Frederick Wiseman’s approach to documentaries is so radically interventionist, his personal imprint is so strong in his choice of subject and his approach to it, that he has no need to show himself in the mirror, or put his voice on the soundtrack, or allow the films’ participants to address him and make viewers aware that he’s there. Though Wiseman is never seen or heard, he’s present in virtually every frame by the force of his analytical conception of the events onscreen. In his new film, “In Jackson Heights,” his powerful and far-reaching ideas come through with the emphatic clarity of a manifesto.
All three words of the title are important: the movie isn’t about Jackson Heights, and it certainly isn’t about the essence or definition of Jackson Heights. It’s a record of some people, places, and events that Wiseman found in Jackson Heights—but what he found there is what he was looking for. “In Jackson Heights” is, for the most part, a non-spontaneous documentary, a documentary by design. Wiseman did some filming in the street, in unplanned and uncontrolled circumstances, of things that took place when he happened to be there. But he didn’t put much of that in the film. Rather, most of the film takes place at meetings that were planned in advance. What Wiseman found in Jackson Heights is people talking, mainly in organized, formalized settings that have their pretext and their agenda defined. He finds civic life taking place in public and quasi-public places—houses of worship, stores, storefront offices of non-profit community organizations, and local governmental offices, including the storefront office of the neighborhood’s City Council representative, Daniel Dromm.
The movie runs more than three hours, and Wiseman lets the talk unfold gradually, with respect for the underlying logic of the matters at hand as well as for the passions that they inspire. The discussions that he films involve such matters as fair labor practices, gentrification, the legal ramifications of urban gardening, the push for change in traffic-safety regulations, school redistricting, police harassment of gay and transgender bar patrons, fear of deportation, citizenship-test study, and the laws and norms to pass a taxi-driver test. In other words, the movie is about the very stuff of life—the ability to make a living, to live in safety, to live without fear, to plan for the future.
The problems that Wiseman finds are local, practical, intimate, but the emotions that he films are grand and tragic. One woman’s account, delivered in a storefront meeting, of her daughter’s harrowing trip through the desert after crossing the border from Mexico has the desperate dramatic coherence of a feature film in itself. A discussion in a barbershop, about the suspected role of a planned Business Improvement District in the displacement of local businesses and the takeover of property by major real-estate investors, has the analytical scope of an investigative opera.
Here, as he has been doing throughout his career, Wiseman films people in walks of life that rarely get them in front of a camera, walks of life that don’t often involve public speaking, and he films them talking. It should be no surprise that they have a lot to say and that they say it engagingly. (As I wrote here recently, it’s a pet peeve of mine that educated filmmakers write working-class characters as stolid, silent types.) Most people do; Wiseman cares enough to look and to listen, to take an interest in what they have to say—and to find the wider societal implications in what they say and to put the ideas along with the people at the center of his film.
That’s why, if the end-of-year lists were to be made today, “In Jackson Heights” would be a contender for Best Screenplay. The fact that its dialogue wasn’t written by Wiseman is irrelevant. He didn’t author the words but he authored their cinematic form, the images and the rhythms, the selection and the context, that rescues them from the stream of time and seemingly sculpts them, in high relief, onscreen. Wiseman (who recorded the sound himself) and the cinematographer John Davey find a splendidly simple visual trope to lend the speech of individuals a public and collective identity: filming discussions for the most part without closeups or speakers isolated in the frame, but, rather, with the speakers set in a composition featuring many people together, as if creating a real-life theatre of political discourse taking place on the wing.
Wiseman highlights the distinctions between neighborhood and community. What he finds in Jackson Heights are communities that seem to have little connection. Latino immigrants meet and speak with each other, as do members of gay-pride organizations; an imam preaches to Muslims in a mosque, a priest preaches to Catholics in a church, Jewish congregants speak to congregants during a service in a synagogue. The only significant public gathering that features a diverse group of attendees is a public meeting regarding traffic safety—and there, Wiseman shows only one speaker, the representative of a nonprofit organization devoted to that purpose. The neighborhood of Jackson Heights appears to be inhabited by members of communities who live side by side but, identifying with their groups, seem to have little contact with those who identify with other groups.
But the crucial connections that spark most of the movie’s discussions are provided by nonprofit organizations and by community organizers who work for them. These organizations that play a central role in the film—whether as the very sites of discussions in their storefront offices or during the visits of organizers to the stores and offices of local merchants—come off as crucial gears in the social and political process. For recent immigrants, these organizations are key points of entry into civic life, the engagement with public institutions as well as the insulation that eases contact with organized forms of public power.
These residents and their organizers aren’t solely protesting or venting grievances—though they’re doing that, too, as well they should. They’re beginning to take part in what comes through, in Wiseman’s view, as the essence of American life, which is its political structures and systems. If there’s a theatre of public life that Wiseman finds, these nonprofit groups are the impresarios who provide the stage for residents who, for the most part, are unconnected from and unrepresented in political life—not least because many aren’t citizens and therefore can’t vote.
The absences in “In Jackson Heights” are as conspicuous as the presences—the absence of relations between communities; the absence of the voices of children and teens (I wonder whether filming in schools might have revealed closer inter-community friendships); the absence of the resented gentrifiers themselves; the absence of resentment overall, including from multigenerational residents against relative newcomers there only for a decade or two.
But the biggest and most conspicuous absence is homes. Wiseman’s subject is political life in the most classical sense—the polis, the life of the city—and his emphasis on urban dwellers’ struggle for a part in the political process, his vision of what surpasses the boundaries of the self-defined community and reaches far beyond local neighborhood, is the idea of equality under the law, fair treatment by the law—in short, the political ideal of the United States. Wiseman’s humanism isn’t narrow in scope; it’s based on the inextricable connection between personal intentions and desires and the societal circumstances that foster or thwart them, the near-constant impingement of the workings of the law on the conduct of daily life, of the inseparability of personal fulfillment and the quest for justice.
“In Jackson Heights” is about America, about the American Dream; it’s a loving depiction of people who pursue it despite mighty obstacles—and of the dream itself, to live without fear of the authorities, to believe that the government will protect one’s interests fairly, to believe in the prospect of a better life through one’s own labors. But, as Wiseman also makes clear, the system that makes personal progress possible is a legal system of fair and just conditions, not utterly unconstrained ones; it depends not on the rhetoric of boundless possibilities but on the definition of legitimate ones,.
The underlying subject of “In Jackson Heights” is the meaning of the “unum” in “E pluribus unum.” It isn’t, as this year’s Presidential-campaign xenophobes would have it, conformity to some preëxisting national culture that, given the nation’s immigrant origins, it would be absurd to call nativist. The plural is culture; the unifier is the political system itself: devotion to the Constitution, to the rule of law, to the exercise of the rights that it guarantees, and to the responsibilities and protections that it affirms. What Wiseman saw in Jackson Heights could perhaps have been found elsewhere, and what he filmed there may not even be the most salient aspects of Jackson Heights. Rather, what he found in Jackson Heights is, as the film meticulously, intellectually, allusively, yet ardently shows, a crucial aspect of American experience, a working-out on film of the American democratic ideal.
