One of Frederick Wiseman’s many talents as a filmmaker is his ability to achieve poetic abstraction by scrutinizing concrete activity. The passages in Meat (1976) detailing the corralling and slaughter of steers inspire one to meditate on human beings’ relationship to animals. The opening 25 minutes of Canal Zone (1977), which show the intricate workings of the Panama Canal, lead viewers to think about the maintenance of society as a whole. The portraits of bodies in movement in Ballet (1995), La Danse (2009), and Boxing Gym (2010) encourage reflection on our corporeality, and so on. Wiseman is fascinated by how things work, but he often eschews linear sequences depicting one step of a process after another; instead, he likes to edit around a procedure, fostering a sense of rumination through the collection of diffuse details.
The corn-harvesting sequence speaks to another peculiar quality of Monrovia, which is the way Wiseman makes routine activities seem significant and milestones seem trivial. A short sequence of a butcher preparing hamburger patties generates an unaccountable sense of wonder (or at least Zen-like fixation), yet a longer sequence depicting a citizen celebrating his 50th year of membership at the local Masonic lodge feels oddly flat. Like Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames, which played here earlier this year, Monrovia develops a fascinating internal tension between momentum and tedium, and like Kiarostami’s film, it’s at its most commanding when people don’t factor into the action. Even the succession of portraits at a barber shop and a beauty salon come across as impersonal (Wiseman has rarely seemed so uninterested in faces as he does in this movie); the focus isn’t on the heads in close-up, but rather what’s being done to them.
Directed by Frederick Wiseman. 143 min. Fri 11/2-Thu 11/8, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $11.
