Award-winning Filmmaker Frederick Wiseman to Speak at KSC's Mason Library Lecture

KEENE, N.H., 3/15/06 - Frederick Wiseman, one of America’s most renowned and prolific documentary filmmakers, will be the featured speaker at the Seventeenth Annual Mason Library Lecture at Keene State College. Wiseman will present sequences from several of his films and discuss his work on Wednesday, March 29, at 4 p.m. in the Mabel Brown Room in the L.P. Young Student Center.

Wiseman’s films deal with issues of social justice and inequality, exploring institutions and their effect on individuals and groups. Among his best-known films are Law and Order (1969), Hospital (1969), High School (1973), Welfare (1975), Adjustment and Work (1986), Public Housing (1997), Belfast, Maine (1999), Domestic Violence (2001), and Domestic Violence II (2002). He has received two Emmy Awards (1969 and 1970) and the Career Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association (1990).

His career began in 1967 with Titicut Follies, a look at conditions inside the Bridgewater State Prison for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts. Some of the scenes Wiseman filmed were so appalling that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts banned the documentary for 24 years, until the ruling was overturned in 1991. Wiseman has since earned wide acclaim and critical respect for his approach, which avoids such filmmaking conventions as narration, interviews, and added music.

Wiseman’s film High School will be shown in Putnam Auditorium on Thursday, March 23, at 7 p.m. In this film Wiseman turns his unblinking camera onto the daily life of a Philadelphia high school in 1968.

The lecture is sponsored by the Wallace E. Mason Library and the Keene Sentinel. For more information call 603-358-2723.