Frederick Wiseman awarded Lifetime Achievement Award

The National Academy for Television Arts & Sciences awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award to Frederick Wiseman, one of the great pioneers of direct cinema and director of such notable films as Titlcut Follies, High School, Aspen, and Primate. Frederick Wiseman has produced, directed and edited 38 films on a wide range of topics. With shooting ratios that have exceeded 100:1, Wiseman gained entrance into institutions and organizations that, at first, merely tolerated his presence. But the longer he stayed, his hosts grew to see him as one of their own...thus providing an opportunity for Wiseman to film life as it happened. Wiseman has described his films as “biased, prejudiced, condensed, but fair.” Wiseman did not tolerate narration, interviews, or reenactments. Because of this his films can feel rather raw and unpolished, but that is also their beauty.
According to the National Academy for Television Arts & Sciences,

While Wiseman’s documentaries are based on completely un-staged events and contain no interviews or voiceover narration, they are less an objective portrait of reality than an accurate portrayal of the filmmaker’s interpretation of the subject, tempered by a deeply held obligation to be fair to the people who pass before his camera. Wiseman typically does little research before shooting, describing the shooting as the research and the finished film as a report on what he has learned. In between lies up to a year of rigorous and painstaking editing, resulting in documentaries that are equal to the best fiction films.

 Wiseman's first film, Titicut Follies, is about a hospital for the criminally insane. Banned for decades by a Massachusetts court citing concerns about patients' privacy and dignity, the film was finally allowed a national airing on PBS in the early 1990s.
According to Wiseman's website, his latest project, Boxing Gym, is scheduled for release later this month.