Law and Order

Law and Order (1969)

A survey of the wide range of work police are asked to perform: enforcing the law, maintaining order, and providing general social services. The depicted incidents illustrate how training, community expectations, socio-economic status of the subject, the threat of violence, and discretion affect police behavior.

Date of release
1969-03-02
TMDB
7.0 / 10 (24)
Runtime
1h 21m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Frederick Wiseman

Casting

Interesting facts

Law and Order is a 1969 documentary film directed, written, shot, produced and edited by Frederick Wiseman. It was Wiseman's third film after Titicut Follies (1967) and High School (1968). The films were among the earliest examples of direct cinema by an American filmmaker.

Production

To create the film, which was shot in 1968, the filmmakers accompanied police officers in patrol cars as they responded to a variety of calls, ranging from domestic incidents to an armed robbery and a lost child. The film documents racial tensions between the police and local residents, and also records the officers complaining to each other as well as engaging in brutality.

Wiseman began work on the film a few weeks after the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, in which there were violent clashes between Chicago police and demonstrators. He originally intended it "as a chance to do in the pigs." But in a 1970 interview he said that "after about two days of riding around in police cars, I realized my little stereotype was far from the truth, at least in Kansas City.

Wiseman did not believe that being filmed had an impact on the behavior of the people being filmed, saying that "If it did, the camera would become the great behavior‐change instrument of our time."

The film was broadcast on March 2, 1969, by NET's Public Broadcast Laboratory (PBL). Prior to the telecast, NET president John F. White, overruling PBL executive's decision, ordered that obscenities be cut from the audio track. The order resulted in a split between PBL and NET. Wiseman protested the decision.

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