Frederick Wiseman’s thirty-ninth feature “Crazy Horse,” which begins its three-week run at Film Forum in New York tomorrow, is an entrancing fly-on-the-wall look at the Parisian erotic cabaret in which nude or semi-nude dancers perform in elaborately lit and choreographed routines that simultaneously emphasize their beauty, their terpsichorean chops, and, not least, their derrières.

With typical observational calm, America’s greatest living documentarian filmed the dancers rehearsing and polishing new acts, and performing older ones, under the supervision of the choreographer and stage director Philippe Decouflé. Wiseman’s longtime cinematographer John Davey also took the camera backstage to capture the dancers off-duty and to sit in on a polite but tense meeting in which Decoufflé appeals to Andrée Deissenberg, the Crazy Horse’s managing director, for a temporary closure so that he can create anew — to no avail.

Acclaimed for his rigorous, unflinching examinations of all manner of social institutions — schools, hospitals, police, juvenile court, the welfare system, military, and behaviors as radical as domestic violence — Wiseman completed an informal trilogy with “Crazy Horse,” having previously directed films about the Comedy Française (in 1996) and the Paris Ballet Opera (in 2009). In its fascination with physicality, though, it can also be aligned with his 2010 “Boxing Gym.” Nine days after his 82nd birthday on January 1, Wiseman sat down to talk to artinfo.

What drew you to the Crazy Horse after filming the Paris Ballet Opera?

I was thinking about doing another film in Paris when a friend told me that Philippe Decouflé was rehearsing a new show at the Crazy Horse. I went and met Decouflé and heard about what he was doing. I thought it would be interesting to follow another form of dance and the creation of a dance show.

But why the Crazy Horse in particular?

Well, I went to the Moulin Rouge and fell asleep. There was an effort at the Crazy Horse – unlike at the Moulin Rouge – to do real dancing. It was more of a spectacle and the lighting and costumes were very carefully thought out. At some of the other places, it’s just pretty women prancing around with bananas on their heads.

Would it have been distasteful to you to go to a club that was more inherently sexual?

If you mean people having sex, I wouldn’t do that. Of the shows that I saw, the Crazy Horse was the most interesting from both a visual and a choreographic point of view. Noneof the dances are particularly sexual. There’s nothing at the Crazy Horse show, for example, that suggests heterosexual sex. All the acts, for whatever reason, suggest either lesbianism or masturbation. I don’t know why that is. I mean, the girls are very beautiful, and one of the reasons that I have a lot of rehearsals in the movie is that in many ways they’re more sexy in the rehearsals than they are in the performances. There are probably several reasons for that, but one is that they look like they’re real women. They’re not made up or wearing wigs, and therefore, in many ways, they’re more attractive because you can distinguish them.

I believe you first went to the Crazy Horse in 1957?

Right. I went with my father-in-law. Not my mother-in-law!

Is it radically different now?

One of the things that hasn’t changed is that they’re still very interested in the creation of illusions. The nature of the dancing has changed and so has the music, though some of the acts are classic acts. For instance, the one where they’re all dressed up as [British guardsmen]—that’s not Decouflé, that’s [Alain] Bernardin [who founded the Crazy Horse in 1951]. There are still many original Bernardin acts.

How did you avoid making the film seem prurient?

By trying to be respectful to the people working there. If, to take an awkward or comic example, I’d shown close-ups of bare breasts or nipples, I don’t know whether it would have been prurient, but I would have made a fool of myself. The dancers are to a large extent naked, but you have to show them in a way that doesn’t mock them or take advantage of their nudity.

The audition sequence, in which girls are chosen for the Crazy Horse based on their body types, is brutal. And the film is wryly amused at the constant emphasis put by Decouflé and his colleagues on making the girls thrust out their buttocks.

It’s not hard to figure out my perspective. The casting sequence is crucial because you learn, very specifically, what the Crazy Horse thinks its brand is. And a major aspect of the brand is, “Can they stick their asses out in the air in a way that represents what the Crazy Horse thinks is the right position?”

I noticed the Crazy Horse audience isn’t full of of salivating men. There are many women in the audience.

Andrée comments on that in an interview with a journalist in the film. I found that interesting. When you think about the acts, none of them, as I said, suggest heterosexuality, which is fascinating. I don’t know why it’s so, but I think Bernardin made that judgment. Obviously from a commercial point of view, it’s a correct judgment, because the Crazy Horse has an audience.

Different fantasies are involved. There’s the fantasy of the owner about what kind of erotic fantasy will attract the public, the fantasy of the choreographer in making the choices, and the fantasy of the dancers as to why they work there. That’s probably the easiest one to explain. They’re trained dancers who can’t get jobs at major dance companies, but they don’t mind dancing naked or mostly naked, so it’s a job.

