There’s a striking irony to the fact that City Hall is nonagenarian documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s 45th feature. It was shot amid the Trump presidency in 2018 and 2019 and is being released in the days leading up to and after an election that will hopefully result in the infantile authoritarian’s ousting. But Wiseman, who made his first documentary, Titicut Follies, in 1967, never makes films in response to the current political climate—at least, not explicitly. Rather, they’re miniature panoramas that, often by circumstance, reflect the political eras in which they were made.

Similarly, the film’s optimistic tone—which marks the culmination of an attitude he’s been inclined toward in his last several features—is also distinctive within Wiseman’s oeuvre. Consider such films as High School (1968), Law and Order (1969), Welfare (1975), Aspen (1991), and even City Hall’s most analogous predecessor, State Legislature (2007). At times these films feel derisive toward the institutions they document, in large part because of how they’re being portrayed. Wiseman undoubtedly believes in the power of institutions, but whether that power is being wielded for the benefit or the detriment of society is up for debate. Here Wiseman presents both the good and the bad, albeit sparingly, as a means of emulating the intricacies of municipal government and the ways it impacts peoples’ lives.

A Wiseman film isn’t a Wiseman film unless there’s a cut to some sort of custodial worker; interstices throughout his films largely concentrate on building exteriors and so-called throwaway shots of people in daily life, usually at work. One sequence in City Hall, among a series of seemingly inconsequential chasms that break up all the official affairs, follows an industrial trash compactor as it crushes large items, from a mattress and box-spring set to a gas-powered barbecue. In my head I can’t help but envision Wiseman directing that shot, marveling like a child at the machine’s power. And just as Wiseman might gape at the ability of this apparatus to break down such heavy objects, so, too, does he stand in awe, in a time when they’re most sorely needed, at the ability of institutions—and, more importantly, the people within them, and the people whom they serve—to build us up.   v

Dir. Frederick Wiseman, 275 min. Gene Siskel Film Center From Your Sofa