Hospital (1970 film)
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1994. | ||
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Hospital is an 84-minute 1970 American documentary film directed by Frederick Wiseman, which explores the daily activities of the people at Metropolitan Hospital Center, a large-city hospital in New York City, with emphasis on its emergency ward and outpatient clinics.
Why It Rocks
- After Frederick Wiseman's first two documentaries led to lawsuits, he started to create films under contract to New York City's public television outlet, partially to make sure his films wouldn't be censored for political or personal reasons. Yet, he didn't change his approach to filmmaking, or his interest in showing how institutions functioned. Metropolitan Hospital, the setting for this documentary, has its doctors depicted in as mostly graduates of the New York Medical College, which meant that they should have been among the best qualified emergency room doctors in the city.
- Despite Wiseman being given free access to the hospital, most of his film takes place in and around the emergency rooms. Like in most medical television shows and films, this is where the action is, where split-second decisions are made about patients who may have no case histories to help doctors make choices. For that reason alone, the documentary stands in contrast to one of his previous films, Titicut Follies, where patients have often been trapped for years in a sort of medical limbo.
- The documentary's a bit different visually as well, with the cinematographer employing a freer camera style with more movement. Wiseman himself stated he “always [thinks] in terms of the relationship between one movie and another. And [he's] always thinking about how one scene may parallel another, because the films are a natural frame of reference for [him]".
- It's also not afraid to showcase the more disturbing and horrifying aspects of a hospital, such as autopsies, operations, and, in one class, a doctor slicing into a cadaver’s brain held in his hand. The urban setting gives them more opportunities to shock viewers. Blood streams down the shirt of one emergency room visitor. Another has to be tied into a wheelchair. Patients lie unattended on gurneys in corridors, or wander around waiting rooms.
- Wiseman's aware that he's not the kind of person who can show or explain long-term illnesses, elective procedures, or many other day-to-day problems and procedures that make up the bulk of time spent by the hospital staff. Instead, the crux of the film is the conversations the doctors have about patients and their families. These can be moving or frightening: a daughter who tearfully admits that she doesn’t know what medications her grievously ill mother is taking, an overdose patient who begs a doctor not to let him die.
- The most painful conversations are those conducted over telephones. In one, an emergency room physician complains that a second hospital has been dumping its patients. A psychiatrist pleads with a government official to place a suicidal patient on welfare. A nurse tries to find authorization to keep a young abuse victim at the hospital overnight. Although everyone speaks in a civil tone, these are life-and-death negotiations with no clear resolutions. It should also be noted that the “villains” are all off camera. All the professionals on screen are concerned and sympathetic.
- The documentary adapts a more serious tone than High School, with few of said film's editing jokes. A clever touch is the film cutting from a church service to traffic on the FDR Drive outside. The cut pulls the viewers away from the activity within the hospital, but it's possible that it's also implicating us in our passive indifference to the misery just beyond our cars.
- Seen today, what may be most astonishing about the film is how patiently and clearly it lays bare the workings of the health care system. The film doesn't try to solve the problems facing public health policy, but it does provide a context for discussing them.