Frederick Wiseman

Eiseman exposed abuses in films like “Titicut Follies,” a once-banned portrait of a mental hospital, but ranged widely in subject matter, from a Queens neighborhood to a French restaurant. He was a director whose rigorously objective explorations of social and cultural institutions constitute one of the more revered bodies of work in American documentary filmmaking, died on in February 2026 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 96. Wiseman attended Williams College and then Yale Law School. Upon leaving Yale in 1954 he was drafted. He applied and was admitted to the Sorbonne, He studied law in Paris on the G.I. Bill. Wiseman is survived by his two sons, David and Eric, and three grandchildren. He met his wife, Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman, at Yale in 1954, and they married in 1955. She died in 2021 after a distinguished legal career.