Throughout 2010, the Museum of Modern Art in New York is presenting a comprehensive survey of films by Frederick Wiseman. Celebrating the recent acquisition of many new prints of Wiseman films, the MoMA is screening a few films each month until the end of the year. So far, many well-known and controversial Wiseman films screened at the MoMA have included Basic Training (1971), Primate (1974), and Racetrack (1985). This month, the museum is playing The Store (1983), Wiseman’s first color film.
Superficially, The Store seems like a departure from Wiseman’s earlier, heavy-hitting subjects like public housing, army basic training, and cruel animal testing. But the expected frivolity of Wiseman’s subject soon gives in to his preternatural ability to capture and display the weaknesses of human character in all its manifestations. With uncomprable talent, Wiseman is able to equate the Dallas Neiman-Marcus department store with the prisons, hospitals, and army barracks of the films which framed his career early on. Through Wiseman’s scrutinizing lens, we are able to see the power structure of the store and the regimental approach to controlling all levels of the workforce, from the shampoo girls to the fashion buyers and the board of executives.
Wiseman’s close and considered study of the store’s employees and management focuses a lens towards the instability of a consumer culture and the inequity of the serving and the served. A particularly strong theme is that of the role of personal shoppers and the wealthy women to whom they cater. Many scenes focus on these shoppers who select incredibly expensive garments which will be worn by someone else. Desires are persistently transferred and unfulfilled in this service culture.
The Store is a thorough exploration of the perversities of consumerism: shop girls are forced to practice smiling before the shop opens; the store model (a woman who appears in nearly every other scene, each time wearing a different couture outfit) approaches each of the tables in the shop café, announcing her dress is available for purchase on the third floor; and the manager of the furs gallery calls a man to tell him the sad news that his wife is just too petite to properly carry off a full-length sable coat.
The kindness of the shop girls and the lovely employees is often met with condescension from the wealthy shoppers, and the contradictory manifestations of class are apparent throughout the film. Like many great Wiseman documentaries, authority creates an imbalance of power and the good don’t go unpunished.
Wiseman is a national treasure, and his films should be the measuring rod for American life. He poetically portrays the greatest flaws of American culture without ever standing in front of the camera or saying a word. His films quietly and humanely captures the full range of American lives in a way which never loses potency or a sense of urgency, even decades after their creation. And because Wiseman never makes his presence known and refuses to influence the action on screen, he is trustworthy—a Wiseman film should be accepted as a definitive and poetic truth.
(Frederick Wiseman at MoMA continues until December 31, 2010. For a full list of screenings, please visit MoMA.org)
