon advanced, light began to pour through the window directly behind him, casting his face into ever-deepening shadow. Occasionally he would lean forward, silhouetting himself entirely but for some unruly wisps of gray hair, which glowed like a nimbus. I wondered if he’d framed the shot this way on purpose, the better to mask his expression whenever it suited him.

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“Law and Order,” 1969.Credit...Zipporah Films

A Wiseman film comprises a series of vignettes, often self-contained. The scenes can be dramatic, and at times quite disturbing: the crew-cut inmate in a tank top offhandedly confessing to raping his daughter during a therapy session six minutes into “Titicut Follies,” or the white plainclothes officer taking sadistic pleasure in choking a Black prostitute during her arrest in “Law and Order” (1969), a film the Safdie brothers have cited as an influence. (The presence of two of his colleagues, who view the violence coolly, interjecting only to taunt the victim, makes the scene all the more unsettling.) More typical Wiseman moments are less explosive, though. In fact, the pacing and duration of his sequences, their patience — unusual by the standards of most film and television today, of course, but even of 50 years ago — tends to mess with a viewer’s sense of time. This might be the greatest barrier to entry when it comes to Wiseman’s work, along with the films’ overall lengths, which can often run between three and five hours. (“Near Death,” his 1989 film about critically ill patients in the intensive-care unit of Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, is two minutes shy of six.)

While multiepisode documentary and podcast series have numbed us to egregiously padded and overlong nonfiction narratives, Wiseman’s films aren’t teasing or manipulative in that way, though you may find yourself wondering: Why am I watching this small-town Lions Club meeting about park benches? (An actual scene from “Monrovia, Indiana.”) Wait, now we’re at a grocery store, and people are just grocery shopping, silently? (Same.) Wiseman delights in presenting his audiences with scenes rarely encountered in film, which are sometimes the opposite of dramatic, putting frames around moments that in real life might tempt you to reach for your phone and sneakily multitask: school lectures, visits from plumbers or exterminators, politicians giving abbreviated stump speeches at buffet luncheons, meetings (so many meetings!). But it turns out there is a drama to all of it; if you can settle into the careful rhythms of Wiseman’s editing, you’ll find his films have an accretive power. As the director Ava DuVernay noted in an interview with Manohla Dargis a few years ago, “The way his camera moves and what it’s interested in, I’m interested in, even though I didn’t know I was interested in it until he looked at it, until he showed it to me.”

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“Monrovia, Indiana,” 2018.Credit...Zipporah Films

Wiseman is making films “for perhaps the most impatient age that has ever been,” Ricks told me. “Unconscionable impatience. What Matthew Arnold spoke about: our sick hurry, our divided aims. Now, this sick hurry is terrible. And Fred stands against that vagary beautifully.”

As unmediated as Wiseman’s footage can feel, themes emerge over time. “Welfare” (1975), with its granular details of how a welfare agency operated back then and a parade of amazing New York characters — the unaccountably nonchalant back-and-forth between a racist white drunk applying for housing aid and an imperturbable Black security guard remains one of the most riveting 14 minutes of dialogue in any film I can think of — works as a document of a specific time and place. But in part because we don’t know the names or back stories of any of Wiseman’s subjects, aside from what they might reveal in the moment, a waiting room filled with desperate people hoping for relief inevitably shades toward the metaphorical as well, conjuring a scene from Kafka or Beckett — a subtext made text near the end of the film, when a ranting client shouts at a caseworker: “I’ve been waiting for the last 124 days, since I got out of the hospital. Waiting for something. Godot? You know what happened in the story of Godot? He never came. That’s what I’m waiting for, something that will never come.” (When that happened in front of his rolling camera, Wiseman told me, “I felt I’d led a clean, moral life and God was rewarding me.”)

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“Welfare,” 1975.Credit...Zipporah Films

The filmmaker Laura Poitras, who won an Oscar in 2015 for her documentary “Citizenfour,” said that seeing “Titicut Follies” as a student at the San Francisco Art Institute had been a “profound experience” and that she considers the film “a model of storytelling, of letting the action do the work in a way that really parallels what I’d refer to as great literature.” She continued: “I think what’s often missed with his films is how incredibly crafted they are. People say, ‘No narrative, no exposition.’ No, no! His editing skills are so amazing. It’s exposition at its best, when you don’t even notice it. You need to look closer.”

