Architecture on Film: City Hall

The latest film by Frederick Wiseman – one of cinema’s greatest documentarians – reveals the labour involved in making and maintaining a city for its citizens.

By turning a lens upon the workings of Boston’s city government and mayor, Wiseman’s panoramic opus bears deep, insightful and nuanced witness to the complexities, textures and efforts of urban governance and democracy in action.

Wiseman’s astute form of cinematic minute taking carries a political and poetic force, demonstrating the strength and fragility of civic life.

What is the opposite of social distance? It might be Frederick Wiseman, whose documentaries are epics of social proximity, serenely and thrillingly observant chronicles of how people behave in shared spaces. Wiseman’s latest […] turns bureaucratic procedure into a kind of poetry.
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times

Shot between 2018-19, during the Trump administration, the film highlights Boston’s fights for social justice, racial equity, and positive structural change, “Because”, in Mayor Walsh’s words, “a more equal conversation means a more resilient city.” Over the course of an afternoon with Wiseman’s film, a city’s potential to be an engine of social progress – within and beyond its geographical limits – is made clear, through an urban portrait exploring how people can help people to live together.

Cinema 1, Barbican Centre, Level -2