La Danse, Frederick Wiseman’s 38th film, is a masterpiece. In it the 79-year-old director has set aside the epic, ongoing film of America’s institutional fabric that has been his life’s work in order to take up a subject that seems nearer to his personal affections – the Paris Opera Ballet. If, like me, you know little about ballet, the film will be an artistic epiphany. And then there is the exquisite pleasure of Wiseman’s own genius for capturing queer, irretrievable experiences. You have only two weeks in which to see it.

The POB traces it’s lineage to the 17th century and the Académie Royale de Danse created by Louis XIV. It is an institution of Byzantine traditions (in a culture that adores them), with an archaic hierarchy that at once baffles and charms. The Ballet’s stars are officially titled as such. Below them a hive of virtuoso dancers toil, each one more lithe and beautiful than the last, reigned over by visiting maîtres. Some of these hold forth in dazzlingly arrogant fashion, with a levity that informs both their wit and cruelty. There is much here for the Francophile, and not only cliché. As Wiseman explores the Ballet, we are given access to the less-than-glamorous aspects too; the spacklers, the electricians and laundresses; an unsightly cafeteria meal of fish drowning in gooey sauce; a labor rep who tries to encourage the dancers as he admits their country’s diminishing ability to sustain pensions. One gets the sense that nearly every employee of the POB understands that theirs is a vocation of love, borne with Sisyphean patience, from the dancers’ endless rehearsals to the seamstress who pins bead after single bead upon a wardrobe of gowns.

It is easy to see that Wiseman shares this love, and the patience that comes with it. Nowhere is this more present than in his documentation of the Ballet’s final performances. Wiseman succeeds in the seemingly impossible task of replicating the kinetic environment of the theater, capturing the mute thud of every footfall, each wince behind fixed and smiling eyes. The mastery he shows here is difficult to convey, but he clearly has an intuitive handle on ballet’s many forms, whether the leaping grace of Noureev’s Nutcracker or the avian rigidity of Wayne McGreggor’s Genus.

These performances come at the end of the film. Before that, we see them in bits and pieces, as the dancers practice privately, and more often, as they work tirelessly before the choreographers. Here Wiseman’s brilliance is working at full steam as he captures the strange existential experience of being in these sun-washed rooms. We are made to inhale a dense atmosphere of ego, fear, pettiness and ambition, above all of absurdity. Freshly agape from a young dancer’s practice performance, one can’t help but be indignant as the choreographer tortures her over some subtlety (an arabesque?) that she has apparently flubbed. Moments later he is satisfied, and the layman is hopeless to determine just what improvement has been made. At one point the choreographer Angelin Prelijocaj rambles on to his young Medea about the significance of her final gesture, a hopelessly romantic blowing of dust from the hand which will symbolize “destiny”. It seems almost comic. Yet when the moment comes in the final performance it is unquestionably profound. All of this Wiseman captures with equanimity. He is never didactic, and seems at pains to preserve the absurdity alongside the artistic triumph, with neither washing the other out.

Were it only a document of these performances, La Danse would be a film well worth seeing. But Wiseman’s own artistry is more than a match for that of his subject matter. From it’s opening shot of the drippy, catacomb-like basement of the PLO, the film, which includes no voiceovers or text, no frame of any kind, conveys rich notions about place that feel as if they were a lifetime in the making. Yes, we are meant to go breathless at the superlative performances, to twinge as arches quiver and hamstrings braid, but it is an intimate love for the building itself that truly captures our imagination. We share with Wiseman the eye of some long-attendant ghost, marveling silently at the agonies of the dancers, at their triumphs and their vanity, only to retreat to the back spiral stair cases and dusty garrets, emerging upon the rooftop apiary that all of dreary Paris surrounds.

Throughout the film I kept remembering a strange evening as a child when I found myself alone in my elementary school auditorium. It was after orchestra practice, and everyone else had gone home. I felt overwhelmed with excitement that I should be standing alone in that busy place, the whole school seemed to swell around me, more alive in its nocturnal form than it had ever been before. What I was apprehending was the idea of institution, the spirit a place acquires over time. It is this sublime apprehension that forms the core of Wiseman’s film. It is above all else a tribute to the uncanny difference between edifice and institution, and a living tradition that depends on such enchantments.

La Danse runs Nov 4-17 at Film Forum.