I saw this for a film class way back in 1990. This is a fun documentary about the famous Neiman-Marcus department store in Dallas, TX. Among the memorable moments: Stanley Marcus sings "My Way," and a Park Cities-type matron tries on a hopelessly dated, metallic formal gown in a private fitting room.
3 Reviews
My favorite Christmas movie
ladyofspain29 October 2002
There's a saying that you pass through boredom into fascination, and when it applies to Frederick Wiseman's movies, it's true. This film, shot during the Christmas season at a Nieman Marcus in Dallas, allows you to be a true fly on the wall in 1982 as rich people shop for holiday dresses, displays of plush E.Ts are put up, some office workers have a birthday party (complete with a guy in a chicken suit), and people behind the scenes control the flow of goods in and out as the well-heeled purchase gifts. This movie fills me with more warm nostalgia than any repeat viewing of It's A Wonderful Life ever could, as it makes me a participant again in the 1982 of Christmas past - not the reconstructed version, assembled from the detritus and artifacts remaining in our era, but allowing me the experience of existing, living, and breathing in the past again. Its real-time, judgementless pace takes a moment to adjust to, but once you do, just being an impartial observer on a moment in time and space is endlessly absorbing.
Would you like an opportunity to participate?
tieman6418 March 2013
Warning: Spoilers
"Only a nation of unenlightened half-wits could have taken this beautiful place and turned it into what it is today: a shopping mall. You know that? That's all you've got. That's all you've got here folks. Mile after mile of mall after mall. Many, many malls. Major malls and mini malls. They put the mini malls in between the major malls. And in between the mini malls they put the mini marts. America the beautiful: one big transcontinental commercial cesspool." - George Carlin
Frederic Wiseman's one of the leading names in documentary or "direct" cinema. His films typically focus upon various pillars of democratic society – high schools, hospitals, abattoirs, state assemblies, military bases, public housing blocks, domestic abuse shelters, shops etc – his camera dryly charting the workings of these institutions.
Wiseman's "The Store" focuses on a Neiman-Marcus retail store in Dallas, Texas (also the chain's corporate headquarters). Significantly, Wiseman's previous film was "Model". Where "Model" focused on the creation of advertising for consumer products, "The Store" looks at the actual selling of commodities.
Through a series of sequences, Wiseman watches as upper, lower and middle management types discuss the selection, presentation, marketing, pricing, advertising and selling of a vast array of luxury consumer products. These include designer clothes, furs, bags, jewelry, perfumes, shoes, various electronics, china and porcelain. We eavesdrop on sales meetings, marketing meetings, overhear advertising strategies and watch various training groups, personnel practises and sales techniques. The point, though, is that the Neiman-Marcus brand is itself Neiman-Marcus' chief product. The store is in the market of marking itself. It actively creates wants and desires.
Typical of Wiseman, the department store's workings are shot to resemble that of prisons and army barracks. The store has its own power structure and regimental approach. It is all-controlling, its workforce clearly demarcated, its members assigned rigid roles. We see the inequity of the serving and the served, the way authority creates an imbalance of power, and the relationship between assistants and consumers. Elsewhere, in boardroom meetings, corporate leaders talk of becoming a kind of all-consuming, manifestation of the Neiman-Marcus ethos. Members of the Neiman-Marcus community exist only to exalt, service and propagate Neiman-Marcus.
Wiseman's opening and closing dialogue scenes often have a symbolic function. Here we're bookended by scenes in which corporate chiefs stress that their "only goal is to make sales". Ancillary benefits offered by Neiman-Marcus are all geared toward facilitating these sales. The film then ends with chairman Stanley Marcus reciting the words to Frank Sinatra's "My Way". To Wiseman, Marcus' "way" is more than an individual ethos. Capitalism is the guiding and ordering force of most of the world, the United States itself "The Store".
But Wiseman's film is less a critique of capitalism - the violence of capitalism can be demonstrated with simple maths, physics and a white board - than a document of its neuroses. Indeed, one early scene shows a corporate chief likening his job to that of doctors. The customer/patient comes, "something is wrong with them, you look at them, cure them". The customer, then, has an existential lack which needs curing. Is Neiman-Marcus a healthy cure, though? What, if any, is the sickness its customers posses? Might Neiman-Marcus itself be a cause, symptom, result and manifestation of this sickness? Wiseman is too subtle to directly ask. His films always seem benign, absolutely apolitical, merely seem to be chronicling perfectly normal, healthy human behaviour. But look closely and there is always something sad, pathetic, irrational and at times ugly on display.
Later, grotesque scenes take place. Shop girls are forced to practise smiling, store models parade about like robots ("This dress is now available on the third floor"), employees are treated with condescension and section chiefs talk narcissistically about fur coats and feathers. Early scenes show the Neiman-Marcus workforce undergoing finger exercises, solely because healthy fingers benefit the department store. The workers' fingers essentially privatised, everything else is privy to decomposition or replacement.
