What an Instagram Reel Has in Common With a 4-Hour Documentary

This open, honest curiosity accounts for his success in gaining entry to so many communities and institutions. I interviewed Wiseman in 2018, and asked whether the residents of Monrovia, Ind. — the subject of his documentary that year — liked the film even though it was created by an outsider. Yes, he said, they’d seemed to. “People like the idea that someone’s sufficiently interested in what they’re doing to make a movie, which is not an abnormal response,” he explained. Everybody wants to feel interesting.

MEANING EMERGES in a Wiseman film through the filter of Wiseman. What you’re getting is what he thinks is interesting, the story he wishes to tell. It is human civilization as Wiseman sees it, at least in that particular place and moment.

This ordering of the mundane to create meaning is why my Instagram Reels sprang to mind at the “Aspen” screening, and at subsequent movies in the series, too: “Primate,” a rather harrowing 1974 look inside the Yerkes National Primate Research Center that also seems to be about life in a surveillance state; “The Store” (1983), shot at the flagship Neiman Marcus store in Dallas; “High School,” documenting life at a Philadelphia institution in the spring of 1968. Each asks us to follow along as people participate in activities they probably forgot about by the time they got home that night. The movie trusts us to be as interested in them as Wiseman is, for the same reason we’re lured into Reels — that we are human too, and humans like to watch each other’s lives. Wiseman may have begun his work long before the advent of smartphone cameras and vertical video feeds, but his hunch that this kind of footage would resonate was clearly right.

If I sit on my couch and scroll my feed for a Wiseman-length of time — who among us hasn’t — I’m effectively watching a little documentary about human behavior, authored by me, or at least whatever interests the algorithm ascribes to me. This is cool, but it’s also scary. Working simply and nimbly his whole career, Wiseman has maintained tremendous independence; I might be tempted to think my own little documentary does the same.

But, of course, I am at best a co-director here. The choices about when clips appear and in what order is left up to the platform, which is programmed in one very particular direction: toward selling me things. Like the shopper wandering around Neiman Marcus in “The Store,” I am encountering a series of vignettes and conversations meant to direct me, ultimately, toward purchasing. A store, no matter how human the touch of the salespeople, is an ad for products. And so is my feed.