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Box set coming in January, per the press release about a major BFI-wide Frederick Wiseman retrospective:

Also in early January, a 3-disc Blu-ray box set, containing TITICUT FOLLIES (1967), HIGH SCHOOL (1968), HOSPITAL (1970), JUVENILE COURT (1973) and WELFARE (1975), will be released by the BFI, packaged with an illustrated booklet and additional special features.

Wow!!! This is a total surprise. Incredible news!

Hopefully the last Shirley Clarke film to get a Blu won’t be a million miles behind.

On one hand, it's great that we are finally getting HD releases for the early Wiseman films. On the other hand, it is a bit disappointing that this doesn't contain more titles, especially those released within the same time frame such as 'Basic Training' and 'Essene'.

It's worth adding that if you're in the UK and have a BFI Player subscription (or a free trial for 14 days), there will be nine Wisemans available on BFI Player. From the press release, they will be: TITICUT FOLLIES (1967), HIGH SCHOOL (1968), WELFARE (1975), MULTI-HANDICAPPED (1986), CENTRAL PARK (1989), BALLET (1995), NATIONAL GALLERY (2014), EX-LIBRIS: THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY (2017) and MENU-PLAISIRS – LES TROISGROS (2023). Menu-Plaisirs is also having a cinema release, though I suspect a limited one given that it's four hours long!

Hopefully if the box set does well enough, there may be more on disc.

Hope it's only a Vol. 1, given all his films are restored in the same breath.

I strongly suspect that, as Gary suggests, sales will play a pivotal role in whether or not this is viable.

BBC2, Channel 4 and Film4 used to show Wiseman films back in the 1980s and 1990s (Channel 4 had a 4-film season in 1986). I don't think Welfare ever made it to telly over here but Near Death had a whole night dedicated to it in 1991 while the last one to be shown was National Gallery on BBC4 about a decade ago, the only one of his I've seen.

Apart from Welfare the other titles in the BFI box seem to have much shorter running times. I gather that the more recent ones are marathon-length.

jlnight wrote: Fri Aug 29, 2025 2:34 pm BBC2, Channel 4 and Film4 used to show Wiseman films back in the 1980s and 1990s (Channel 4 had a 4-film season in 1986). I don't think Welfare ever made it to telly over here but Near Death had a whole night dedicated to it in 1991 while the last one to be shown was National Gallery on BBC4 about a decade ago, the only one of his I've seen.

Apart from Welfare the other titles in the BFI box seem to have much shorter running times. I gather that the more recent ones are marathon-length.

Law and Order was the one I saw from the 1986 season. I also saw Titicut Follies on BBC2 in 1993, which the Radio Times billed as the world television premiere. I had previously seen it at what was then the National Film Theatre.

Near Death, all nearly six hours of it, may be the longest film to be shown on UK TV in one go, commercials apart. The Human Condition is a nine-hour trilogy and Shoah runs that long too, but both were shown on Channel 4 over three and two nights respectively. Near Death and The Human Condition are in black and white too - the sort of programming C4 came up with then that you couldn't imagine nowadays.

Great news that Wiseman is willing to license these now. Hopefully whoever has them in the US, assuming someone does, will at least tease their plans so we can decide whether to encourage BFI or wait. I'd buy a Complete Wiseman box set in a heartbeat.

It does seem a bit of an odd selection, and something of a missed opportunity. I'd have preferred complete chronological sets, as this almost is, but between 1967 and 1975, when the first and last of the five films in this set were released, there are four missing: Law & Order, Basic Training, Essene, and Primate. And if that's too much to commit to, thematic sets—Education, Military, Arts, Government, Commerce—would have been an interesting way to organize career-spanning surveys.

senseabove wrote: Fri Aug 29, 2025 7:22 pm Great news that Wiseman is willing to license these now. Hopefully whoever has them in the US, assuming someone does, will at least tease their plans so we can decide whether to encourage BFI or wait. I'd buy a Complete Wiseman box set in a heartbeat.

