Frederick Wiseman, 96, Penetrating Documentarian of Institutions, Dies

Frederick Wiseman, a director whose rigorously objective explorations of social and cultural institutions constituted one of the more revered bodies of work in American nonfiction filmmaking, died on Monday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 96. His family announced the death through Zipporah Films, the distribution company he founded in 1971.

Mr. Wiseman, who received an honorary Academy Award in 2016, preferred to call his works merely "films" rather than documentaries and was closely associated with the cinéma vérité approach. His 1967 directorial debut, Titicut Follies, a harrowing portrait of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane, was long banned in the United States on the grounds that it violated inmates' privacy; the ban was lifted in 1991 and the film later aired on PBS.

Later projects earned strong praise: In Jackson Heights (2015) was called "most richly textured and sumptuously beautiful" by one critic, and Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (2017) was lauded as among his greatest films.

United States, Cambridge, Massachusetts

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