The celebrated American documentarist Frederick Wiseman is a rare example of a filmmaker who is in total control of his own output. Originally trained as a lawyer, he is fiercely independent and totally pragmatic. "For my first two films, I had to sue the distributor for my share of the money," he says; since then, he has paid personal attention to every detail, from raising the funds to distribution. At [...]

The photograph says it all: a table carefully set with a polished silver urn; a china tea-set patterned with flowers and birds; a toast rack; a neat table cloth. The calm, self-satisfied decency of the image oozes Victorian values. A present-day version of such a picture would probably be an advertisement, or it might appear in the consumer pages of a newspaper. In the 1840s, it was, among other things, [...]