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Opinion
July 16, 2026 — 12:00pm
In an age of restless scrolling, of recommendations based on mysterious algorithms, pop-ups urging us to watch the Next Hit Show before the end credits have even started to roll, and addictive 30-second reels that are like sugar hits to the brain, a three-hour documentary on an art gallery or a road film about a whiny filmmaker might be just what’s needed to restore your faith in film and TV.
These thoughts come to mind with two recent if disparate events. The first was the death of the great American filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who died earlier this year at the age of 96. The other is the arrival of a restored 4K version of Ross McElwee’s 1986 road film-cum-documentary Sherman’s March.
McElwee and Wiseman seem like outliers today, having made films with a singular focus on topics where, on the face of it, nothing much happens. The viewer is asked to surrender to an unhurried pace and an epic run-time. These are works that offer reflection, demand viewers’ attention and reward endurance.
In Sherman’s March – “a meditation on the possibility of romantic love in the South during an era of nuclear weapons proliferation”, or so promises the on-screen credits – McElwee sets out to retrace the journey of General William Tecumseh Sherman during America’s Civil War. No spoilers, but what emerges in the following 170 minutes is a rambling and circuitous trip that offers a very different type of history lesson than the one we expect.
The joy of cinema is surrendering to the journey that the filmmaker takes us on, to experience, perhaps for the first time, a voyage into the unknown. It’s not just about discovering something we didn’t know, it’s about how that curtain is lifted. Some journeys take longer than others to do the subject justice. Some, like McElwee’s, end up taking us somewhere altogether different.
And in many ways this is anathema to the modern streaming era. The attention economy – or should that be “non-attention”? – is built upon scrolling and the echo chamber of a mysterious algorithm. What possible purpose could there be in investing three or more hours watching, say, something as seemingly mundane, uneventful and slow burning as the comings and goings of people at an art gallery or in the case of Sherman’s March, the whines of a filmmaker with a broken heart?
In a nod toward efficiency and expedience, most streaming platforms give us the option of watching shows at a faster speed, tacitly acknowledging that the filmmaker didn’t get that part of their creation right, or that with the press of a button you can more quickly move onto something else (interestingly, this feature isn’t on public broadcasters’ platforms).
As Wiseman shows, there are plenty of reasons to give hours of your life to films in which “nothing much happens”.
In his 60-year career, Wiseman made more than 40 films of epic scale and scope, which he called “voyages of discovery”. His modus operandi was to embed a skeleton crew inside the institution he was documenting, which included prisons, schools, New York’s public libraries, the department store Neiman Marcus and London’s National Gallery, to name a few.
From hundreds of hours of footage and without relying on “actors”, voiceovers, music or titles, he assembled living, breathing portraits of those places and the people who work there. Crucially, he never tells the viewer what to think and never take sides. He leaves the viewer to contemplate what’s in front of them, to form their own judgements and impressions. (You’ll find many of his films on Kanopy, which is free to view with a local library card.)
For his final film (made in 2023 when he was 93!), Wiseman decamped for seven weeks to a Michelin-starred restaurant deep in the Burgundy region of France, where he quietly, unobtrusively yet intensively observed the daily routines of chefs, a family dynasty and diners who are lucky enough to land (and afford) a booking. At 240 minutes, Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros (Docplay) is relatively compact by Wiseman’s standards (his 1989 documentary Near Death runs to six hours). It’s lyrical, transporting and completely absorbing.
Last month’s Sydney Film Festival premiered The Valley, a 180-minute documentary set in the rural southern NSW township of Kangaroo Valley, very much in the Wiseman mould. It’s a mosaic of disparate people living and working in and around a rural community, often in solitude and in sync with nature’s rhythms. Its director, Ian Darling, literally said the quiet bit out loud when he told this paper, “I’m hoping that [festival audiences] will be willing to sit in the dark, in relative silence, for a long period of time.”
Despite the prevailing panic about shortened concentration spans and how multiscreen viewing and reels are eroding how film and TV makers intended for their work to be seen, as viewers, we do have a choice. No one is holding a gun to our heads ordering us to watch more and faster, even if that is where the gatekeepers of film and TV see the future.
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