The Store and Law and Order: Making the Mundane Extraordinary

Even the most ardent fans of American documentary filmmaking of the mid-to-late 20th century would be forgiven for not having seen the earlier efforts of observational auteur Frederick Wiseman. An independent filmmaker through and through, Wiseman has been producing and releasing his own films for the better part of six decades under his company Zipporah Films, though newer restorations of his older works have not been readily available for distribution for some time. 

Thanks to the efforts of the staff at Austin Film Society and a collaboration with Zipporah Films, and much to my delight, many of Wiseman’s hard-to-find films are showing with multiple screenings this fall, and I’ll be providing reviews for the “Frederick Wiseman: Eight Systems” series throughout their run at AFS. 

The series began in early September with showings of The Store (1984). Wiseman’s meditation on U.S. consumerism and excess of the early 1980s takes place at the flagship store and corporate headquarters of Neiman Marcus during a holiday season that also marked the company’s 75th anniversary.

Historical context grounds The Store in the time it was made: In 1982, the Reagan administration was in the midst of instituting a deregulatory economic policy promoting a free market that stoked consumerism. Though Reagan’s administration is credited with cooling stagflation (a term many of us may be far too familiar with at this point), the economic policies of this time also hastened the expansion of the income gap and the national debt by endorsing an ethos around the accumulation of wealth that has become a hallmark of the decade’s legacy.

The Gordon Gecko-esque attitude inherent to this sort of capitalist excess may not be better characterized than by an upscale department store like Neiman Marcus during the 1982 holiday season. Several interstitial shots show shoppers using escalators to climb higher and higher into the store and its luxurious offerings, almost aping the socioeconomic upward mobility so championed at the time. Many of the store’s employees, aside from executives and salespeople, are shown only occupying the building’s basement and other lower levels. And the assembly of high-end products—from priceless gems to fine fabrics and sable skins (so many sable skins)—looks like office monotony against a background of pale white walls and sterile lighting. This juxtaposition is made even more effective by Wiseman’s focus on the string of in-store carolers, fashion shows, and personalized styling services amidst warm and inviting shades of festive red and green.

WIseman’s knack for impactful juxtaposition not only appears in the film’s cinematography but also in his editing, which keeps the intersecting characters and stories clipping along at a nice pace while still finding meaning in the events shown. The Store, like the rest of Wiseman’s filmography, employs fly-on-the-wall filmmaking techniques—like featuring certain figures and locations repeatedly so viewers can become as familiar with the surroundings as those who were actually there. Some sequences, such as a long meeting on Neiman Marcus’ future advertising goals, can feel a bit drawn out, but Wiseman balances these out with quick cuts to carolers belting out holiday classics, in-store toys and gimmicks, and office birthday celebrations involving a stripper dressed as a chicken. Wiseman finds thematic tension in such starkly contrasting sequences, shining a spotlight on the grinding, monotonous work it takes to put on such gaudy festivities as Neiman Marcus did for Christmas in the 1980s. 

In contrast to the glitz of The Store, Wiseman finds uniformity in the Kansas City, MO, of Law and Order (1969): a solid, unchanging background to display the aches and pains of implementing the still recent Civil Rights Act and other related federal legislation. The film was shot four years after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the historic bill and focuses on the Kansas City Police Department, which became notorious for civil rights-related conflict during riots immediately following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. 

Law and Order occurs several months after the Kansas City riots and primarily follows patrol units during stops for various suspected crimes, including casual conversations between officers. By focusing on these subjects, Wiseman highlights the challenges police departments faced internally in enforcing civil rights legislation—tensions which surfaced most overtly between cops and the general citizenry. Wiseman records some police officers bragging about their brutal treatment of people of color, while others are shown committing such acts in very tough-to-watch scenes: one young Black man arrested on suspicion of car theft is repeatedly shoved into the pavement and the rear of a police vehicle, and a young Black woman apprehended on suspicion of engaging in prostitution is choked for several minutes while being berated with interrogative questions. Later scenes in the film depict managing sergeants attempting to reason with their patrol officers to comply with the new civil protections. These pleas are largely dismissed or outright contested by patrol officers, with no ramifications to their duties or employment levied at them. 

Contemporary reporting on Law and Order read the conflict shown in the film as the struggles the police face when enforcing the law. But this paints an incomplete picture, excusing the brutality we see as just cops trying to do their job. 

The Store found its narrative and themes through juxtaposition in cinematography and editing techniques that are meant to be noticed, but Wiseman seeks to evade notice in Law and Order. The black-and-white cinematography fits the aesthetics of documentary of the late 1960s, as do Wiseman’s unremarkable visual and sound editing choices. These simpler formal elements still find their impact, as Wiseman makes an emphatic point of what the true work of a municipal police department and its officers is by heavily featuring scenes involving paperwork and managing civil complaints at the local precinct. These scenes, again featuring no narration or talking-head interviews, stand out against the sequences of police violence, producing a sense of conflict in viewers over the responsibilities of law enforcement by giving witness to some deeply uncomfortable, and other somewhat relatable, aspects of police work.

The Store and Law and Order ultimately highlight different stages of sociopolitical change. The former finds a system of troublingly imbalanced capitalism and consumerism well in place and practice, while the latter is unsettling in its own way with cops in several cases blatantly ignoring new legislation protecting against cruel acts of police brutality and racism. Even from the earlier stages of his career as a documentarian, Wiseman seems to have understood and found value in plainly depicting his films’ subjects with as little interpretive framework as possible. Both films are absent of narration or any other messaging from the filmmaker, instead offering careful and attentive observation of day-to-day events in well-established systems and skilled editing that, no matter how indictable this reviewer may see things, allow audiences to draw their own conclusions. 

As an introduction for me to Wiseman, who continues to helm some of today’s most well-regarded documentaries at 94 years old, as well as to AFS’ running series of new restorations of his earlier documentaries, I am deeply intrigued by how his style as a director and editor and knack for intensive observation continued to evolve in the first half of a stunningly impressive career. And as for our coverage of the ongoing “Frederick Wiseman: Eight Systems” series at AFS, we’ll next be looking at Wiseman’s Central Park and Canal Zone, his surveys of the lives of the many people who lived around the legendary New York City park and the Panama Canal, respectively.

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