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Reviewed by:
  • State Legislature
  • Kevin Hagopian
State Legislature (2006). Produced, Directed, Edited by Frederick Wiseman. Distributed by Zipporah Films. www.zipporah.com 217 minutes.

Frederick Wiseman is the cinematic poet laureate of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory – he is fascinated with the paths by which the ideologies of institutions of social control find their way into the heads of individuals who fall in the range of those institutions. Wiseman’s depiction of the integration of citizens into these institutions of social control has ranged from the tragic (the celebrated sequence in 1968’s High School in which a teary principal reads a letter from a former student serving in Vietnam who seems to be announcing less his affirmation of Northeast High’s “values” than his exhausted submission to them) to the Absurd (1983’s The Store’s recycling of consumer fantasies as a bland, by-the-numbers ritual). [End Page 77]

But State Legislature offers a new and hopeful position in Wiseman’s oeuvre: here, we see citizens struggling to make one of Wiseman’s trademark structuring social institutions (the Idaho State Legislature) work democratically, and, by fits and starts, succeeding. Wiseman in autumn has found optimism for the future of at least a part of the American political process.

State Legislature begins with an impromptu civics lecture by the Speaker of the Idaho House of Representatives to a group of schoolchildren in the rotunda of the neoclassical Idaho capitol building, exactly the kind of public affirmation of a benevolent social mission Wiseman likes to use his films to undercut. But the struggle of this film is not one by an administrative elite to subject a docile constituency to the exercise of power. Instead, it is the struggle of a public institution to come to a consensus in the name of that public. As the Speaker says, the Idaho legislature is a cross-section of the state, its members no smarter or more ethical than their constituents, and that is how we see them. They are awkward as speakers, proud (sometimes dangerously so) of their “amateur” status, and given to homespun appeals to “common sense” over policy and legislative expertise. Many of the legislators chosen by Wiseman seem to imagine their state as a place where a mythical Main Street America of small businesses still thrives. The repetition of the phrase “this is not New York” reflects an oblivious provincialism on the part of some in the film. But if State Legislature is anxious about such xenophobia, it finally respects the society that phobia seeks to serve, however errantly.

Structurally, Wiseman’s films often consist of individual sequences that have an internal dramatic structure, organized into a larger pattern which lacks a major turning point or argumentative destination. Thus, if there is a narrative in Wiseman’s work, it is an ideological one, not a dramatic one. Lacking voice-over and other conventionalized means of drama in the documentary, Wiseman’s effects are cumulative.

In State Legislature, Wiseman is unusually structurally self-conscious. The film samples the entire legislative process, although not in a linear manner, and not in reference to any single bill. We see testimony by ordinary citizens, lobbyists, and experts; markup sessions; private lobbying sessions, committee meetings, press relations, floor and committee debate, and finally voting. Here, the vote to report an anti-gay marriage bill out of committee comes as close to a dramatic climax as Wiseman has ever given us, because the debate on the bill, far from banal, becomes an unselfconscious but profound philosophical discourse in the faith of the citizenry in self-government.

Wiseman often foregrounds internal audiences in his films, witnesses at the exercise of power. These are almost always quiet listeners, seemingly affectless, even disengaged. At its most extreme, this tactic abstracts the people listening from the speech acts we see (or believe we see) them listening to. In this film, Wiseman’s listeners are intent but not partisan, anything but the alienated and passive bystanders of many of his previous films.

There are scenes in the film which are transcendentally perverse, vintage Wiseman moments in which his cynicism about the way society manages power and punishment is in full cry...

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