The Projects, Up Close and Personal

“Public Housing” is another of Frederick Wiseman’s extraordinarily intimate variations on Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” his penetrating documentary lens once again acquainting us with the fascination of the routine. Fascination in some cases, that is, only if you’re not living it.

In this instance the locale is not the peaceful New England hamlet of Wilder’s play but Chicago’s pulsating Ida B. Wells housing development, where the perpetual crackling of a police radio on Wiseman’s soundtrack competes with “Pop Goes the Weasel” blaring from a cruising ice cream truck’s loudspeaker. And the routine is not one shared by most Americans, Wiseman’s chosen people this time being a cross-section of the troubled South Side housing project’s 5,000 mostly black residents, many of whose lives are the equivalent of getting in the way of a wrecking ball.

“High School,” “High School II,” “Law and Order,” “Hospital,” “Juvenile Court” and “Welfare” are just some of Wiseman’s films that, without narration, have quietly chronicled institutions that inspire foamy debates on Capital Hill. “Public Housing” is among his most significant and compelling works, making its scheduling by KCET-TV Channel 28 all the more maddening. Because its 9 p.m. Dec. 1 airing on PBS conflicted with a KCET pledge drive, it’s been delayed by the Los Angeles station until Sunday, and relegated to an 11 p.m. time slot that equals oblivion for a film that runs three hours and 15 minutes. Talk about your wrecking balls.

Wiseman’s technique is to observe at close range without seeming to trespass, integrating his lens into the Wells “projects,” for example, in ways that give this volatile urban slab the tone of a small town.

Heading its heroes and heroines is the feisty, red tape-battling Tenants’ Council president who is on the phone here aggressively urging that the sad-looking teenage mother in her office be allowed into an empty apartment. It’s a tough sale, but this people’s advocate vows to keep trying.

Meanwhile, young girls jump rope, teenage boys shoot hoops, adolescent mothers mind their children, women do each other’s hair and a nun tells a slender woman at a rummage sale, “You’re getting too skinny. Are you eating?” Then they embrace.

In another section of the film, former Los Angeles Laker Ron Carter, now working for the department of Housing and Urban Development, urges residents gathered in a hall to help themselves the old-fashioned way, by becoming entrepreneurs. Elsewhere, elderly seamstresses with busy fingers project a dignified grace at their sewing machines and address each other formally by their married names. A stooped old woman studies a cabbage like a crystal ball in the kitchen of her tidy flat, seemingly unaware of the polite repairman fixing her leaky bathroom sink. And in another apartment, an exterminator chats amiably with a resident while spraying for roaches.

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The serenity is deceptive, for insecticides won’t erase the teeming drugs and crime that fill much of “Public Housing.” Its expressions of poverty and despair are a metaphor for the faceless outer edges of society appearing as background buzz on all of those entertaining cop shows in prime time. “Public Housing” supplies the faces.

Ever present here are Chicago Housing Authority police, one of them seeming almost to harass a woman named Debbie he suspects of lingering on the street because she’s linked to drugs. Another offers protection to a vacant-eyed addict hiding from angry drug dealers he’s somehow crossed. Still another tries to intercept an angry teenage girl stalking a smaller girl with a bottle.

Wiseman’s rawest, most amazing brush with reality is a crack addict’s lengthy interview with a drug counselor, two middle-aged black men genially facing each other across a desk, each weary for a different reason, one hearing the other routinely pour out his life’s troubles in slurred speech caused either by the drugs or a baseball bat that someone once crashed into his skull. So open is this crack-head about his destructive conduct that merely getting someone interested in his life seems to be his high of the moment.

There’s a trade-off in Wiseman’s method of foregoing voice-overs and supplementary visuals. Gaps in the narrative surface like huge potholes, any questions you may have go unanswered and historical context is not a Wiseman priority. Although no one here appears to notice the camera, moreover, it’s reasonable to assume some of these people are playing to it in hopes of wringing the most from their five minutes of fame. Would the repairman have been as pleasant to the old woman away from the lens? Would the exterminator have been as helpful? The cop as tough with Debbie? Or perhaps even tougher? There’s no telling.

More important, though, is Wiseman’s larger truth, the one meant for the eyes and ears of cocooned public television viewers who may be learning from this great filmmaker for the first time of the existence of places like the Wells projects and those who reside there. Some of them nurturing dreams of escaping this cycle of poverty, but many others, it seems, living from day to day utterly without hope.

* “Public Housing” airs at 11 p.m. on KCET Channel 28.