Going Public

Wiseman strikes again, plus Cassavetes

A profitable trip to Europe: I saw two masterpieces, Leonardo's The Last Supper in Milan, and Frederick Wiseman's Public Housing at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland.

The Last Supper you know about. Public Housing is brand new -- this was the world premiere of a vital, overpowering tour de force of nonfiction reportage by Cambridge's world-renowned documentarian. The latest in Wiseman's 30-year filmic exploration of American institutions (which began with Titicut Follies in 1967 and High School in 1968), Public Housing casts a hard, mostly heartbreaking, look at everyday life at the Ida B. Wells project on the South Side of Chicago, an eroding all-black ghetto sliced off from the city by a six-lane highway (an invidious racist maneuver by the late mayor Richard Daley). It's just Wiseman and his cameraman, John Davey, shooting inside and outside, as people gather on the dangerous streets or in their crumbling apartments, dutifully attending tedious meetings to try to make existence at Ida B. Wells a little more civil and decent.

As always, Wiseman, like no other documentarian on earth, establishes such an ambiance of trust (and here he's a middle-class white guy from Boston!) that he virtually dematerializes from the scene. Those filmed proceed as usual; nobody "acts" for the camera. We slide magically close to reality itself, though it's configurated, via Wiseman's marvelous editing, into artful, revelatory vignettes.

These can be frightening. A forlorn drug addict squats in the shadow of a police station for protection, while those to whom he owes money presumably trash his apartment. Two middle-aged men who have committed the crime of stepping off a city bus are searched and humiliated by Chicago cops. A senile old woman at a kitchen table stares perplexed at a cabbage, occasionally pulling at one of its leaves. A cokehead with an archetypal sad-clown face, wishing an end to decades of addiction, offers his saga of woe, a soliloquy of downwardness, to a counselor across a table. (Fortunately, the counselor listens sympathetically. He recommends treatment instead of a prison sentence.)

Wiseman offers many scenes of the citizenry of Ida B. Wells, as well as unsung bureaucrats, valiantly trying to dig out of the mire of unemployment, crime, drugs, and welfare. Although Bill Clinton's America has abandoned them, the good and the brave at Ida B. Wells say no to giving up. "We're the people," down but not out, and they give Public Housing the cumulative impact of an African-American Grapes of Wrath.

Public Housing is scheduled for PBS broadcast on December 1. It would be in PBS's interest to hold off on a TV airing so that this monumental film can be shown theatrically, even at its The Godfather length of three hours and 20 minutes. That's a reasonable running time for this great work of Frederick Wiseman, the don of American documentary.

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CRITIC PHILLIP LOPATE, who's typical of American disbelievers in the cinema of actor-director John Cassavetes, used the occasion of a Miramax-sponsored retrospective of six Cassavetes films (they're at the Coolidge Corner August 29 through September 4) for a second look. "They are much more tightly structured and narratively propulsive than they seemed when they had their premieres," he conceded recently in the New York Times. "One reason it took film critics (myself included) so long to appreciate Cassavetes's virtuosity as a filmmaker was that he broke with the perspectives and deep-focus framing of classical mise en scène. He did so because he wanted to convey a sense of the world as always in flux, and of human nature as chronically unsettled, up for grabs."

How does Cassavetes's pal Ray Carney, a BU professor and the celebrated author of The Films of John Cassavetes, feel about Lopate's about-face? "He's bowing, doing a public mea culpa, so I say, `Welcome to the Church!' " Carney explains over the phone. "But the cynical part of me thinks that Cassavetes has to be dead 10 years to be appreciated. Critics are always the last to know.

"Those who are most passionate about Cassavetes are viewers ages 18 through 30, and I get e-mails every day from young filmmakers who say Cassavetes has inspired them."

Although Carney put together this New York-LA-Boston touring series as "Six from the Heart: The Love Films of John Cassavetes," he observes, "It's always love with a razor blade, love with broken glass." Three of the films, Husbands, Love Streams, and Minnie and Moskowitz, have been out of circulation since before Cassavetes died. "See them spanking new, dripping from the lab, in 35mm. See them as they haven't been seen," says Carney, who will speak at the August 29 Coolidge opening of A Woman Under the Influence and Minnie and Moskowitz.

He concludes with a warning. "Cassavetes's films don't look pretty. They don't seduce with acoustic charms. In fact, they're the opposite: sweaty, uncomfortable, unresolved, in your face. But Cassavetes is in a tradition with the greatest American artists of the century: de Kooning, Pollock, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, as great as great jazz, which is very very great."

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary[a]phx.com.