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<p>This paper explores the role of marginalized bodies between legal and filmic discourse in Frederick Wiseman’s famous institutional documentaries, focusing on <i>Titicut Follies</i> (1967), <i>Law and Order</i> (1969), <i>Juvenile Court</i> (1973), and <i>Welfare</i> (1975). Drawing primarily on Jacques Rancière’s theory of the distribution of the sensible [le partage du sensible], alongside the work of Michel Foucault, the paper argues that legal discourse constructs visibility as a mode of control and dispositive of social recognition/disrecognition — determining who is seen, how they are classified, and whether they can speak. Marginalized bodies — racialized, gendered, and socially excluded subjects — are often made hyper-visible as threats or rendered invisible within procedural abstraction. Wiseman’s cinema, in contrast, generates an aesthetic counter-discourse: through slow observation of everyday life, the representation of repetition of legal acts and rites, and a silent staging without voice-over, it reconfigures the field of perception, challenging the semiotic and institutional regimes that structure exclusion and misrecognition. According to Pierre Legendre, his films reveal how law functions not only through rules and procedures, but through images, gestures, and spatial arrangements that encode power. By confronting legal language with cinematic presence, Wiseman’s work stages what Rancière calls “aesthetic dissensus” — a disruption of established orders of visibility — offering a mode of critical visual jurisprudence rooted in the politics of perception and the reappearance of marginalized lives.</p>

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Subjects of Law, Objects of Gaze: Marginalized Bodies Between Legal and Filmic Discourse in the Cinema of Frederick Wiseman

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年1月13日

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  • Guglielmo Siniscalchi

摘要

This paper explores the role of marginalized bodies between legal and filmic discourse in Frederick Wiseman’s famous institutional documentaries, focusing on Titicut Follies (1967), Law and Order (1969), Juvenile Court (1973), and Welfare (1975). Drawing primarily on Jacques Rancière’s theory of the distribution of the sensible [le partage du sensible], alongside the work of Michel Foucault, the paper argues that legal discourse constructs visibility as a mode of control and dispositive of social recognition/disrecognition — determining who is seen, how they are classified, and whether they can speak. Marginalized bodies — racialized, gendered, and socially excluded subjects — are often made hyper-visible as threats or rendered invisible within procedural abstraction. Wiseman’s cinema, in contrast, generates an aesthetic counter-discourse: through slow observation of everyday life, the representation of repetition of legal acts and rites, and a silent staging without voice-over, it reconfigures the field of perception, challenging the semiotic and institutional regimes that structure exclusion and misrecognition. According to Pierre Legendre, his films reveal how law functions not only through rules and procedures, but through images, gestures, and spatial arrangements that encode power. By confronting legal language with cinematic presence, Wiseman’s work stages what Rancière calls “aesthetic dissensus” — a disruption of established orders of visibility — offering a mode of critical visual jurisprudence rooted in the politics of perception and the reappearance of marginalized lives.