Central Park and Canal Zone: The Art of Sound Editing and Audiovisual Storytelling

Earlier this year, Cannes Classics collaborated with Frederick Wiseman’s Zipporah Films and Steven Spielberg to digitally restore Wiseman’s filmography. The premiere of Wiseman’s Law and Order at the festival kicked off an extensive campaign of career retrospectives celebrating the work of the veteran filmmaker, with restorations that bring the bygone years of the mid-to-late 20th century United States back to life with sumptuous visuals and aural acuity. 

The quality of these restorations speaks not only to the efforts of the team behind them, but also to Wiseman’s technical prowess as a director and editor. Two of the more recent screenings in Austin Film Society’s Wiseman retrospective “Frederick Wiseman: Eight Systems,” Central Park (1989) and Canal Zone (1977), point especially to his knack for keen sound design and editing. Both restorations demonstrate Wiseman’s deliberate choices for aural transitions and building an immersive and rich soundscape that helps fill out the impressive scope of both projects.

In addition to their stylistic editing, Wiseman’s documentaries are well-known for their lengthy runtimes, with both Central Park and Canal Zone clocking in at just under 3 hours. This provides ample space for Wiseman to explore every crevice of the worlds he studies and to exercise his editing skills. In Central Park, Wiseman spends several days observing New Yorkers from all walks of life and covers what kind of labor and administration go into upkeep of the park. With Canal Zone, he looks into the lives of those working and living within the Panama Canal Zone, a concession of the U.S. between 1903 and 1979. Though the conversations and events Wiseman focuses on can feel at times dry, he keeps his films at a steady, rhythmic pace and employs techniques to make them feel shorter than they are. A couple of early sequences in Central Park follow a theological class working on their oration skills, and it threatens to run stale due to the repetitive exercises. But Wiseman seems mindful of this, and at one point begins regularly shifting between perspectives of a student performing in front of the class, her classmates, and the teacher conducting the lesson, maintaining intrigue and consistently re-engaging the audience while deftly carrying the audio track continuously through the visual shifts. 

Pace is hardly the only thing Wiseman accomplishes through his editing. As discussed in our first review of this series, Wiseman finds great meaning through deliberate juxtaposition, and in the case of these two films between visuals and the soundtrack. In the middle of the two theological class sequences, Wiseman turns to two young people sitting at a fountain in the park, casually discussing a gory, gruesome story one of them had picked up from a movie they’d seen recently. The darkness of that story is counterbalanced by truly lovely shots of people sitting around the fountain painting their surroundings, creating a noticeably absurd tonal difference. In that juxtaposition, a key tension of the film about Central Park and other public spaces like it becomes clear: a multitude of stories and people populate these areas at any given time, and the parks can and do accommodate people and their diverse pastimes.Wiseman cultivates a sense of normality to all these activities by syncing them together in scenes; both the recounting of the grim movie and the group painting session become relatable and desirable because they are joined harmoniously.

Festivals and celebrations make up the focal point of both Central Park and Canal Zone,  engaging similar yet still opposing themes of community-forming and how smaller systems operate within larger infrastructures. Where Central Park shows everything from a dinosaur festival to a memorial for victims of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Canal Zone finds various festivities commemorating the U.S. bicentennial in the summer of 1976. Wiseman’s frequent jumps between the many different convenings in Central Park speaks to the sociocultural diversity of late-1980s New York, foregrounding Central Park as a municipal institution that leverages connections between the city’s communities and its legislature. Canal Zone takes an opposite approach to exploring community, showing a tight-knit American enclave that’s both inextricably linked to the military-industrial state of the Panama Canal Zone and highly insulated from the rest of the Republic of Panama.

Wiseman finds a profoundly affecting story of how the U.S. citizens of the Canal Zone attempt to maintain strong ties to their North American countrymen by celebrating American holidays and honoring U.S. iconography. The film was produced early in the summer of 1976, documenting the build-up to the Zone’s commemoration of the United State’s 200th anniversary through smaller events, including a flag retirement ceremony, a Law Day celebration, and a seafaring service for Memorial Day. We also see speeches made at other festivities, like a high school graduation and a Boy Scouts service award ceremony, that aim to inspire the Zone’s inhabitants by reaffirming American ideals and social conventions. 

Wiseman smartly invests running time into all these demonstrations of Americana to tap into how a society of expatriate Americans fits into larger goals of the U.S. government to insinuate itself in Central and South America throughout much of the 20th century, especially through owning and operating the Panama Canal. He carries this narrative throughout other scenes of locals’ lives in the Zone by repeatedly showing key figures, particularly Canal Zone governor and head of the Panama Canal Company Harold Parfitt, involved in some daily administration and meetings, yet another signature of Wiseman’s documentaries. Wiseman mines more meaning by juxtaposing the extravagance and bombast of the patriotic celebrations with the banality of operating the Canal Zone as a political and economic entity. The community continued to make big shows of their presence within the Republic of Panama, even though their influence there continued to shrink as the U.S. government turned over control of the Canal to Panama and erased the Zone just a few short years following this film’s events.

It is signature features like his penchant for juxtaposition in editing that make Wiseman and his lengthy career so worthy of retrospection and continued praise. He excels at and is highly intentional with his filmmaking craft, though discourse on his techniques as an editor are often overshadowed by discussion of his efforts as a director and his meditative treatments of his films’ subjects. We will continue to laud his technical skill AND directorial panache in the next installment of our reviews for AFS’ “Frederick Wiseman: Eight Systems” series, taking a look at the Cold War with Missile and financial assistance in the United States in Welfare. 

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