Frederick Wiseman famously avoided using narrators or talking-head commentators in his documentaries. He wanted his films’ subjects to speak for themselves, and the viewers to think for themselves.

“I don’t like to be told what to think,” he told the Press Herald in 2017.

Wiseman, who made more than 40 documentaries, influenced generations of filmmakers and was given an honorary Oscar for his pioneering work in documentary film, died Monday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 96.

Wiseman had summered in Northport, near Belfast, since the 1970s and considered that Midcoast town, along with Cambridge and Paris, France, to be his homes, according to a statement from his family and his company, Zipporah Films, based in Harpswell.

Raised in Boston, Wiseman was a film fan from a young age but worked as a lawyer before deciding he needed to find a line of work he was passionate about, he told the Press Herald.

Wiseman’s first documentary, “Titicut Follies” (1967), was banned for years because of its frank and shocking look at how patients at a Massachusetts prison hospital for the “criminally insane” were treated. Other films of his look at community and cultural institutions, including “High School” in 1968, “Hospital” in 1969, “State Legislature” in 2006, “Belfast, Maine” in 1999 and “In Jackson Heights” in 2015.

Many of his films, including “In Jackson Heights,” “National Gallery,” and “Belfast, Maine,” were shown nationally on PBS TV stations. “Titicut Follies” was made into a ballet, with Wiseman’s help, and it was performed in New York City.

Wiseman first came to Maine in the early 1970s because his friend, the painter Neil Welliver, had a place in Lincolnville and recommended the area. Wiseman bought a barn and had it moved to land in Northport. He had it made it into a home, where he often edited films as well.

Wiseman received an honorary Academy Award in 2016 and was lauded in the official Academy press release as a pioneer in the field of documentary film. In 2017, on the 50th anniversary of his first film, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston hosted a retrospective of all his films. Last year, the Lincoln Center in New York did the same, calling it “Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution.”

“Belfast, Maine” is a good example of Wiseman’s spare and unadorned style. Wiseman wanted to show the daily life of a small town in painstaking detail. The film has an 11-minute scene in the now-closed Stinson sardine cannery showing dozens of workers standing over a series of conveyor belts with thousands of sardines and thousands of cans, like a river, flowing toward them. Silently, wearing aprons and hair nets, they quickly snip the sardines into pieces with scissors and pack them for shipping.

“What I was trying to do was give some sense of what it’s like to work there, to be on that assembly line for eight hours a day for maybe 20 years,” Wiseman told the Press Herald.

Wiseman’s company is named for his wife of 65 years, Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman, who died in 2021. He is survived by his two sons, David (Jennifer), and Eric (Kristen Stowell), and three grandchildren, Benjamin, Charlie and Tess, as well as Karen Konicek, his friend and collaborator, who worked with him for 45 years, according to the statement from his family and Zipporah Films.

A celebration of life will be announced at a later date. In lieu of flowers, Wiseman’s family and Zipporah Films ask that people support their local PBS station or independent bookstore in Wiseman’s memory.