The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film by Aitken Ian

Author:Aitken, Ian
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Law and Order

(US, Wiseman, 1969)

Law and Order shows the work of the city police force in Kansas City, Missouri, from precinct administration to routine patrol duty. Director Frederick Wiseman travels with cops in their patrol cars, and shows the police responding to different kinds of calls, ranging from domestic quarrels to armed robbery.

Stylistically, like all of Wiseman’s documentaries, Law and Order offers no voice-over narration or expository titles, but presents a series of sequences that alternately depict the police as kind and cruel, as both benevolent and brutal. For every scene in which a policeman does something like find a lost purse for an elderly woman, there is another such as the one in which a detective seems inexplicably to ignore a man who wants to report someone with a gun.

In one sequence a policeman becomes a father figure to a lost little girl, bringing her to the precinct station and giving her candy. The policeman himself provides the perfect emblem of his ‘parental’ position by taking out a pipe and smoking it as he drives the patrol car with one arm wrapped protectively around the child, and Wiseman clearly encourages this view of him by shooting the policeman from a low angle, as if from a child’s perspective. However, elsewhere in the film we see events that are likely to make us angry, such as the scene where a detective seems excessively violent to a prostitute, choking her even as he denies doing so. The event unfolds in a poorly lit basement and is the only time in the film when Wiseman uses artificial light in the form of a sun gun, tingeing the violence with a visually eerie tone.

The film thus places viewers in a conflicted position in relation to the police, their torn response analogous to the position of the police themselves. The film suggests that the sometimes inadequate or excessive responses of the police are, in turn, symptomatic of the impossible demands made on them as a result of larger social problems. Wiseman himself has said that his preconceptions about the police changed, grew more ambiguous, as a result of the experience of riding on patrol with them.

Wiseman is always interested in showing how a particular institution relates to the larger social fabric, and Law and Order suggests that American society, not unlike the police and the viewer, are torn. The police can neither solve domestic crime nor prevent it (a theme to which Wiseman returns again in Domestic Violence, 2001); often, all they can do is inform people that ‘there’s nothing we can do about it’, the response they give in both the opening and closing sequences. The domestic emphasis of routine police work is expressed by the number of sequences in the film that refer to family and social tensions. In addition to the two domestic arguments that bracket the film, there are also, among others, a man charged with having molested a boy, a man who threatens to kill another man for molesting his niece, and a runaway boy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.