City government touches upon almost every aspect of our lives. Most of us take for granted necessary services like sanitation, veterans affairs, elder support, parks, licensing bureaus, recordkeeping, as well a myriad of other activities that support the citizenry. In City Hall, through a series of his trademark masterfully edited vignettes, filmmaker Frederick Wiseman explores the inner-workings of the government of his native Boston. City Hall shows a city government successfully offering a wide variety of services to a diverse population, while addressing racial justice, affordable housing, climate action, and homeless. USA, 2020, 275 minutes.
Buy a ticket at anytime. After this content becomes available November 13th at 12:01 am EST, you’ll have 5 days to start watching. Once you begin, you’ll have 72 hours to finish watching.
Rivertown Film is pleased to present this new film by legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman in a Virtual Theater, where you will be able to view this 275 minute film at your leisure over a period of 72 hours. The recipient of an Honorary Acacemy Award, none of 91 year old Frederick Wiseman’s 43 films have ever been shown in a Rockland County theater.
“Magisterial… An exploration of civil society and the common good… Wiseman has answered that laugh line (‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help’ – Ronald Reagan) and its cruelty with a titanic body of work that – meeting by meeting, institution by institution – serves as a powerful refutation. His is the art of resistance at its finest.” (NYTimes Critic’s Pic) – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
“The individuals who find themselves in front of his camera are usually there for just a few minutes, and only a handful are clearly identified. But those few minutes hold you rapt, and so do the next few, and then the next few, until you find yourself happily lost in a maze of colliding narratives, bound by themes and connections that are sometimes obvious and sometimes subliminal.” – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
“An affecting testament to the countless anonymous people who undergird the part of a functional democracy that’s routinely taken for granted or demonized as the “Deep State.” Wiseman delivers an engrossing rebuke to that toxic myth by putting viewers into their own deep state: In this case, one of reflection, admiration and profound gratitude.” Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
“A love letter to civic governance, and the notion of democracy.” – Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal
ABOUT FREDERIC WISEMAN
Mr. Wiseman is a film and theater director of 45 films, primarily focusing on American institutions. In 2019, he was the honoree of the Library Lions Award from the New York Public Library and received the Pennebaker Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards. In 2018, he was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. In 2016, he received an Honorary Award for lifetime achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Board of Directors. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has won numerous awards, including four Emmys. In recent years, he directed The Belle of Amherst, Beckett’s Happy Days in Paris and Vasily Grossman’s The Last Letter at the Comédie-Française in Paris and Theatre for a New Audience in New York. A ballet inspired by his first film, TITICUT FOLLIES (1967), premiered at the New York University Skirball Theater in 2017.
