Watching Frederick Wiseman’s diligent document of Boston civic life feels bittersweet in a moment where our national politics appears to collapse into fascism. This grand, nearly four and a half hour tour of Boston elegantly shuffles us through nearly every aspect of city government from budget meetings to garbage collection, school funding to marijuana dispensaries, homeless shelters to sports parades, community cooking classes to traffic court, marriage ceremonies to archeological digs, the scope feels so massive as to appear infinite. Yet, what separates City Hall from other documentaries that tackle the subject is Wiseman’s bold hands-off approach. There are no talking heads, no voice-over, no animated infographics, and no location titles. There is no traditional narrative structure to follow either, he observes like a scientist. Wiseman’s city: an organism; his camera: a microscope. The lens shifts from scene to scene, and the bigger picture develops over time without ever needing pull back to see it.

The film starts and ends at a call center: the city’s neural net. This framing is central to Wiseman’s thesis that quietly simmers as the connective tissue between scenes. In these bookends, we see the purest form of interaction between city staff and city residents. No matter how obfuscated this concept becomes by panels, boards, or power structures, what we are witnessing is a direct relationship between the people and their government. Wiseman’s egalitarian approach in editing which places the mayor and sanitation worker on equal footing, is extended to Boston’s citizenry as well. In City Hall, we are not observing a city ‘managing’ its population, we are observing a symbiotic relationship, within which the equality between the two parties is absolutely vital.