For fans of groundbreaking documentaries, especially those concerning life and culture in the groovy (and not-so-groovy) 1960s, March in Oklahoma City offers an embarrassment of riches thanks to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art and Rodeo Cinema Stockyards.
The museum docs will make you think and feel, while the Rodeo lineup will make you dance.
Ain’t that America?
Beginning March 13 and continuing each Thursday through April 24, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art presents Frederick Wiseman: Documenting American Life, a seven-film retrospective spotlighting arguably America’s greatest documentary maker. The Boston attorney-turned-moviemaker, who turned 95 earlier this year, pioneered the cinéma verité style that seeks to document its subject matter as realistically and honestly as possible. Eschewing voiceover narration, interviews and music cues in his docs, Wiseman has steadfastly refused to spoon-feed viewers over seven decades of landmark films.
His 1967 debut, Titicut Follies, details the environs of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in eastern Massachusetts. Its title comes from a talent show hosted at the facility — the film periodically dips back to scenes of stone-faced inmates/patients singing on a stage — but Titicut Follies is hardly whimsical. Shot in grainy 16mm black and white, it is a startling exposé of how Bridgewater guards and doctors mistreated the inmates. Asylum residents are paraded around naked, rarely allowed to bathe and subjected to verbal abuse. In one particularly horrific episode, guards relentlessly taunt a mentally ill inmate that he needs to clean his spotless and largely barren cell. Agitated, the inmate reacts by smacking his head repeatedly against a wall until he draws blood. Titicut Follies proved so upsetting that Massachusetts corrections officials successfully litigated to prevent it from being screened by the public, a court order that remained until 1991.
Wiseman’s 1968 sophomore effort is a densely fascinating portrait of life in a Pennsylvania high school. High School exemplifies the richness of Wiseman’s ostensibly detached approach. Film critics of the time saw the doc as evidence of an oppressive education system that valued conformity and respect for authority above all else — and to be sure, High School features plenty of students being chewed out for mild offenses. “It’s nice to be individualistic,” a school administrator cautions a girl over the length of her prom dress, “but there are certain times to be individualistic.” And yet, considering how today’s culture wars largely play out in public schools, it can be jarring to see a female teacher in 1968 instructing an assembly of girls on how to use the pill.
If the age of reality TV has taken some of the bite out of Law and Order, this chronicle of a Kansas City police precinct offers a complexity that one never saw on Cops. Amassing hundreds of hours of footage, Wiseman captures some extraordinary incidents of racial profiling and police brutality, but the picture is not an indictment of law enforcement. Law and Order also uncovers instances of police being exceptionally compassionate, such as when an officer tries consoling a lost and crying toddler.
Best of the lot is Welfare. Released in 1975, this epic work examines a maddening bureaucratic maze that would have given Kafka the shakes. Embedded in a windowless welfare office in New York’s Lower Manhattan, Wiseman’s fly-on-the-wall camera catches scene after scene of desperation and rage. Some of the welfare workers try hard to help the clients; others are jaded and confrontational. Happy resolutions are nearly nonexistent. Welfare clocks in at nearly three hours, but it is continually riveting, such as a jaw-droppingly racist conversation between a mentally disabled veteran and a Black security guard. Like Titicut Follies, Welfare is a challenging watch, but a vital one.
While the institutions that interest Wiseman vary — an asylum, a school, a police department, the welfare system — common threads emerge. The allure of following rules. The diminution of critical thinking. The seemingly constant undercurrent of racism. Wiseman’s approach is presumably objective, but he has a definite point of view. These films are meticulously structured, purposeful and tick along to a discreet inner rhythm.
Rockin’ in the USA
Over at the Rodeo Cinema Stockyards, the rhythm of the movies is more overt. A trio of all-time-great music documentaries — er, rockumentaries — screen this month: 1968’s Monterey Pop, 1970’s Woodstock and 2021’s Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).
Monterey Pop spotlights the 1967 music festival in Monterey, California, but director D.A. Pennebaker delivers more than simply awesome tunes. Immersed in scenes of hippy-dippy bacchanalia, the film nails the charmingly naïve flower-power vibe of the era. As one would expect, the music is superb. The concert made a star of Otis Redding and confirmed the preternatural soulfulness of Janis Joplin. The Who, Jefferson Airplane and the Mamas and the Papas are among the memorable performances, but nothing can hold a candle next to the literal fire that Jimi Hendrix creates with his guitar. And, yes, I’m using “literally” correctly.
The Grand Poobah of concert flicks, Woodstock is a big, meaty and wildly entertaining time capsule of the August 1969 music festival held on a farm in Upstate New York. The stats of that music fest remain impressive — some 450,000 concertgoers, 32 music acts, 742 overdoses — but Woodstock the movie endures because it deftly illustrates why this event was a cultural milestone, the apex (or nadir, depending on your point of view) of a generation that fervently believed peace and love could be a viable way of life. In 2025, flying cars and talking dogs seem more within reach.
With a four-hour running time, Woodstock is the heartiest of rock ’n’ roll meals, from a Richie Havens appetizer to the after-dinner acid tab. There are too many stellar performances to name, but suffice it to say highlights include Joe Cocker, Sly and the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Director Michael Wadleigh let loose a posse of scrappy camera people, including a 25-year-old Martin Scorsese, to roam throughout the three-day happening. What they collected is poignant, hilarious, sweet and weird, from hippies frolicking in mud to a guy tasked with cleaning out the portable toilets. And just to be clear, those scenes are not connected.
Woodstock wasn’t the only blockbuster concert festival in the summer of ’69. At Mt. Morris Park in New York City, the Harlem Cultural Festival encompassed soul, blues, gospel, Motown, funk and more. Footage of the show languished in a basement for 50 years until it was rescued by Questlove, he of The Roots fame, who directorially shaped the celluloid treasure into Summer of Soul. The extraordinary lineup features Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, B.B. King, Mahalia Jackson and The 5th Dimension, to name but a few. The resulting movie is an exhilarating celebration best described by the title of a surprise gospel hit from ’69 performed here by The Edwin Hawkins Singers: “Oh, Happy Day.”
This article appears in Alcoholmanac 2025.