Frederick Wiseman is a gifted historian of American institutions. His films about teachers, doctors, social workers, research biologists and many other specialists and generalists of modern life, capture as truly as any imaginative portrait of our times the way that individuals have shaped large tracts of contemporary experience for better and for worse. The people he looks at are not idealized, whether as heroes or villains; they are shown as workers (both masters and servants) in the medium of abstract ideals or bureaucratic conventions. I think of Wiseman as a historian because of the demand he makes of his materials. Like the artist, the historian must search for the significant detail that carries the imaginative force, and it is an incidental difference that the historian is obliged to deal with things that really happen. But there is a difference. For the artist, the deepest sin is to include in the work any element that fails to contribute to its fictive form. For the historian, the deepest sin is to exclude any fact that contributes to the total truth of the reality portrayed. Wiseman selects like an artist, but he has the morality of a historian. He does not aim for a picture that has more coherence than the things it represents.

–David Bromwich, The New Republic