As well as a hierarchal, or class based segregation (the lower and unseen levels of the department store resemble sweat shops or factories), is a kind of gender segregation. Subtly sexist, customers and workers are predominantly female, whilst management and executives are all male, constantly trumpeting the "brand purpose" of Neiman-Marcus. Men then, hold sway over female self-perception and female desires. Elsewhere we hear of the "Neiman-Marcus attitude": the store panders to class based aspirations. It sells the illusion of finery and worth; a simulation of wealth. Significantly, upper management is excessively verbal or verbose. They lay down the law. The lower workers are silent and operate in the realm of the physical, always punching time-cards, wrapping gifts, pressing garments, sewing etc.
Perhaps the film's best scene watches as a young black woman attempts to "sell herself" to Neiman-Marcus. She wants to work there and deems herself suitable for employment. Her sequence recalls several scenes with African Americans in Wiseman's previous films. This is the end result of Civil Rights movements: the right to market oneself to "The Store".
8/10 - A slightly superior version of Robert Altman's "HEALTH". Worth one viewing.
Frederic Wiseman's one of the leading names in documentary or "direct" cinema. His films typically focus upon various pillars of democratic society – high schools, hospitals, abattoirs, state assemblies, military bases, public housing blocks, domestic abuse shelters, shops etc – his camera dryly charting the workings of these institutions.
Wiseman's "The Store" focuses on a Neiman-Marcus retail store in Dallas, Texas (also the chain's corporate headquarters). Significantly, Wiseman's previous film was "Model". Where "Model" focused on the creation of advertising for consumer products, "The Store" looks at the actual selling of commodities.
Through a series of sequences, Wiseman watches as upper, lower and middle management types discuss the selection, presentation, marketing, pricing, advertising and selling of a vast array of luxury consumer products. These include designer clothes, furs, bags, jewelry, perfumes, shoes, various electronics, china and porcelain. We eavesdrop on sales meetings, marketing meetings, overhear advertising strategies and watch various training groups, personnel practises and sales techniques. The point, though, is that the Neiman-Marcus brand is itself Neiman-Marcus' chief product. The store is in the market of marking itself. It actively creates wants and desires.
Typical of Wiseman, the department store's workings are shot to resemble that of prisons and army barracks. The store has its own power structure and regimental approach. It is all-controlling, its workforce clearly demarcated, its members assigned rigid roles. We see the inequity of the serving and the served, the way authority creates an imbalance of power, and the relationship between assistants and consumers. Elsewhere, in boardroom meetings, corporate leaders talk of becoming a kind of all-consuming, manifestation of the Neiman-Marcus ethos. Members of the Neiman-Marcus community exist only to exalt, service and propagate Neiman-Marcus.
Wiseman's opening and closing dialogue scenes often have a symbolic function. Here we're bookended by scenes in which corporate chiefs stress that their "only goal is to make sales". Ancillary benefits offered by Neiman-Marcus are all geared toward facilitating these sales. The film then ends with chairman Stanley Marcus reciting the words to Frank Sinatra's "My Way". To Wiseman, Marcus' "way" is more than an individual ethos. Capitalism is the guiding and ordering force of most of the world, the United States itself "The Store".
But Wiseman's film is less a critique of capitalism - the violence of capitalism can be demonstrated with simple maths, physics and a white board - than a document of its neuroses. Indeed, one early scene shows a corporate chief likening his job to that of doctors. The customer/patient comes, "something is wrong with them, you look at them, cure them". The customer, then, has an existential lack which needs curing. Is Neiman-Marcus a healthy cure, though? What, if any, is the sickness its customers posses? Might Neiman-Marcus itself be a cause, symptom, result and manifestation of this sickness? Wiseman is too subtle to directly ask. His films always seem benign, absolutely apolitical, merely seem to be chronicling perfectly normal, healthy human behaviour. But look closely and there is always something sad, pathetic, irrational and at times ugly on display.
Later, grotesque scenes take place. Shop girls are forced to practise smiling, store models parade about like robots ("This dress is now available on the third floor"), employees are treated with condescension and section chiefs talk narcissistically about fur coats and feathers. Early scenes show the Neiman-Marcus workforce undergoing finger exercises, solely because healthy fingers benefit the department store. The workers' fingers essentially privatised, everything else is privy to decomposition or replacement.
As well as a hierarchal, or class based segregation (the lower and unseen levels of the department store resemble sweat shops or factories), is a kind of gender segregation. Subtly sexist, customers and workers are predominantly female, whilst management and executives are all male, constantly trumpeting the "brand purpose" of Neiman-Marcus. Men then, hold sway over female self-perception and female desires. Elsewhere we hear of the "Neiman-Marcus attitude": the store panders to class based aspirations. It sells the illusion of finery and worth; a simulation of wealth. Significantly, upper management is excessively verbal or verbose. They lay down the law. The lower workers are silent and operate in the realm of the physical, always punching time-cards, wrapping gifts, pressing garments, sewing etc.
Perhaps the film's best scene watches as a young black woman attempts to "sell herself" to Neiman-Marcus. She wants to work there and deems herself suitable for employment. Her sequence recalls several scenes with African Americans in Wiseman's previous films. This is the end result of Civil Rights movements: the right to market oneself to "The Store".
8/10 - A slightly superior version of Robert Altman's "HEALTH". Worth one viewing.
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