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: American Lives’ 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.

Matthew Barrington, curator of cinema at the Barbican and an authority on Wiseman’s work and slow cinema, introduces the film:

After the screening, he was 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: