Up close but too personal?

[Photo: Domestic Violence Film Inc.] A victim seeks counseling at the Spring, a shelter in Tampa, in a scene from the documentary Domestic Violence.

By ERIC DEGGANS, Times TV Critic

© St. Petersburg Times
published April 1, 2003

Frederick Wiseman's compellingly told PBS documentary on spousal abuse, using film shot at the Spring shelter in Tampa, also provokes questions of privacy rights.

Before long, it's obvious that Sue Spitz is trying to be diplomatic.

It's also obvious that Spitz, the chief executive officer of the Spring, a domestic violence shelter in Tampa, has a few reservations about the highly praised PBS documentaries that feature her facility, Domestic Violence and Domestic Violence 2.

"I think it's wonderful that there's a documentary about domestic violence," said Spitz, who took over as CEO in November 2001, about three years after renowned documentarian Frederick Wiseman filmed the footage in Tampa. He tagged along with police on calls, visited the courts and recorded the process of bringing victims into the shelter.

"My concerns had to do with confidentiality. . . . It's always a concern to protect anyone who has used our services," Spitz said, adding that there are likely no residents and just one employee (of about 137 total) now at the Spring who were around during Wiseman's filming. Still, considering that the films were made so long ago, the executive remained disappointed that viewers see an outdated version of her facility.

"We want to be portrayed as we are today," she said. "I'm not sure the film does that."

Spitz's confidentiality concerns were echoed by Jennifer Harrell, a Maine-based domestic violence activist who co-founded the University of South Florida's Harrell Center for the Study of Domestic Violence and invited Wiseman to produce his films in Tampa.

"We're dealing with women and children who are exposed for (commerce)," said Harrell, who feared that abusers could still easily identify the women who appear on camera. "It's not worth the risk."

Wiseman's Domestic Violence films, which premiered nationally on PBS on March 18 and 19, have received wide praise from critics (the Baltimore Sun called them "frightfully real reality TV," and the Boston Globe hailed them as "gourmet reality for a culture strung out on reality in a can").

To keep the films from interfering with its pledge drive fundraising programming in March, Tampa PBS station WEDU-Ch. 3 held the programs. The station airs Domestic Violence and Domestic Violence 2 at 9 tonight and Wednesday.

The films stand out mostly due to Wiseman's trademark technique: presenting a film without narration or identifying titles, carefully editing footage so that all context comes straight from the sources' mouths.

Over the course of the films, viewers follow Wiseman's lens through all phases of the domestic violence process, beginning with police visiting the homes of fighting couples, progressing to women housed in the Spring shelter and ending with those who land in court.

Unlike some documentaries, in which an omniscient narrator sets up scenes, provides context and tells viewers what to think, the Domestic Violence films deliver their lessons obliquely.

As a woman answers questions from a social worker during the Spring's intake process, we learn the characteristics of such problem relationships ("Does he pay all the bills?" the social worker asks. "Has he ever embarrassed you in public or at your job?").

In another scene, emergency workers place a woman covered in blood on a stretcher -- it's never clear where the blood is coming from -- while a friend talks about how her husband gets drunk "and loses his mind" during arguments. Women in therapy at the Spring speak of how their husbands isolated them, forcing them to live with relatives who didn't speak English or demanding to authorize every item purchased at a grocery store.

Any question about the impact of such violence on children is answered by a painfully cute little girl who tells a shelter staffer, "When my dad dies, I'm not going to cry."

For Wiseman, who began his storied career with a look at a state prison for the criminally insane (Titicut Follies) in 1967, the Domestic Violence films continue an ongoing message in his work.

"The subject of human violence is a theme that I've been dealing with in a variety of ways," he said, reached at his office in Massachusetts. "The films try to suggest how complex the problem is."

That's the effect Harrell was hoping for when she contacted Wiseman.

She and her husband, James, founded the Harrell Center at USF with a $600,000 donation about five years ago. After noting that Wiseman often showed his films at an art museum in a town near her Maine home, Harrell said she arranged a lunch in 1997 for Wiseman to meet police, social workers, judges and prosecutors. "He got a feel for the community," she said, a British accent flavoring her words. "At the time, we thought he was just going out with the police."

But Wiseman did more, which makes Harrell sorry she helped him. Because in featuring so clearly and closely the victims of domestic violence staying at the Spring, she fears that the filmmaker has taken advantage of vulnerable subjects and possibly endangered whatever life they now live.

"These women and children are immediately identifiable in their communities, and one possible consequence is reprisals from violent spouses or boyfriends," said Harrell, who fears that any former resident featured in the films could wind up watching them while sitting next to the person she's describing. "That (footage) could really annoy an abuser, because it tells all about the attacks."

[Times photo — Toni L. Sandys] Although Sue Spitz, CEO of the Spring of Tampa Bay, Inc., doesn’t say she wouldn’t have participated in the the film, she says much has changed at the Spring since the documentary was shot five years ago. She says she is concerned about residents’ confidentiality.

But Spitz's predecessor, Mabel Bexley, a longtime women's issues advocate who served as chief administrator at the Spring for 18 years, said that Wiseman was straightforward with shelter clients about their participation and videotaped their consent statements.

"I really saw it as therapeutic for women to share their stories," said Bexley, who agreed to give Wiseman complete access to the shelter and its programs. "To know that these women, with help from law enforcement, found safe shelter . . . they're really heroines, as far as I'm concerned."

