Category: Documentary

From a feature essay on the films of Fred Wiseman:

For more than 50 years and across nearly as many films, legendary director Fred Wiseman has made a career of exploring the public institutions of the modern world. From libraries to public housing and city hall to the welfare office, Wiseman’s collected oeuvre provides a ringside seat to the daily work of government bureaucracies and other public settings — many of which will be (often frustratingly) familiar to readers of Planning magazine.

Wiseman’s style is not for everyone: scenes of daily life unfold at their own natural pace, and with minimal cutting. Shots are long, background noises are present, and seemingly endless minutes creep by with very little conventional “movie action”: a woman sweeps a floor; children fidget waiting for the start of an all-school assembly; a researcher sorts photos in the library.

But these marginal times and spaces are where the pathos of people and places reside. Rather than summarize or digest the material for us, Wiseman’s camera strives to inhabit these places for a time, so that we may come to understand what it means to attend this school, or live in this housing, or be at the mercy of this social service agency. And while the camera does not flinch from confronting the reality of the interactions it captures — some of which are tense, violent, or even graphic — it does so with empathy. Wiseman is never exploitative or voyeuristic, and while his films are often funny, the humor is never at the expense of his subjects….

For the full essay, see the July 2020 issue of Planning Magazine.

In these days of global pandemics, hurricanes, floods, raging wildfires, and other disasters of seemingly biblical proportions, it can be hard to remember how devastating even a simple heat wave can be — especially when the conditions of poverty, aging, urban air pollution, and failing infrastructure combine, as they did in Chicago 25 years ago. In the summer of 1995, the heat index spiked to more than 126 degrees, leading to the death of more than 700 residents in just one week.

This human-made tragedy is the subject of Cooked: Survival by Zip Code, a new PBS/Independent Lens documentary by Judith Helfand based on Eric Klinenberg’s excellent 2002 book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Courtesy Kartemquin Films.

As the film explores, most of the victims were low income, elderly, and Black, and they died alone and isolated — killed more by social neglect, structural racism, and poor planning than the heat itself. For people living on the edge — both physically and economically — access to a reliable electric grid, an air-conditioned library or senior center, or even just a simple crosstown bus can mean the difference between life and death.

At the heart of this analysis is a simple and striking “heat death map,” which uses the basic tools of spatial analysis familiar to most planners to make the case, finding “almost perfect overlaps” between neighborhoods with the most heat-related deaths and those with the highest levels of poverty.

The film is available for streaming. Viewers will also find extensive background and follow-up material on this pressing and oft-ignored challenge.

From Planning Magazine.