In ‘Maine,’ Wiseman Finds Meaning in the Mundane

A nice thing about the small screen is the big screen.

The late great Frenchman Francois Truffaut’s brilliant “Jules and Jim” was on television the other day, and coming mid-February to Turner Classic Movies is a weeklong festival of U.S. oldies along with three nights of director Martin Scorsese reflecting passionately on his own cinema favorites.

It gets you thinking. Who has been the most important American filmmaker of our age? Not the most popular, most worshiped or trendiest, but the one future historians and social scientists will most likely designate for Mt. Rushmore, the one whose work is mandatory for any time capsule showing coming generations how we lived and died, and how our institutions succeeded and failed?

Here’s one vote for Frederick Wiseman.

Wiseman the documentarian, whose vital 30th film, “Belfast, Maine,” tonight sprawls imposingly across four hours and eight minutes on KCET, while monitoring the fascinating commonplace in this port community of 6,474 people? The same.

His films are always lengthy, this one especially so. And because it starts at 9 p.m. on PBS, seeing it as it airs pushes you into the wee hours. This is another case of public TV dangling something enticing in front of viewers and saying, in effect, “Here it is. You find a way to watch it.”

Although meeting that challenge--via perseverance or the VCR--is worth the effort.

How extraordinary is the ordinary, how consequential the seemingly inconsequential? Very, Wiseman quietly affirms in film after film, shunningvoice-overs and supplementary visuals while entrusting his narrative entirely to the camera and its subjects. Whatever his topic, Wiseman believes in pauses, bringing to filmmaking moments of solitude that give audiences time to weigh and interpret what’s set before them.

For more than three decades, he has touched the pulse of America in ways rare for documentaries, making him the nation’s peerless video archivist and observer of our behavior.

He went on a roll from the start, shooting his first film, “Titicut Follies” (1967), in the Massachusetts State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. In “High School,” a year later, he examined values imparted to students in Philadelphia. He also used institutions to examine urban problems in two 1969 films, “Law & Order” and “Hospital.”

On and on he’s traveled, from “Welfare,” “Basic Training” and “Meat” to “The Store” and “Public Housing,” his remarkably intimate 1998 chronicle of South Chicago’s troubled Ida B. Wells development, whose teeming poverty and despair were Wiseman’s metaphor for the faceless outer edges of society.

If nearly every Wiseman close-up of spellbinding minutiae evokes New England images of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” that goes doubly for “Belfast, Maine,” where before the lens are the relationships and casual routine that give a community its glue from one life cycle to another.

Although every close-up camera alters reality at some level, Wiseman’s never seems to be trespassing, even when appearing to be just inches from the faces of its subjects. No posing or mugging. Amazingly, they seem totally oblivious.

It’s essentially a working-class Belfast that Wiseman and cinematographer John Davey capture while speeding past graceful white mansions en route to rural shanties and trailer towns where the film’s attention to detail is so acute that you can almost hear rust forming on the debris.

Nothing much--and everything--is happening in “Belfast, Maine,” where skilled hands often prevail. Inside Weaver’s Bakery, a worker quietly cuts chocolate doughnuts from a sheet of dough at dawn. Somewhere else, an artist dabs paint on his canvas in the afternoon light. Anguishing Willie Loman wags a finger as amateur thespians rehearse “Death of a Salesman.” Women fold clothes at a laundermat with the camera tight on the sloshing suds. On other fronts, a gay and lesbian group hashes over gay marriage, some of Belfast’s younger crowd spend their evening shooting pool, and corn pops at a movie house. Somehow, it’s all very seductive.

Although People magazine’s connoisseurs of chic have anointed Belfast “culturally cool,” its uncool gray roots are visible here. Wiseman is especially attracted to Belfast’s caregivers, two of whom lift a decaying old man from his recliner so they can weigh him, as his much younger self gazes from a wall of photos of him with his family. Elsewhere, a frail and aged woman’s white hair blends into the pillow beneath it as she tells her nurse: “My mother used to say that the young may die, but the old must.”

Contrasts are everywhere. Compare the individuality of Belfast residents with the industry assembly lines where many of them work. Compare, too, the exquisite beauty of trees silhouetted against an apricot sunset with the ugliness of a man shooting dead the coyote he’d snared in a cruel leg-hold trap. And with other men silently skinning foxes through the night in this region where stalking and killing animals in the wild is regarded almost as a birthright.

Underlying this picture of a former whaling town is the subtext of working classes as heroic. In a high school, students listen intently to a balding teacher paint an enthralling picture of that peg-legged human harpoon, Capt. Ahab, in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.”

Imagine, the teacher says dreamily about Ahab, eyes shining with admiration through thick spectacles, “a commercial fisherman from Nantucket achieves tragic stature.”

Melville’s message, he adds, is that “the common man is as good as . . . “

“The rich,” a girl interrupts.

“Yeah,” he says. “As good as the rich.”

* “Belfast, Maine” can be seen to-

night at 9 on KCET-TV.

* “A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies,” a three-part documentary, can be seen at 8 p.m. on Feb. 19, 26 and April 1 on TCM.

*

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.