Wiseman said he obtained consent from all who appear in the films. But Spitz and the Spring's attorneys grew so concerned, they scrapped a planned fundraiser based around a preview showing and asked the filmmaker to send them a letter confirming that he possessed the taped consents.

Five years later, the facility Wiseman visited in 1998 is a very different place, with increased salaries and employee benefits in place to stem a turnover rate that stood at 95 percent before Spitz's tenure, she said. Residents no longer clean the facility, as shown in the film (a service handles it), and the facility has procedures for helping store clients' pets (which is also unclear in the film), Spitz said.

The CEO stopped short of saying that she wouldn't have participated in the movie had she been running the Spring when Wiseman came to film. "I would have tried to explore how we can do education and outreach without compromising confidentiality," Spitz said. She said that she would have resisted showing residents' faces.

Because residents are often traumatized and in crisis while at the shelter, Harrell said, Florida law requires filmmakers to obtain written consent from clients before disseminating information about them.

"(Filmmakers) should be sitting down with each domestic violence client and going through the consequences very carefully," she said. "It's not a decision you'd like to rush them through. (This film) is abusing the abused. That's what it should be called."

Wiseman remained unconcerned about showing a dated vision of the Spring and not informing viewers directly that the footage was filmed five years ago.

"I have been using this technique for 37 years," the filmmaker said of his no-narration philosophy. "When it works, the viewer is more involved. They're not standing back, being spoon-fed information. It treats the audience as an adult rather than some mental defective."

Because the Spring's average client stays 40 days, all the residents featured in Wisemen's films left the facility long ago. And even Harrell admits that she has not heard about past clients complaining about inclusion in the movies (Domestic Violence has been shown at some film festivals and was in limited theatrical release in 2001 and '02).

"A lot of women came up to me at the end of shooting and said one of the reasons they participated was that they wanted people to know their situation," Wiseman said. "None of the women are still at the shelter . . . (and) the staff comes off tremendously well. People who see the film without knowing what changes have taken place there still say 'This is a very good place.' "

There are times when viewers could use a little context, most notably in the scenes when Wiseman shows police going to the homes of fighting couples.

Though one woman going through the intake process says she has a doctorate, most of the participants seem to be working-class couples struggling over problems with money, alcohol, child care, employment and more.

"I thought (the films) presented . . . a real look at some of the issues . . . (but) one concern I had was that it presented domestic violence as more of a problem of poor women," said Martha Coulter, a professor of public health at USF and director of the Harrell Center. "It probably is accurate that if you're filming in a shelter, you'll see more poor women, because those are the women more likely to use that facility. But there's domestic violence everywhere, and I don't like the presentation of this being a poor woman's problem."

Some critics call it the Cops syndrome -- named for the Fox show that features footage of real police arrests -- in which the verite often features working-class participants who might not have legal advisers to caution them against agreeing to appear in such shows.

(Bexley and Spitz said that the average Spring client is a woman living at the poverty level with three children, so any filmmaker filming there would see mostly working class women).

Coulter, who watched Wiseman film some segments in open court, cautions against assuming that the women at the Spring didn't have the education or composure to consent to appearing in the film.

"I don't like to disempower victims," she said. "I think they need to make decisions on their own, and we need to allow them to do so. I don't know how (the situation) was presented by Fred, but I don't like the idea that we think domestic violence victims are incapable of decision-making."

Bexley agreed. "In many cases, the most powerful thing a woman can do is speak the truth," she said. "The idea that if she keeps the family secret, she'll be safe, is complete nonsense."

Hillsborough County Judge Walter Heinrich hasn't seen the films in which he appears; review copies have been sitting in his office unseen for weeks. He can't even remember Wiseman; Heinrich presides over a courtroom where all criminal defendants appear when initially charged -- and where media visits are frequent.

But Heinrich makes one of the most powerful impressions in the film, matter-of-factly telling those who make bail that they are not to try contacting the other person in their dispute at the risk of imprisonment or worse.

"If you have to be placed in isolation cells and cut off from the entire world, that is what I will do to you," he tells one man. Later, facing a woman pleading for the judge to release a man accused of assaulting her, he asks the question on most every viewer's mind.

"Why in God's name would you want someone out of jail who (is) on probation for two previous violent acts against you?" he asks incredulously.

Heinrich says that many couples who call police to help mediate heated arguments still don't realize that the law often requires police to make an arrest and that it may take days to see a judge to set bail.

"The way the Legislature has written the law, if (police) think there has been violence in a domestic situation, someone has to be arrested," said Heinrich (Domestic Violence 2 shows a woman arrested over the objections of her boyfriend when police find scratches on the man after an argument).

"It puts everyone in the same boat. . . . Just because someone has a lawyer or lives in a certain part of town . . . they're still going to jail," the judge said. "For the most part, one arrest is an eye-opening experience and people don't come back."

Concerns about confidentiality aside, Wiseman's unflinching access gives viewers a similar experience without the handcuffs and jail cell.

"I try not to simplify what's going on in the interest of creating a one-dimensional narrative," said Wiseman, noting that he doesn't develop characters and story lines in his documentaries the way Dateline NBC might do.

"I think I'm doing the place and the people a disservice by dumbing down the material to allegedly reach an audience. The only assumption I make is that the audience is as smart or as dumb as I am."

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