He's licensed his films before, mainly in France (where Blaq Out released almost his entire filmography through In Jackson Heights in three DVD box sets) but also to a lesser extent in Germany and Japan. I'm not optimistic that he'll drop his insistence on self-distributing in the U.S. but hope springs eternal.

The man is 95 years old. Surely, he must be thinking of passing the torch to another US distributor at this point. Criterion seems the perfect home for a complete set, but who knows. I'm happy to pick up a bunch of BFI sets too.

I could see him selling (or licensing long-term) his catalog to another distributor who specializes equally in home video and licensing for education: Cinema Guild, First Run Features, or Icarus Films. Criterion/Janus does home video and repertory programming extremely well, but their educational licensing model is (at least as of a couple of years ago) unworkable.

Coincidentally, two weeks ago I recommended Near Death to a friend of mine who is an E.R. doctor here, specifically the two sections with Dr. Taylor. Came up when we were talking about his dissatisfaction with medical shows in television (including The Pitt) and when he mentioned how far they fell from reality, Wiseman came to mind, especially when it would be nearly impossible to make Near Death and Hospital nowadays. As a model for bedside manner, Dr. Taylor's scenes sounded like something that would draw his interest. (FWIW, from what I can tell, Dr. Taylor is still around as an advisor at Harvard Medical School.)

For years I had been hoping that Criterion (or someone) would make their most impressive box set from his complete works. More recently, the comprehensive restorations of his back catalog & career retrospectives raised my hopes that some type of preparation for this was in the works while he's still alive . I was also hoping that Kanopy's pulling all his titles from their site meant something was in the works. I'm glad to see some of the titles getting upgraded, though a box with a few selections across his entire career is not so attractive as I would really like to get rid of the 3 volume dvd boxes with burned-in French subtitles. IMHO, I would consider Wiseman the best/2nd best American director of all time (in large part because of my social science background & his effectiveness in revealing how American institutions function over a time period when those institutions are falling apart). Admittedly a complete box would be more attractive to schools/libraries than to most consumers. However, individual releases or thematic smaller collections can be also be made available for that purpose. A UHD box collecting his more recent titles would also be welcome & good way to break things up. I hope BFIs efforts are successful, but I worry a more carefully curated selection or a more intentional strategy for getting his works out would be an easier sell.

Years ago, I tried to get my library to buy some of the films directly from Zipporah, which they refused, telling me they were too expensive!

I have the Zipporah High School DVD, but it's so badly encoded, I never picked up any of the others. Their Blu-rays of the more recent films are good, but I'll happily toss everything in the bin if the complete works of the new restorations come out.

Lowry_Sam wrote: Fri Aug 29, 2025 10:03 pmI hope BFIs efforts are successful, but I worry a more carefully curated selection or a more intentional strategy for getting his works out would be an easier sell.

You have to be realistic. A UHD release of Wiseman's complete works is clearly total fantasy given manufacturing costs at this point - I can think of few more certain money-losers and indeed label-bankrupters. And his profile is nowhere near as high in the UK as it is in his native country, which I imagine is why the BFI is testing the water - not least because they'll know from extensive experience that documentaries are intrinsically a harder sell than higher-profile fiction features.

I sympathise with people's frustration that they're not releasing every last scrap of footage that Wiseman ever shot, but... well, if they know an eccentric millionaire or two, I'd be happy to arrange an introduction to the BFI's decision-makers. But the bottom line is that the BFI's home video arm is expected to be one of the income-generating departments.

One of the most interesting allusions in other films to Frederick Wiseman's work turns up in the much, though understandably, maligned Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, which begins with an asylum forced tube feeding sequence that the director Joe Berlinger in his commentary track directly mentions as being a homage to a similar sequence in Titicut Follies.

