I’ve only seen two Frederick Wiseman documentaries, and I tend to forget the rhythms of them. Moments brought together in montage and then staying with one scene, before moving onto the next. Cataloguing an institution by shifting around, sometimes faces will reoccur and appear again, others will be forgotten and moved on from. The Store (1983) is Wiseman and his crew spending four weeks during the Christmas holiday shopping period in a Neiman-Marcus store/corporate headquarters based in Dallas, Texas. Neiman-Marcus never made it to Australia, I don’t think, but it’s comparable to what Myers used to be; the idea of a shopping department that had elegance and class. In the early 1980s, this meant trading on a European appeal such as the one scene where we see the restaurant/cafe menu being discussed, and the focus on wealthy repeat clients with the scenes of personal shoppers, like the salesman discussing sable coats to one middle-aged guy buying for his wife. We move from the workers in the basement repairing clothes and illustrating advertisements for jewellery, to the public-facing staff to the corporate meetings where executives smoke freely indoors.
The early 1980s fashions and stylings never feel aesthetically pleasing; there’s something benign and gaudy about the dresses we see, or the Christmas decorated interiors. With the amount of time we spend in the Neiman-Marcus, only rarely venturing outside for a shot of the street, it begins to feel claustrophobic. The difference between a customer passing through, and a worker spending their hours within the department store interiors. One of the first scenes gets stuck into the underlying theme of the movie, and of the store, as an executive underlines that it’s all about selling to the customers, demonstrating a classic management monologue of relaying something evident to everyone, but extolling it in an obvious analogy (“A hospital is for treating patients, if they don’t treat the patients, then what is it?”). We observe the different levels of work, including the in-store models or the Christmas carol singer who wanders the floor, and hear about the buyers, the advertisements, the items, and the issues. There was something slowly absorbing about the day in and day out practices of Neiman-Marcus, the vibe of Dallas Texas at that time communicated through the customer interactions, and the ways in which corporate culture has shifted, yet also remained entirely the same.
Streamed on Kanopy.
VHS Tracking 