The art of a Frederick Wiseman documentary lies in its apparent artlessness. His films are put together from unbroken takes of lengthy conversations, with no voiceover narration or on-screen titles to indicate who's who or what, precisely, is going on. It's cinéma vérité at its purest, and yet the "drop in a camera and get out of the way" style can be deceiving. Wiseman's three-hours-plus Domestic Violence appears to have been filmed over the course of a single day in Tampa. It begins in the morning, with the police answering domestic-dispute calls, moves to The Spring, a battered-women's shelter, for the afternoon and early evening, and ends late at night with another police ride-along. But the film was actually shot over the course of two months, and it spent more than a year in the editing room. Wiseman has said that he doesn't do research before he starts a project, and that "the shooting of the film is the research." In Domestic Violence, he spent months dwelling on the subject of abuse, letting women, their boyfriends, their kids, their counselors, and the cops converse in front of the cameras. As a result, talking becomes the film's central theme. It's difficult to explain why people stay in abusive relationships, or to describe the cruel dynamics that develop; when The Spring's staffers try to break it down with a diagram labeled "The Power Control Wheel," their little paper handout looks sweetly ridiculous. So Domestic Violence delves into ways of coping with no-win situations. Unlike the Wiseman-esque TV show Cops, Domestic Violence stays with disturbance calls long past the initial complaint, observing how complainants cling to police officers' adjudicating voice of authority, and how they won't let the cops leave until they've explained one more aspect of their fractured relationships. At The Spring, group-therapy sessions and check-in procedures become occasions for cathartic personal narratives, which the counselors hear with the same detached-but-sympathetic posture as the police. Like other recent Wiseman films, Domestic Violence is a bit too long. Conceptually, it's sensible to keep the camera running while these women bare their souls, but in practical terms, the gist of some of their stories would have sufficed. Nevertheless, Wiseman has scored another considerable achievement in the documentary form, both in Domestic Violence's look (impeccably shot on film, with lyrical silent shots of Tampa streets and storefronts) and in the countless unshakable moments that punctuate the occasional tedium. The hardest sequence to watch comes early on at The Spring, as a 70-ish, upper-middle-class woman checks in after a 50-year abusive marriage to a college-educated man. She sums up the contradictions of violent relationships in a four-word description of her husband: "He's brilliant," she says, "but stupid."