From the start, Wiseman has relied on a tight crew: just a director of photography, an assistant and Wiseman himself on sound, hoisting a boom mic. He has worked with the same cinematographer, John Davey, since 1978 and won’t commit to a project unless the subject has granted him comprehensive access. (Since the early 1990s, he said, he has wanted to make a film about The New York Times but has been rebuffed over access issues.) Robert Birgeneau, the chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, when Wiseman made “At Berkeley” (2013), asked around after receiving the filmmaker’s initial request “and got a lot of warnings,” he told me, adding, “Some of Fred’s films are not flattering to the people in charge.” But after a lunch meeting with Wiseman, Birgeneau instinctively liked and trusted him. The university couldn’t allow him to film anything involving personnel issues, but all else became fair game. “It was surprising to me that after the first 10 minutes of any meeting or event, no matter how complicated the issue, we sort of forgot Fred was there,” Birgeneau said.

Aside from introducing himself, Wiseman says he tries to demystify the process by answering any questions but doesn’t do preinterviews. “There’s a whole issue as to whether the camera changes behavior — the pretentious way of talking about it is, ‘Does the Heisenberg principle apply to documentary filmmaking?’ — but in my experience, 99.9 percent of the people don’t act for the camera,” he said. “My explanation for that is most people aren’t good enough actors to become somebody else. Not everybody’s Meryl Streep. And when people are uncomfortable or putting it on, so to speak, you instantly know it.”

For those of us who report for a living, it’s impossible not to marvel at Wiseman’s preternatural gets — his uncanny ability, particularly in the early films, to record moments that should by all rights permit no outside witness. Only once, Wiseman told me, has he worried about crossing a line. It came during the filming of “Hospital” (1969) at Metropolitan Hospital Center in East Harlem, when a subway worker who had accidentally touched the third rail was brought into the emergency ward. All of his nerve endings had been burned, so he wasn’t experiencing any pain, and he was surrounded by loved ones. But he was clearly dying. Wiseman decided not to film the sequence. “I thought maybe he should be allowed to die with his family,” he said. In retrospect, he wishes he’d gotten the shot.

The idea for “City Hall” came about several years ago, after Wiseman saw a list of mayors receiving accolades at the time. He reached out to the offices of a half-dozen or so (including that of the young mayor of South Bend, Ind., long before his presidential run) but was ignored or rebuffed by every city except one, Boston, his hometown, where his request ended up on the desk of Joyce Linehan, a former A.&R. rep at Sub Pop Records who’d become Mayor Marty Walsh’s chief of policy and planning and who was, luckily, a Wiseman superfan. “I immediately called the other five employees, of the 17,000 of us, who would appreciate the fact that Fred Wiseman wanted to make a movie about us, and we all jumped up and down and geeked out a bit,” Linehan said. Then she convinced Walsh, and a highly skeptical media-relations team, that they should grant Wiseman the access he wanted. “Which is almost complete access,” Linehan said. “Not unreasonably, the press department wanted me out of their office.”

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Mayor Marty Walsh of Boston in “City Hall,” 2020.Credit...Zipporah Films

The film opens in a 311 call center, where we hear one-sided, amusingly mundane snippets of nonemergency telephone conversations. (“Do you by any chance know if your parents were married at the time of your birth?” “Is it a stray dog?”) There’s a sweet, awkward civil wedding ceremony; a wordless, oddly hypnotic sequence involving a garbage truck, culminating in the deeply satisfying crushing of several mattresses; a moving encounter between a city building inspector and a troubled veteran with a rodent infestation; a tense public hearing in which Black neighborhood residents confront the would-be operators of a cannabis dispensary.

Throughout, Mayor Walsh emerges as the closest thing to a main character Wiseman has ever given us. At first, in a meeting about violence prevention, he comes across as earnest but unprepossessing. But just as seeing people in films hugging or gathering maskless can feel uncanny these days, the mere fact that Walsh and the bureaucrats staffing multifarious city agencies take their jobs seriously and are capable of conveying both empathy for their constituents and a mastery of the basic facts of governance plays like a gauzy dream sequence, a distant transmission from a better world.

