High School

EN

“Many of us grow to hate documentaries in school, because the use of movies to teach us something seems a cheat - a pill disguised as candy - and documentaries always seem to be about something we're not interested in. But Wiseman's documentaries show what is left out of both fictional movies and standard documentaries that simplify for a purpose, and his films deal with the primary institutions of our lives.

[…]

High School is so familiar and so extraordinarily evocative that a feeling of empathy with the students floods over us. How did we live through it? How did we keep any spirit? When you see a kid trying to make a phone call and being interrupted with "Do you have a pass to use the phone?" it all floods back - the low ceilings and pale-green walls of the basement where the lockers were, the constant defensiveness, that sense of always being in danger of breaking some pointless, petty rule. When since that time has one ever needed a pass to make a phone call? This movie takes one back to where, one discovers, time has stood still. 

[…]

Wiseman extends our understanding of our common life the way novelists used to - a way largely abandoned by the modern novel and left to the journalists but not often picked up by them. What he's doing is so simple and so basic that it's like a rediscovery of what we knew, or should know. We often want more information about the people and their predicaments than he gives, but this is perhaps less a criticism of Wiseman's method than it is a testimonial to his success in making us care about his subjects. With fictional movies using so little of our shared experience, and with the big TV news ‘specials’ increasingly using that idiot ‘Mcluhanite’ fragmentation technique that scrambles all experience – as if the deliberate purpose were to make us indifferent to the life around us – it's a good sign when a movie sends us out wanting to know more and feeling that there is more to know.”

Pauline Kael1

“High School, Wiseman’s second film, reveals an aesthetic growth. Indicative of this was his decision to film in an institution that seemed to be working relatively well. The film was shot at Philadelphia’s Northeast High School, a relatively good school in the system chosen because Wiseman felt an inner city school would be a too easy target. The film demonstrates a remarkable advance in Wiseman’s sense of structure. From the sledgehammer Kino-fist style of Tuticut Follies, he begins in this film to explore a more complex dialectical form of montage, establishing more resonant relationships between sequences that are themselves embedded within a more carefully organized structure.”

Barry Keith Grant2

“Frederik Wiseman seems to be a great teacher himself. He not only shines light into places we are not meant to go, but he shows us anew places whose familiarity has made them obscure to us. [...] In his early films, one feels a certain anger: wake up, wake up, he seems to say, to who we really are and what we do to one another. In the later films, the shaking is gentler; he invites us to come out into the world to see the beauty and compassion we would otherwise miss.”

Andrew Delbanco3

“As I remember, when I showed up at his office, I was expecting to find someone angry and highly political. Both the scandalous inadequacy of the facility for the criminally insane in Tuticut Follies and the punitive banality of the Philadelphia public high school in High School led me to imagine and ardent crusader for reform, an antagonist to the institutional forms of life in capitalist America. Those impressions weren’t entirely wrong; they were just inadequate. Wiseman’s career as a filmmaker is a stunning case what might be called the artistic uses of anger. There is, without doubt, an extraordinary rage hidden deep in the underbrush of many of the films, but it does not emerge as an ideologue’s rant.”

David Denby4

“In Wiseman’s documentaries institutions themselves are treated symbolically. The films employ textual strategies that force the viewer to understand them as social microcosms, as interwoven parts of the larger social fabric. Wiseman says he is ‘interested in how institutions reflect the larger cultural hues’. He refers to the process of filming institutions as a search for cultural spoors. He also likens it to tracking the abominable snowman – looking for the creature but finding only traces.”

Barry Keith Grant5

“Wiseman is not primarily a social commentator or an investigator of this or that institution, as he is often said to be. He is a portraitist, and his favourite genre is the double portrait. [...] In most such scenes – I am tempted to call them duets or pas de deux – one person occupies the subsidiary position (student, patient, novice, recruit) while the other (teacher, doctor, drill, sergeant, nurse) holds the authority. In the early films, there can be cruelty in this relation, but in later work Wiseman seems more interested in unarticulated tenderness, or what is sometimes called tough love.”

Andrew Delbanco6

“The greatness of Wiseman’s art is its so balancing the true claims of both parties to the conversations. There is a sense in which everything may be seen under the aspect of performance, and another equally common sense in which there is a perfectly simple indispensable distinction between performance and other things in life. Of either of the extreme positions it should be believed (in words that are crucially different heard in King Lear as against in conversation), that way madness lies.”

Christopher Ricks7

“One thing surprised me in 1978. Fred had little interest in watching other movies at the festival. He was interested in London theatre and excited about the prospect of going to a play. I still believe, over thirty years later, that his movies come from the theatre, perhaps the theatre of the absurd, rather than from any specific film tradition. [...] When a Spanish teacher in High School drills the line, ‘Sartre is an existentialist philosopher,’ or a helpless welfare recipient in Welfare refers to Godot in the closing minutes of the film, I can imagine Wiseman smiling. These are his roots – not Grierson and Flaherty but Beckett, Anouih, Ionesco, and Sartre, the theatre of hopeless irony and the absurd. It’s no wonder he lives now in France. Wiseman’s films can be considered as extended essays on the meaning of meaninglessness. And they are incredibly bitter and funny. Really, really funny.”

Errol Morris8

• 1Pauline Kael, “High School”, The New Yorker, October 18, 1969.
• 2

  Barry Keith Grant, Voyages of Discovery: The Cinema of Frederick Wiseman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).

• 3

  Andrew Delbanco, “Learning from Wiseman,” in Frederick Wiseman, ed. Joshua Siegel & Marie-Christine de Navacelle (Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 94.

• 4

  David Denby, “Comfort for the Tough-Minded,” in Frederick Wiseman, red. Joshua Siegel & Marie-Christine de Navacelle (Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 97.

• 5

  Grant, Frederick Wiseman, 20.

• 6

  Delbanco, “Learning from Wiseman,” 95.

• 7

  Christopher Ricks, “Imagination Alive Imagine,” in Frederick Wiseman, red. Joshua Siegel & Marie Christine de Navacelle (Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 56.

• 8

  Errol Morris, “The Tawdry Gruesomeness of Reality,” in Frederick Wiseman, red. Joshua Siegel & Marie-Christine de Navacelle (Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 63-67.