CENTRAL PARK

RELEASED 1990, 176 MINUTES, COLOR

CENTRAL PARK is a film about the famous New York City landmark and the variety of ways in which people make use of it: running, boating, walking, skating, music, theatre, sports, picnics, parades and concerts. The film also illustrates the complex problems the New York City Parks Department deals with in order to maintain and preserve the park and keep it open and accessible to the public.

His film… is a fine medium for understanding New York itself, how it needs the park and how the park means different things to different people… It is a lab for bird-watchers, gardeners and dinosaur lovers… It is a public commons for ideas… and exiles… and artists… It is a huge repository for every imaginable sport: Wiseman peruses over remote-control boat racing, lawn bowling, tai chi, marathon races, cross-country skiing and acres full of tennis players.

–Robert Koehler, Los Angeles Times

One of the most accessible and salutary films ever made by master documentarian Frederick Wiseman… ‘CENTRAL PARK’ celebrates not the Earth but the 840 acres of it in the middle of Manhattan where New Yorkers retreat and repair and lapse into modes of behavior one might actually classify as civilized.… Wiseman is one of the great filmmakers of our time.

–Tom Shales, The Washington Post