That said, it’s far too reductive to think of “City Hall” as a four-and-a-half-hour subtweet of the Trump presidency. Yes, for viewers in 2020, Walsh’s baseline decency “becomes underlined” by an implicit comparison with the current occupant of the White House, Wiseman acknowledges. But darker, more complicated themes also stir beneath the surface — most starkly in a bravura 25-minute sequence shot at Faneuil Hall on Veterans Day, in which the testimonies of multiple generations of veterans explicitly lashes American history to a brutal microhistory of warfare.

With the exception of “Near Death,” “City Hall” marks the first time Wiseman has filmed in his home state since “Titicut Follies,” his debut. At the time, Wiseman was unhappily teaching law at Boston University, having earned his own degree at Yale in part to avoid the draft for the Korean War. He was following in the footsteps of his father, Jacob, who immigrated to Boston from Ukraine with his family as a 5-year-old and worked his way through law school — though aside from meeting his wife (who taught and practiced law for years), Fred didn’t get much out of his time in New Haven, and never took to the bar. In the early 1960s, he read a novel by Warren Miller, “The Cool World,” about a young Black gang member in Harlem. Though independent cinema remained very much an outlying proposition at the time, he decided to option the book and film it. “I would not characterize my decision as a rational one,” Wiseman said. He initially considered directing himself, but then decided to produce instead and hired Shirley Clarke for the job. A pioneering female director who largely operated in the world of independent, experimental film, Clarke had just released “The Connection,” a controversial feature about heroin-addicted jazz musicians, which Wiseman had invested a bit of money in and thought was terrific. For “The Cool World,” they filmed on location in Harlem with many nonprofessional actors, auditioning nearly 2,000 kids at local high schools, though in the end Wiseman found working with Clarke “very, very difficult” and after the completion of the project vowed never again to produce a film for anybody but himself. “What I took away from it,” Wiseman noted tartly, “was if Shirley could make a movie, I could, too.”

A few years later, Wiseman asked for permission to shoot at Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane, where he’d been taking his Legal Medicine class on field trips. In his written proposal to the hospital’s director, he declared his intent to avoid making a “cliché documentary about crime and mental illness.” The film, he wrote, would possess “imaginative and poetic” qualities that would set it apart.

Making good on his promise from its first frame, “Titicut Follies” opens on a stage. Eight inmates stand in neat choir formation, hands behind their backs, singing “Strike Up the Band,” a satirical Gershwin standard about rallying the troops. A cheap tinsel sign hanging behind the men, who’ve been absurdly costumed in bow ties and plumed shakos, makes it clear we’re watching an amateur talent show. Eventually their hands emerge, clutching pom-poms.

The film became an immediate scandal, the black-and-white images of nude inmates paraded around by guards invariably calling to mind concentration-camp footage. The lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Elliot Richardson, had initially helped Wiseman gain permission to shoot in Bridgewater but later accused him of “double crossing” the state and persuaded the Massachusetts Supreme Court to ban the film from public screenings outside an educational context, successfully arguing that Wiseman had invaded the privacy of the inmates. (The ruling wasn’t overturned until 1991.)

Wiseman found the decision ridiculous but, he insisted to me, not especially discouraging. While shooting “Titicut Follies,” he had an idea for a series of films in which, rather than following a single protagonist, the place would be the star. A few months after the trial, he began filming “High School.”

He was 38 by this point. Perhaps discovering his vocation at a relatively late age fixed his eye on the clock. For whatever reason, his practice has remained steady and undeviating: nearly a film a year, with minimal research in advance. (He considers the shoot itself the research, preferring to encounter the material cold.) Until “La Danse” (2009), about the Paris Opera Ballet, when he switched to digital, Wiseman edited his films (all but one shot to that point in 16 millimeters) by hand, using an ancient Steenbeck flatbed editing machine. There was something artisanal about the hand-editing that he liked: holding the film, threading it through the machine. It gave him time to think. Eventually, though, finding labs able to process 16-millimeter film quickly became too difficult. He takes between six and eight months to edit the individual vignettes of a given film, at which point he knows the material so well he can recite the dialogue, and then another four to six weeks to determine the overall structure.