There’s also the collective fantasy of the public. Why do men go to the Crazy Horse? Why do women go? I don’t know. Everybody knows what a naked woman looks like, yet people pay a hundred euros to watch naked women, which they may or may not find sexually stimulating. The whole taboo about nakedness is odd, because, in effect, there’s no surprise for anybody, except maybe a young child. And even a young child may see his parents or his brother or sister naked. Then why does America collapse when one of Janet Jackson’s nipples is shown for ten seconds at the Super Bowl show? 

Isn’t it because of residual puritanism?

Residual Puritanism and present hypocrisy. Nevertheless, the fact is there’s no secret about what people’s bodies are like.

Did you stage any scenes?

No. I never stage anything. In performance movies, I’m shooting things that are already staged, as at the Crazy Horse, by somebody else. Some documentary filmmakers suggest lines to people, or ask them to do things, but I’ve never done that. I like to represent that what you see in the movie would have happened had I not been there, even though you’re looking at it in a different way, because the eye doesn’t have a zoom lens, for example.

Once you put a camera on something, doesn’t it change it?

Well, it’s the old question: Does the Heisenberg Principle apply to documentary filmmaking? In my experience — and I can’t talk about any experience other than my own — and the camera doesn’t change people’s behavior. If people don’t want their picture taken, they thumb their nose, walk away, say no. If they agree to have their picture taken, well, none of us are good enough actors to suddenly become somebody else. If we were, then the level of acting in Hollywood and Broadway would be much better than it is, because there’d be a wider pool to choose from.

If I think somebody’s bullshitting for the camera, I stop shooting, but that rarely happens. All of us, all the time, when we meet people, are having to make up our minds about whether we’re being conned. I think the same thing goes on when I’m making these movies. The other aspect of it is that we all act in ways that we think are appropriate for the situation we’re in — even though somebody else, looking at our behavior, may not agree with us.

I’ll give you an extreme example. In ’68, I made a film called “Law and Order” about the Kansas City police in Missouri. In order to make an arrest for prostitution at the time, the police had to have a price and an act, which meant that the undercover cop had to pick up a woman, bring her back to a hotel, get undressed, and presumably at the last minute say, “I arrest you.”

That happened. The undercover cop starts to lead the woman down the stairs of a seedy hotel. When they’re on the stairs, she knocks him down and flees. He gets on the walkie-talkie and calls the vice squad car. We’re in the vice squad car. We respond to the call, get to the hotel, the bellhop says that she fled to the basement. We go down to the basement. There’s no light in the basement. I had a sun gun on the camera, because I guessed I might need that, shooting at night.

The cop finds her hiding under some old furniture, drags her out, and starts to choke her in front of the camera. It’s a close-up. Glug glug glug. Another cop is holding her hands. After about twenty seconds, the cop who’s choking her lets her go, and she turns to the cop holding her hands and says, “He was trying to strangle me.” And the second cop says, “Oh no. You were just imagining it. Look, if you want to be a hooker, that’s your business, but if you get picked up by one of our boys, we’ll take you down to the station house, we’ll fingerprint you, you’ll pay a $50 fine, you’ll be out on the street in half an hour. But don’t fuck with our boys.”

And I could say, “If we hadn’t been there filming, he would’ve killed her.” But I don’t think that’s the case. I think what they were doing was shaping her up into the cop-hooker system, teaching her the rules of the game. The cops didn’t see it the same way that you or I might see it. It’s horrible that the cop choked this woman, but he thought it was perfectly appropriate behavior because she knocked the undercover cop down the stairs.

Have your methods changed over the years?

Not in major ways, but I like to think I’ve learned something over the years and hope the films have technically gotten better. I like to think I’ve learned more about how to think in visual terms, and how to present complex ideas. I look at some of the early films, and I wouldn’t cut them the way I cut them now. I learned more about filmmaking from editing all my films than I have in any other way, because when you’re sitting in the editing room and you don’t have the shot that you need, the next time you’re out and you’re in a similar situation, you remember to get that shot.

I must ask you his: do you have powerful memories of making “Titicut Follies [his 1967 debut about the treatment of mentally ill inmates in the Massachusetts Correctional Institute in Bridgewater]? 

Sure, because it was my first film, but not more than the others. I’ve reached the age where sometimes I don’t remember my own name, but I still can recite the dialogue from all of my own movies because I looked at the rushes so much.

For further information on Frederick Wiseman’s films go to www.zipporah.com