Remembering the late documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s and his ‘Belfast, Maine’

Before everything went digital, a film print used to arrive at the movie theater in hulking metal cases holding individual reels of celluloid. The numbered reels would first need to be spliced together by the projectionist before the movie could be screened. But the spinning platters on the projector — which unspooled the film to feed it between the bulb and the lens, casting the moving image onto the screen in the theater below — presented limitations when it came to the length of movies, as they could only hold so much film. A feature that was between 90 minutes and 2 hours could easily fit on one platter and be shown continuously without a reel change. But a longer film, like the 4-hour documentary “Belfast, Maine,” made by the late Frederick Wiseman, who died Feb. 16 at the age of 96, required switching from one platter to another in the middle of the screening.

“Belfast, Maine,” which Wiseman shot on location in the fall of 1996, had a three-part premiere in the early months of 2000: It played at Lincoln Center in New York as part of a retrospective of Wiseman’s more than 30 years of documentary filmmaking, it was broadcast on PBS, and just before all of that it premiered in January at the Colonial Theatre in Belfast, Maine. Before the two-night run, “he had sent us the reels; I think he sent us five reels,” said Mike Hurley, the former Belfast mayor who owned the theater at the time and was friendly with Wiseman. “We spliced them together and made two big reels: We did half of reel 3 with 1 and 2, and half of reel 3 with 4 and 5.” Wiseman attended the screening, a fundraiser for the Waldo County YMCA and the Belfast Free Library, and tickets sold for $20 a pop. “He’s there, but he’s not watching it riveted. He’s already seen hundreds of hours of it,” Hurley recalled of that first night. “He’s sitting there and almost sleeping, but when the reel cut came he was up out of his chair and running up to the projection booth.” They had spliced the film together incorrectly, putting the break to switch from one platter to the other in the wrong place. “He was outraged and angry,” Hurley said, laughing. “It was good to see that he had a temper.”

Wiseman wasn’t the only one in the packed theater that night who was upset at what they saw on the screen. Wiseman was a titan of nonfiction filmmaking, later recognized with an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement. But his critical acclaim did not impress Belfast residents at the turn of the millennium. “I walked out of the theater with two people who have lived here for a long time, and they said that they hated it — hated it,” said Jay Davis, a former editor of The Republican Journal and co-author of “The History of Belfast in the 20th Century.”

The film depicts the breadth of Belfast life — from hauling traps on the bay or making chocolate-coconut doughnuts at Weaver’s to telling prisoners at the local jail how to avoid getting HIV or shooting a trapped coyote point-blank — with the same dispassionate affect that Wiseman is famous for. “He didn’t sugarcoat it,” Hurley said. “It wasn’t like it was ‘Down East Magazine’ that made this thing. Here’s a coyote hunter skinning a coyote. Here’s a social worker picking nits out of a woman’s hair.” While some people loved the film (Davis and Hurley among them), many longtime residents resented the way Wiseman showed Belfast largely as a blue-collar factory town with all the attending problems, while some newer residents resented the way Wiseman showed Belfast as … a blue-collar factory town with all the attending problems.

With no real narrative, no interviews, and in many of the scenes little if any actual talking, “Belfast, Maine” is more the kind of movie that washes over you rather than demands a certain kind of viewing — or that makes any kind of overt argument. And if reviews in Belfast were highly mixed in 2000, outside Waldo County the movie was seen in a very different light. Writing in The New York Times in 2000, the critic Phillip Lopate called “Belfast, Maine” “a summation of everything Mr. Wiseman has done.”

“It captures the rhythms of community, with scenes of lobstering, factories, moviegoing, emergency clinics, outreach care for elderly people, hunting, amateur theatricals, high school (a teacher gives an impassioned defense of ‘’Moby-Dick’’), the after-effects of domestic abuse,” Lopate continued, “Fastening with Bressonian closeups on everyday implements, the aging Mr. Wiseman, holding on, shows himself to be less an angry prophet than a grateful mystic of the materialist realm.”

Twenty-six years later, that continues to be how much of the world sees “Belfast, Maine,” which in the wake of his death has been held up by many as one of the greatest films of the 50 some documentaries he made throughout the course of his long life and career. But watching the film in the Midcoast, whether at the Colonial in the first month of the new millennium or streaming it on Kanopy last week (a service free to anyone with a local library card), is to see something that’s far more intimate than what most audiences see. It’s not just some platonic ideal of a high school English teacher telling a room full of very ‘90s-looking students, surely a few the children of lobstermen, how extraordinary it was for Herman Melville to make a fisherman from Nantucket a tragic hero on par with Hamlet and King Lear — that was the late Mr. Murphy, whose American Experience class was a favorite of my kid’s godmother, who also taught one of my coworkers who went to Belfast Area High School, and whose son used to mow Mike Hurley’s lawn. There’s no six degrees of separation from the people on the screen; if you don’t know them, you almost certainly know someone who knows them.