Wiseman has retained full ownership of his films and keeps tight control over their distribution. Until 2007, when he finally relented and began making the films available on DVD, they could only be viewed, outside their runs on PBS, at public screenings of 16-millimeter prints. They’re still not available on any streaming platforms in the United States aside from Kanopy, which is free to use with a library card in certain cities. “Fred is persnickety,” his friend Errol Morris, the documentary filmmaker, said. “He’s always been, in his own way, extremely conservative and unwilling to change.” (When Morris called Zipporah to ask for a screening link to “City Hall,” they sent him a copy of the 275-minute film with a four-day expiration date. “I’m not sure what the fear is,” Morris said. “Am I going to sell it to a foreign government?”)

Despite the uproar caused by “Titicut Follies,” Wiseman has never considered himself a muckraker or a journalist. In the MoMA catalog essay, he described his approach in far more literary terms, insisting the films must work, at least for him, on both a literal and metaphorical level, and citing as the greatest influence on his editing “the attention to close reading I was taught in college and the novels and poems I have since tried to read with care.” He sees himself, he told me, like an artist who makes work from found objects, except in his case, the art is assembled from found events. “Which are recorded in a certain way, and edited and ordered, and every aspect is completely subjective,” Wiseman went on. “I make my little jokes about how I hate the term cinéma vérité or observational cinema or direct cinema. Because I make movies. And I would make the argument that they’re fictional movies — based on real, unstaged events.”

Nobody talks seriously about writing the Great American Novel anymore, but Wiseman belongs to a generation that used to, and his body of work, when considered in the manner he lays out above, represents the nearest contemporary equivalent I can think of. Especially when viewed in Wiseman’s terms — as a single, ongoing project — the scope and ambition become panoramic, a national monument. Norman Mailer used to refer to his desire to write the Great American Novel in tragic-heroic terms, casting himself as an Ahab in doomed pursuit of what he called “the big one.” Wouldn’t it be funny, though, if the Great American Novel actually does exist, only it’s not a novel and has been quietly appearing in serialized form on public television for the past 50 years?

Wiseman had a couple of potential follow-ups to “City Hall” in mind before the pandemic struck, but he doesn’t want to reveal any details. To keep busy, he has embarked on what he called a “half-assed” self-improvement course, reading the Great Books he’d always meant to get around to. (At the moment, he’s quite enjoying “Tristram Shandy.”) Shoots are physically demanding, so he has spent his exile in Paris trying to keep in shape, taking walks when it’s safe and working out on an exercise bicycle. He speaks to his wife and to his longtime producer, Karen Konicek, who runs Zipporah Films, daily. He has also been working on a screenplay, partly adapted from the diaries of Sophia Tolstoy — a surprisingly contemporary portrait of a marriage, he said, “where she talks about her difficult life with the great man.” He plans to make the film with a small, quarantined crew at a house in the French countryside in the spring.

“I imagine,” I said, “it must be painful for you to have to lose six months, or a year, or however long this thing goes on, right now, when you don’t know....” I faltered here, leaving the remainder of my thought unspoken. After stammering a bit, I tried again. “I mean, none of us know, but, you know —”

Wiseman cut in. “Yes, if I were 35 or 45, I wouldn’t be thinking that there’s a possibility I made my last movie. Because of my age and susceptibility to Covid, I do think about that in my darker moments. But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

He sounded matter-of-fact. I realize I haven’t described Wiseman’s voice yet, its warmth, its rasp, how he always seems to be suppressing a sardonic chuckle. The sense of wryness comes through whether he’s talking about the attempted subversion of the U.S. election results or his own death. It’s strange to think of “City Hall” as possibly his final statement on American democracy, a film that’s being read as a paean to old-fashioned civic virtues and the quiet dignity of the well-meaning bureaucrat. Not that it’s not all of those things. But as Morris has pointed out, Wiseman also possesses an unparalleled eye for the absurdity of the human condition. Morris once wrote that Wiseman “likes institutions like Fellini likes the circus. They are a backdrop or a metaphor for something else.” To treat him like “some junior-league sociologist,” he told me, insults his artistry and misreads his worldview.

