Hospital

I am talking about a 1970 documentary from legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman:

For many people here this will be the first Frederick Wiseman documentary they’ll see me review; however, way back in ’16 I talked about At Berkeley, a 4 hour piece on the prestigious American university the University of California, Berkeley. Those unfamiliar with Wiseman, my review discusses how he is a fly on the wall documentarian who offers a comprehensive look at his subjects, mainly American institution. Berkeley offered a broad scope of not only its students but also all the employees who contribute to the school being open, down to maintenance workers (groundskeepers, janitors). At the end I’ll mention how I was able to track this down, but in fact an inspiration for me to finally see something else from Wiseman after all these years was how his ’89 movie Central Park was discussed for a few minutes during the latest episode of the Pure Cinema Podcast.

The way I was able to see this, most of his filmography was available to choose from. One reason why this was selected was its 84 minute length fitting my schedule; the other is that for over 30 years, my late mother was a nurse at a hospital. She started shortly after the footage from this was filmed; while her hospital wasn’t a large one in East Harlem, NYC like the Metropolitan Hospital shown here, she still dealt with a variety of people of different races & ethnicities, although they weren’t always poor like many of those are shown here. She also didn’t deal with social welfare, which is partially shown here. We see everyone from a college student on a bad trip and neglected toddlers to a slashing victim & a young trans person.

It was a fascinating world which proved how difficult life in that world could be… yet it also showed sick people being helped so the rewarding aspect was also presented. After all, my mom worked at the same hospital for 33 years before retiring-she wouldn’t have lasted nearly that long if she found nothing worthwhile about the job. While more footage would have been welcomed by me, what was presented was fascinating. Doctors and nurses were shown not just trying to take care of patients but also advocating for them when talking to social workers and the like. There’s blood from a throat slashing, surgery-which always makes me queasy-and in a rather memorable scene, plenty of vomit… although apparently not as much as in Triangle of Sadness. It was something that probably is still relevant to presenting life in a major hospital in a major American city.

I take no pride in admitting this, but I went to the backwaters of the Internet to check it out. I’d love to stream it legally—the only way to do that is via Kanopy, which requires me to either be a student somewhere or do it via my local library. As I can do neither, it requires shadier methods. Perhaps as a way of validation, my review can spread awareness to a filmmaker that presumably is unknown to many across the world due to his work almost entirely in the nonfiction world. The hope is to see far more from Wiseman in the future, on a far more frequent basis. Believe it or not he’s still making movies, in his early 90’s; presumably he hasn’t slowed down yet I have no idea what his next subject will be if something new comes out within the next few years.