The London Review of Books presents a special screening of one of Frederick Wiseman’s most influential films, Law and Order (1969), to mark his death, its (ever-)present relevance, and the arrival of ‘Frederick Wiseman’s America’ on MUBI: a curation of documentaries shot over a period of more than 50 years, cataloguing great American institutions such as the police, the public school system, Ivy League colleges, City Hall, the five boroughs of New York City and more.

Law and Order follows the members of the Kansas City Police Department, who are largely white, as they engage in daily patrol activities, interacting with members of the public. Despite occasional flashes of brutality, Wiseman found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he’d created a sympathetic movie about cops. After its re-release in 2017, Pauline Kael described it in the New Yorker as ‘the most powerful hour and a half of television I’ve seen all year.’

Matthew Barrington, curator of cinema at the Barbican and an authority on Wiseman’s work and slow cinema, will introduce the film. Then after the screening, he’ll be joined via video link by Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor at Princeton, author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America – and star of another Wiseman film, 2017’s Ex Libris: New York Public Library.