Institutions: Early Work of Frederick Wiseman

Around the same time that the French theorist Michel Foucault was publishing books like Discipline and Punish and Madness and Civilization, explicating the ways in which modern societal control was produced and exercised in institutions, Frederick Wiseman’s 16mm camera was documenting the very events and people that made up these spaces of regulation and subjectivization. A 6-film selection of Wiseman’s earliest work, newly restored and available, perhaps will shed concrete light on Foucault’s famous quote “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”