As an aside, Berlinger of course is more notable as a documentary filmmaker himself, notably of the Paradise Lost true crime documentaries (imagery of which he also folds into Book of Shadows), and is part of why Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is both a disaster as a sequel to one of the most famous shakeycam found footage horror films ever made (Berlinger also notes on his commentary that as a professional documentary maker he hates faux-documentary shakeycam with a passion and that influenced his decision to make Blair Witch 2 as a more conventional horror film about the mania surrounding the fictional film itself. Which would seem to have made him quite a bad choice to be director of a Blair Witch sequel!), but also fascinating if seen as a film that is folding all sorts of allusions to previous documentary films into it.

If the BFI manages to squeeze out a second box set and only that, I hope they include Near Death and Public Housing - at least they'd have released my very favorite ones shot on film.

MichaelB wrote: Sat Aug 30, 2025 11:32 am

Lowry_Sam wrote: Fri Aug 29, 2025 10:03 pmI hope BFIs efforts are successful, but I worry a more carefully curated selection or a more intentional strategy for getting his works out would be an easier sell.

You have to be realistic. A UHD release of Wiseman's complete works is clearly total fantasy given manufacturing costs at this point

I agree which is why I thought UHDs would only only be considered for his most recent projects where the difference in PQ (particularly for the longer films) might be noticeable (ie. Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros). I was thinking smaller theme-based sets might be more easily marketable: a French collection, education, government, commerce, entertainment, justice/penile system, and then a sampler overview to catch stragglers.

criterionsnob wrote: Fri Aug 29, 2025 10:18 pm Years ago, I tried to get my library to buy some of the films directly from Zipporah, which they refused, telling me they were too expensive!

I have the Zipporah High School DVD, but it's so badly encoded, I never picked up any of the others. Their Blu-rays of the more recent films are good, but I'll happily toss everything in the bin if the complete works of the new restorations come out.

I used to purchase these titles for a library; they were incredibly expensive DVD-Rs.

Lowry_Sam wrote: Sat Aug 30, 2025 5:40 pm

MichaelB wrote: Sat Aug 30, 2025 11:32 am

Lowry_Sam wrote: Fri Aug 29, 2025 10:03 pmI hope BFIs efforts are successful, but I worry a more carefully curated selection or a more intentional strategy for getting his works out would be an easier sell.

You have to be realistic. A UHD release of Wiseman's complete works is clearly total fantasy given manufacturing costs at this point

I agree which is why I thought UHDs would only only be considered for his most recent projects where the difference in PQ (particularly for the longer films) might be noticeable (ie. Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros). I was thinking smaller theme-based sets might be more easily marketable: a French collection, education, government, commerce, entertainment, justice/penile system, and then a sampler overview to catch stragglers.

I would be pretty shocked if he was using 4K cameras even at the point of City Hall and Menu Plaisirs. There is a better argument to be made for using the discs for HD-in-UHD just to get 100gb discs to better streamline the sets!

I think this is very exciting, and would not be surprised if given his apparent retirement they are now shifting their plans for Zipporah’s catalog in the US to be how he wants it to be for his legacy in years to come to be secure rather than to make sure he can maintain his production workflow (and just getting them all restored and onto DCPs was probably a hugely cost intensive step towards that effect!)

I’ve actually hoped for UHD’s for certain TV shows that top out more or less in HD just to have an entire season on as few discs as possible so I’d welcome the same for Wiseman, but I don’t expect that to happen due to the economic reality of producing such a release.

I don’t know how practical it would be for Wiseman to make a 4K nonfiction film. Given the mobility and long takes he would likely need (or at least prefer), it could create a lot more difficulty that he’d rather not have, but maybe technology has progressed to the point where it’s feasible, or even done already. (Anyone know?)

Given the added production cost, would there be any savings from putting say 3 Blu-rays of content on one UHD disc?

FWIW, Wiseman said he thinks his filmmaking days are over in a recent interview

Something interesting that I haven't seen be mentioned yet (and is pretty cool) is how Steven Spielberg is acknowledged in the end credits for the films that have received restorations. Wonder if he was the main financial backer behind the restoration project.