The Front Row: “Hospital”

It’s a commonplace, though an accurate one, to say that the documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman is a keen analyst of institutions, as seen in his fourth feature, “Hospital,” from 1970 (which I discuss in this clip). The method and substance of his analyses, though, is the proof of his genius. Wiseman, who studied law and was a law-school professor, doesn’t so much film institutions as discover them. He goes to a place of concentrated and focussed activity—a hospital, a school, a public-assistance office, a business, a university, even (as in his most recent film, “In Jackson Heights,” one of his best) an entire neighborhood—and manages to reveal the abstractions, the rules and the exercise and negotiation of power, behind the surfaces of daily life.