Abstract/Summary

In Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary, Jonathan Kahana paraphrases Hannah Arendt as follows: ‘Public things do not just appear, in some quasi-natural event, but are the result and legacy of human fabrication, of work’. Through a detailed interpretation of Frederick Wiseman’s Central Park (1990), this essay asks what it means for a film to register and document this fabrication, and how the fact of provision can be made present and meaningful in such a film. It brings together three distinct but related critical ideas – the commons, infrastructure and the everyday – to examine the formal and aesthetics means by which Central Park depicts urban phenomena not as an immanent condition, but rather as something which has deliberately and actively been made available to a public.