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“Zoo,” 1993.Credit...Zipporah Films

“In many ways, the subject of Fred’s films is the surrealism of life,” Morris said, “this disjuncture between how we see ourselves and a hidden, underlying reality that at least partially emerges.” Morris cited a number of his favorite Wiseman scenes, all flickers of absurdity that puncture the self-seriousness of a moment: a monk interrupts a religious discussion to swat a fly in “Essene” (1972); the meeting in “City Hall” when one participant silently roots around in a bowl of sorry-looking candy; a scene in “Zoo” (1993) in which a wolf is castrated by an entirely female surgical team while a male attendant stands with his hands folded across his crotch, gazing on nervously. “Fred and I would have these arguments,” Morris went on. “I call him the king of misanthropic cinema. He would turn around and say: ‘I’m not the king of misanthropic cinema. You’re the king of misanthropic cinema.’ As if this throne of misanthropy had to be unremittingly debated.”

I ran Morris’s interpretation by Wiseman, to which he replied, “I’ve told Errol several times: sheer projection.” He acknowledged finding the reading funny, and partly accurate. But only partly. In making his movies, Wiseman explained, he’d witnessed both immense kindness and unbelievable cruelty. “If somebody asked me for a generalization about human behavior, I’d say, ‘Watch my films,’” he went on. “If you can say in 25 words or less what they say about human behavior, well, good luck to you. I can’t do it.”

Which, I suppose, also applies to any attempt at summarizing what his films have to say about the life of the American institution. I thought of the bracingly dark lecture on Melville delivered by a high school English teacher in “Belfast, Maine” (1999), which had a funny moment along the lines of those Morris loves, when the teacher, recounting to the stunned-looking teenagers a horrific drowning scene from “Moby-Dick,” seems to be confronting his own existential abyss. Then he moves on to another Melville book, “The Confidence-Man,” a bizarre, difficult novel and a surprising choice for a high school English class. To Melville, the teacher explains, everything in America is a confidence game. “They’re always telling you to believe,” the teacher says, “but anytime you believe in anything, it’s only setting you up to be the fool, to be the gull, to be the victim of the game.” He tells the class the title character of the novel was a huckster on a steamboat selling people what they wanted to hear.

“What does this tell us about the American dream?” he asks.

“It’s false!” one of the kids responds.

“It’s false,” the teacher repeats. “It’s a confidence scam.”

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“Belfast, Maine,” 1999.Credit...Zipporah Films

The scene comes more than three hours into a four-hour film, which, to that point, seems to have been a complicated but sympathetic portrait of a quaint coastal town near where Wiseman bought an old barn in the early ’70s, and where he frequently spends summers. The lecture changes the atmosphere, forcing the viewer to rethink everything that’s come before and all that remains. When I brought up the scene with Wiseman, he told me “The Confidence-Man” was one of his favorite novels.

But then there’s the final scene of “City Hall,” which, like the first scene of his first film (and which Wiseman had acknowledged could be the last scene of his last film), unfolds on a stage — in this case at Boston’s Symphony Hall, where Mayor Walsh delivers his State of the City address. Before the speech begins, we see rows of flags, a marching band with bagpipes and drums, the sort of patriotic trappings with which our outgoing president has festooned his never-ending MAGA spectacle, only here rallying the faithful for a liberal Democrat. As the audience stands for the national anthem, Wiseman cuts back to the stage, and we learn that the woman singing is an African-American police officer. She’s in full uniform, including a peaked hat and sidearm. A gangly white officer stands beside her, holding his own microphone. Smiling like he’s Marvin Gaye sidling up to Tammi Terrell, he joins at “whose broad stripes and bright stars.” And he has a lovely voice as well, a warbly tenor. It feels like a minor cinematic miracle, Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling, Judy Garland awakening in a Technicolor Oz — just the utter unexpectedness of what we’re witnessing, the bluntness of the symbolism, its naïveté, the fact that they’re cops (in this of all years), and yet perhaps, at least for some viewers, a stirring of emotion about flag and anthem the past few years had made all but impossible. Because it’s a Wiseman film, we get to hear the entire song, along with the applause from an audience already on its feet.

THE NEW YORK TIMES