- Zipporah Films
- Aspen
Of the ten films playing in the Frederick Wiseman retrospective currently underway at Doc Films (which, full disclosure, my wife Kat Sachs and I programmed), Aspen (1991) is one of the documentarian’s most underrated films, if not one of the most underrated American movies, period. It plays in the series tonight at 7 PM. Like Robert Altman’s comparably novelistic Nashville (1975), Aspen is a both a city portrait and a State of the Union address, a bracing mix of cutting social satire and heartfelt Americana. It’s also prescient in its analysis of American society at the dawn of the first Bush administration, the subject of a current cinematic wave that includes Cold in July, Foxcatcher, It Follows, Red Army, White Bird in a Blizzard, The Wolf of Wall Street, and the low-budget comedy L For Leisure, which screens Thursday at the Chicago Underground Film Festival.
This theme of whitewashing the culture turns chilling in the movie’s final third when Wiseman visits a literature course at an adult-education center in town. One older man—a standoffish type in a charming cardigan and square-frame glasses—lambasts the Gustave Flaubert story under discussion because he refuses to relate to the heroine, an impoverished woman of below-average intelligence.
