The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, October 7-13
Welfare (1975)
Directed by Frederick Wiseman
An ideal, representatives introduction to Wiseman’s work—three hours is pretty much a reasonable median length for him—Welfare isolates the emotional and political drama fomenting within social services’ drab exterior. In a crowded Manhattan office everyone’s irritable, but (some) welfare workers do their patient best to suss out the truth of each claimant’s needs, struggling to maintain empathy within an often inflexible system, both parties trapped in a mutual hell neither made. Within dreary, colorless confines a world of black comedy and social pathologies emerges through a distinctively tetchy, period-redolent series of 70s recitals of irritation and grief. Vadim Rizov (October 11, 3:15pm at the Museum of the Moving Image’s “Frederick Wiseman’s New York”)