-By Maria Garcia

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Few institutions have escaped Frederick Wiseman’s steady gaze, including a now-infamous psychiatric facility in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and a disturbingly familiar high school in Philadelphia. Since Titicut Follies (1967) and High School (1968), Wiseman has made 36 feature-length films, probing American institutions in order to define the values that shape them. His often lengthy documentaries—many are three hours, and some stretch to twice that—form a moral history of the generation that survived the Vietnam War. In Wiseman’s latest documentary, La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, we get a fleeting glimpse of the man whose twin passions may be the City of Paris and the art of ballet. Wiseman studied at the University of Paris, and worked there as a young lawyer, afterward abandoning his law career for filmmaking.

In some ways, La Danse is a return to Ballet (1995), Wiseman’s documentary about the American Ballet Theatre: We witness leonine artistic directors—in this case, Brigitte Lefèvre—struggling to ensure their institution’s financial security, and preserve the delicate hierarchy of stars and starlets that comprise the heart of any ballet company. Like Ballet, La Danse is also a beautiful investigation of craft. We watch as the dancers first master a phrase, and then a sequence and, finally, perform parts of “Medea,” “Paquita” and other ballets in dress rehearsal. Wiseman also wanders the strangely silent halls of the Palais Garnier, sometimes aiming his camera at a plasterer, but often simply charting the real and metaphorical conduits that are the heart and lungs of the place. In one sequence, we drift to the roof, where Wiseman alights on an unexpected sight that would stretch credulity in any narrative film.

There, a beekeeper in netted pith helmet and gloves carefully removes combs from the beehive as the insects swirl around him, his only witnesses a pair of timeworn gargoyles—and, of course, Wiseman. It is as if the filmmaker had suddenly come upon a reflection of himself: If the mirrors of the Paris Opera Ballet studios provide the dancers an image of themselves and their art, the beekeeper in his aerie, the City of Paris as his backdrop, is Wiseman in apograph, carefully inspecting the inner workings of the beehive that, in this case, is a French ballet company, but which might easily have been an American juvenile court, a welfare office or a meatpacking plant. So sublime is the metaphor that it encompasses both the 79-year-old artist and the institutions he plumbs, for the honeycombs are factories but also nurseries for the natural inhabitants.

The business of the ballet company is encapsulated in a scene in which Madame Lefèvre presides over a meeting about the access which wealthy American donors will be offered; after some wrangling, she declares studio visits impossible but acquiesces to free tickets. It’s vintage Wiseman, and a humorous diversion from the tireless work of the dancers. The queen bee of the company, Madame Lefèvre manages the young upstarts and the mature ballerinas with authority and affection. In a meeting in which a financial director drones on about his negotiations with the government to ensure the dancers their pensions—they can begin collecting at 40—a sly Madame Lefèvre insists that success in such matters depends mostly on the continued prestige and excellence of the Paris Opera Ballet.

Then there are the dancers in whose bodies seem to reside all of the emotions that inspire the great ballets. Wiseman never celebrates them in an obvious way; instead, he observes, knowing that the intimacy he provides will breed an appreciation of form and artistry and storytelling. In the dancer, Wiseman discovers the same dedication to a passionate but wordless method of performance not unlike his own unique style of filmmaking. The dancers find their parts in repetitions of the same movement, and Wiseman “finds” his institutions—for they have become “his”—in years spent behind the unblinking eye of a static camera. In the final scenes, when we see the dancers in performance, we get much more than the wealthy donors because we’ve seen the beehive from the inside out.
-Nielsen Business Media