Critics Campus 2025 participant Thomas Phillips examines the ambivalent documentation of aesthetics and artifice, glamour and illusion, and the industry’s manufacturing of desire in Model, Frederick Wiseman’s revelatory film about fashion.

“There is no such thing as instant glamour,” writes fashion theorist Elizabeth Wilson. “Glamour is the result of work and effort – artfully concealed.” In Model, Frederick Wiseman’s 1980 documentary about New York’s Zoli modelling agency, we see this effort exerted on an industrial scale by models, gatekeeping agents and a complex network of mediators between images and their audiences. Like all of Wiseman’s documentaries over his six-decade career, the film is free from conventional linear narrative. Rather, its labour sequences coalesce into a mosaic that reveals the protocols, power dynamics and drudgery behind fantasies of the good life.

In Wiseman’s earlier films about American institutions, his fly-on-the-wall approach lent itself to unflattering revelations: arbitrary discipline in High School (1968), animal cruelty in Primate (1974; MIFF 2010), Kafkaesque bureaucracy in Welfare (MIFF 1976). In Model, the same style reveals the shallowness of an industry poised for the coming decade of consumerist excess. But what appears to be another exposé develops into something more ambivalent, simultaneously laying bare an agency’s underside while being playfully complicit in its artifice.

For the models who make it through Zoli’s ruthless culling process, Wiseman’s portrayal of the industry diverges from the era’s stereotypical depictions of a privileged work–life balance. In The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), a New York–set thriller starring Faye Dunaway as a clairvoyant fashion photographer, models dance to the disco anthem ‘Let’s All Chant’ during a photoshoot sequence that feels more like a nightclub than a workplace. During a party scene in Model, this scenario is inverted when Wiseman cuts between shots of lively attendees and a row of models lining the event’s perimeter like human furniture. For them, this party is just another workplace.

Unlike the one shot by Laura Mars, the photoshoots in Model are invariably less dignified than the scenarios they depict. In an especially elaborate example, two formally dressed models repeatedly pretend to disembark a helicopter hovering just above ground level. We never see the resulting images, which will presumably emanate wealth, power and the aspirational time-scarcity that necessitates private air travel. But from the film’s perspective, the repetitive movements evoke the tragicomic aimlessness of glitching non-playable characters (NPCs) in a videogame. Elsewhere, Wiseman compounds this repetition with duration, dedicating more than fifteen minutes of the film to the Sisyphean production of a thirty-second hosiery commercial in which a director demands take after take. “The film’s not long enough to tell you exactly how boring and monotonous the whole exercise was,” recalls cinematographer John Davey in a 1986 interview. “Being a model is very tedious … It’s not wonderful, glamorous Studio 54 every night.”

Model

Wiseman’s perspective seems superior at first, but when he casts a self-referential lens on the artifice of a film crew producing another documentary about modelling, he hints at his own status as a kind of illusionist. Despite his policy of non-intervention, Wiseman has described his work as “reality fictions” that incorporate less than four per cent of the footage he shoots (a similar rejection rate to Zoli’s, we learn). In a 1999 documentary on the topic, he calls cinema vérité a “pompous French term that has no meaning”, describing what he sees as the conscious manipulations inherent at every stage of documentary filmmaking, from topic selection to editing.

In one such manipulation, Wiseman depicts an interviewer instructing a model to repeat each question in his responses to create the illusion of a free-flowing monologue. When asked whether he’s always self-aware of his good looks, the model fails to comply. “I’m … I’m aware of an inner thing,” he says, his voice faltering with uncertainty. The tape seems unusable for its intended purpose, but not for Wiseman, who extracted it from hundreds of hours of rejected rushes.

While much of Model unfolds like a comedy, many moments take on the queasy qualities of his earlier work, especially during the steady flow of rejection meetings that punctuate the film. Zoli’s agents enforce an idiosyncratic set of protocols like iron laws of nature, including conformity to the “sophisticated” look the agency is known for. In one scene, a boy-next-door type is told he’s “more commercial than print”. In another, a previously rejected applicant is praised for altering her “squeaky-clean” look into something “harder”. For those who make the cut, casual sexism and strictly enforced gender norms become occupational hazards. When a queer-coded model voices anxieties about living up to a Middle American masculine ideal, it sounds like an allusion to the strains of passing against a backdrop of Reagan-era conservatism.

Wiseman’s lens is more critical when he leaves the inner sanctums of photo studios and the Zoli office to venture out into the real world. Establishing shots around New York show the omnipresence of billboards, storefronts and street posters broadcasting glamorous images onto a city of visible wealth disparities. Sequences of photoshoots in public spaces incorporate flummoxed reaction shots of elderly passers-by, as if they’re staring into an inaccessible mirror world. Most pointedly, a fabricated protest in which predominantly white models gleefully pose holding picket signs is later echoed by a genuine street rally for racial justice.

But even at its most polemical, the film relishes the visual artifice of the world it unveils. In Model’s final sequence, Wiseman depicts agency boss Zoltan “Zoli” Rendessy explaining the precarity of modelling careers before closing on a dynamic runway sequence of an Oscar de la Renta collection. In Notebook on City and Clothes (1989), Wim Wenders’s documentary about Yohji Yamamoto, the director describes one of the designer’s fashion shows as the sartorial equivalent of a montage. Model’s equivalent sequence is comparably cinematic, taking on the celebratory energy of Wiseman’s more reverential work, such as Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros (MIFF 2024). After separating monotonous labour from its final product for much of the film, the sequence functions like a pressure valve, blurring Wiseman’s critiques with a self-conscious complicity.

Model screens on Sunday 10 and Friday 22 August as part of the MIFF 2025 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.