Wiseman, who lived in Cambridge, Mass., began spending summers in Northport in 1974 at the recommendation of his friend Neil Welliver, the Lincolnville painter. He bought a barn, moved it to a property in Northport, and converted it into a summer home that he visited up until last year. Through the five decades he spent summers here, Wiseman was a familiar sight in Belfast, taking in movies at the Colonial (Hurley said Wiseman was always asking if he was going to show any good movies while he was in town during blockbuster season) and later became a regular at Chase’s Daily, too. He had an editing studio in Northport, and would often work in the mornings before getting outside to play tennis or otherwise enjoy the weather.

The subjects of Wiseman’s documentaries were often either institutions or broad social arenas, like “High School” and “Welfare,” films whose titles, like “Belfast, Maine” double as their subjects. The idea of making a movie about a small American town or city was one that he thought about for some time, and in the early 1990s he began to look just up Route 1.

“Jay and I worked with Fred and used to meet Tuesday (or was it Wednesday?) mornings at 6:30 at Traci’s to talk about Belfast,” Hughes said. “Jay and I were writing a history of Belfast in the 20th century at the time, and Fred was hoping to do a film of the city, so we naturally worked together. He needed ‘insiders’ and we benefited from Fred’s ‘outsider’ documentary knowledge.” They’d talk about who and where Wiseman might shoot, and Davis said, “he went to some of those places, but he also found places of his own. He had been here often enough that he knew what to look for.” Wiseman was also a subscriber to the local papers, including The Republican Journal, which he had delivered to Cambridge in the off-season, and found leads there, too.

There was plenty to shoot: The four-hour film was cut, by Wiseman, from 110 hours of footage. And true to his “fly-on-the-wall” approach to filmmaking, the crew consisted of just one cameraman and two people running the sound, with Wiseman himself holding the boom mic. The artist Linden Frederick, who is shown in the film painting in his downtown Belfast studio, said there was barely any conversation between him and the crew when they came to film. Judy Berk, who lives in Northport, appears briefly in a scene shot at Hannaford, which was still Shop ‘n’ Save back then. “I just remember being shopping. I remember being aware that there was a camera for a while,” she said. “I didn’t expect to be in it, frankly. I didn’t do anything very dramatic.”

Some of the most fascinating and revealing scenes in the movie were those shot at local factories, where the seeming mundanity of production-line work proves to be incredibly riveting. There’s an almost eerie quiet among the line workers at both Stinson’s and the potato plant, and an enveloping, rhythmic din of machines. But seeing exactly how work worked in these factories is fascinating and visually arresting: a swinging arm distributing potato skins across a conveyor belt; the shimmering rattle of empty sardine tins being sent down the canning line; slivers of Ducktrap smoked salmon being fanned out onto a piece of gold-faced boxboard.

The Stinson’s scene is particularly masterful: There are 275 cuts in the sequence, which took Wiseman five weeks to edit. “If I had wanted to simply establish there was a sardine factory in Belfast, I could have had a wide shot on the factory floor, a wide shot of the workers, and an exterior of the building,” he told the Portland Press Herald in 2017. “But what I was trying to do was give some sense of what it’s like to work there, to be on that assembly line for eight hours a day for maybe 20 years.”

While events like the World Championship Sardine Packing Contest at the old Maine Seafoods Festival in Rockland showed the public in the 1970s and ‘80s what canning work looked like, watching Rita Willey pack sardines on a stage wasn’t exactly the same as seeing it done on the clock. Even if Stinson’s was incredibly familiar, not everyone packed sardines, and those who did worked behind closed doors. “I lived here when there were chicken plants and sardine plants and potato plants and shoe factories and all that stuff, but I never went inside them because I’m a person, I don’t go inside somebody’s factory,” Berk said. “This gave me a glimpse.”

“For those of us who walked and drove and visited and spent time at those places” as elected officials, said Susan Longley, who represented Belfast in the state Senate at the time, “it was going down memory lane — that’s what we saw.”

Of course, Stinson’s is long gone now, as is the potato plant. So, too, are Weaver’s, Goose River, and Bruno and Rico’s Pub on High Street. There’s still a hospital in town, but it’s no longer called Waldo County General. A cord of seasoned hardwood goes for far, far more than $50. If nothing else, “Belfast, Maine” is like a celluloid time capsule, and everything that was put into it was gathered at a pivotal moment in the city’s history: MBNA had opened the year before, and Wiseman shows the office toward the very end of the film, all gleaming white and a very familiar color of green that would soon spread into office spaces across the Midcoast — a color that some people in Belfast used to refer to as the color of money.

“He literally caught us as we turned the corner,” Hurley said. “Here’s these people driving around in these beaters, skinning coyotes, working at Stinson’s, making doughnuts at Weaver’s Bakery, working at the potato plant — and also about to go work at MBNA.”

According to Jay Davis, Wiseman was more than willing to hear people out about their frustrations about “Belfast, Maine,” though he didn’t often have any real answers to the questions that were asked of him. “It was often that their feelings ought to be said, rather than he should really answer them,” Davis said.

For Wiseman, the four hours of film selected and stitched together over the course of four years spoke entirely for itself. “The movie is the best expression of the answer to what it’s about,” Wiseman told a reporter from The Republican Journal just after “Belfast, Maine” premiered. “If I could say what the movie is in 25 words or less, I shouldn’t have made the movie.”