LA DANSE: LE BALLET DE L’OPERA DE PARIS (2009) will make you want to go to the ballet. Yeah, it’s that good.

Posted by Stephen Jannise

Frederick Wiseman has made a name for himself directing the kind of documentaries I treasure most. His films do not utilize narrators, zany animation, or talking heads like most documentaries, and Wiseman consistently gets away with it. When recently asked why he doesn’t resort to these narrative crutches, Wiseman essentially said that he shoots all the right footage and edits it together in all the right ways. His coverage tells the whole story. This may sound like bragging, but Wiseman has earned more praise for his methods from others than he could possibly give himself. His camera is all-seeing and all-encompassing.

His latest “whole story” is La Danse, which chronicles an entire season in the Paris Opera Ballet. This is typical of Wiseman, who focuses on a new institution with each film. Some of his other films, all with the simplest of titles, include State Legislature, Public Housing, Zoo, The Store, and Hospital. Over the course of La Danse, you will see seven actual performances of ballets both classical and contemporary. But you will also see so much more than that.

As is his style, Wiseman does not force story or character development out of his film; in fact, he doesn’t even structure the sequences in the film in the usual ways. You don’t follow a particular ballet through its rehearsal stages up to its performance, nor do you follow two or three particular dancers. The scenes may or may not be shown in chronological order; Wiseman provides no dates to confirm this. What emerges, then, is a collection of scenes ordered in a way that Wiseman felt most accurately describes a season in this institution.

Don't be late for rehearsal.

You’ll see a montage of the maintenance staff painting walls, buffing armrests, and picking up litter, then a rehearsal of a contemporary ballet danced by a man and a woman, then a scene featuring the director of the Paris Ballet working out the benefits that will be provided for certain donor levels, then a performance of a classical ballet featuring over 20 dancers. These scenes are not connected in any particular way, other than the fact that, seen together, they provide a total portrait of this ballet company.

By privileging Wiseman’s style, I don’t mean to suggest that I dislike documentaries that are structured as a linear narrative. If a filmmaker recognizes a story naturally occurring in the work, he or she ought to follow it, as evidenced in the recent favorite Man on Wire or in one of the greatest documentaries (hell, one of the greatest films) ever made, Hoop Dreams. But too often, this desire to force a story out of non-fiction results in a film that rings false, like 2008’s American Teen, in which a documentary about a high school is derailed by its decision to focus on four or five students clearly chosen for their similarities to archetypes from The Breakfast Club. At that point, why not just watch The Breakfast Club again?

This is why I feel Wiseman’s films are not only entertaining but important: his work provides lasting documents of the institutions he visits. By denying his films the cinematic comforts of narrated cohesion or meticulously chosen characters, he gives the films a greater gift: the infallibility of his almost scholarly approach to documentary filmmaking. I didn’t feel like I was getting Wiseman’s opinion of the Paris Opera Ballet, I felt like I had been given the same access to the Paris Opera Ballet that he had. His films are intriguing, mesmerizing, beautifully crafted ethnographies, which means above all that they are genuine, and which is probably why PBS continues to give him money to make them.

One of the amazing contemporary dances in the film.

Speaking of PBS, you’ll want to mark your calendars in order to keep La Danse in mind. Wiseman announced during his recent appearance on Charlie Rose that La Danse will air on PBS sometime this summer. This film is more than worth the price of admission, but if you can see it for free on PBS it’s an absolute steal. (You should check out that Charlie Rose appearance, by the way. You’ll get to see a few scenes from La Danse, as well as a montage of scenes from his other films.)

While I’m telling you to keep your eye out for things, you should be on the lookout for an opportunity to see another documentary called Sweetgrass. Filmed by a couple of Harvard professors in the same ethnographic style as Wiseman, Sweetgrass documents the journey of two Montana cowboys and about three hundred sheep as they make their way across 150 miles of Montana mountain range. This film proves the importance of the work done by filmmakers like Wiseman, as Sweetgrass just so happens to capture the last trek that will be undertaken on those mountains, marking the end of a tradition that had lasted over a century. Now we can all partake in this breathtaking ritual, and once you’ve seen it, you’ll never forget it.

Sweetgrass will make you want to herd sheep through mountains. Yeah, it's that good.