High School

"High School" is enthralling in one sense; if you are obsessed with the mundane "American Splendor" of generations past, then you will adore this documentary. For its time, it was brilliantly avant garde and remains so even today for its muted commentary on administration and the growing disparity between older generations and the younger high schoolers of the late 60's.

There is something purely amazing in viewing such settings in this vignette as they were, undoctored by Hollywood's lens. I am fascinated by the details of a time that I will never know personally and "High School" provides a brief glimpse into the mindset of the young adults of 1969 who are not unlike ourselves.

If you dig documentaries, please give this one a shot. Maybe you'll become as obsessed with "High School" as I have.

Sometimes the best films are those truest to themselves. There's nothing phony about this movie. It's a time capsule. It captured a cloistered, closed system from within. The results are spellbinding.

The faculty of NorthEast high school in Philadelphia are the stars. The viewer decides whether their actions are good or bad. There's certain purity at work. Is it an imperfect system? You bet it is. Do rules appear petty and draconian? Yes, they do. But there is hope inside the bubble. The faculty at NorthEast could be teachers at my high school. We have the flat-topped disciplinarian, the hip, young English teacher, the no-nonsense fashion matron, and the boring instructor with the bad teeth.

The scene with the coach and the graduate who visited while on leave from Vietnam illustrated one of the prominent themes; this environment is in a bubble insulated from community and society. In this scene, the coach made a connection between a soldier's war wound and the effect on his sports career. He was so wrapped up in his role as the school coach; he immediately applied news from the outside world to his microcosmic world inside the school grounds.

This theme was also reiterated by a boy in one of the rare scenes where students were the stars. The would-be bohemian said as much; this school is a cloistered, closed system. The bubble theme is further underscored by the sequence where three boys emerged from a space capsule simulator after 193 hours. There was much fanfare for the successful end to 'Project SPARC' including a telegram from astronaut Gordon Cooper, read with typical dragnet-style inflection by the sponsoring teacher.

In fact, several scenes feature extended recitations of written material by instructors who suffer from chronic educational ennui. There is the flat rendition of 'Casey at the Bat', the review of the typing test text, and the dreaded retelling of the "thought for the day" from the daily bulletin. A glimpse of self-awareness offered by a young English teacher was most startling. In the course of dissecting Paul Simon's poem "The Dangling Conversation", she read it aloud first, and followed with the Simon & Garfunkel song version. She told the students to listen to both versions. The poem came alive with the music. A lingering shot of the teacher showed the hope in her eyes that someone will get the message. For me, it's the best sequence in the film. If Wiseman wanted to underscore a failure of the system, it lied not with the disciplinarian tactics or heavy-handed advice dispensed by the staff, but with the inadequacy of the delivery methods used by educators.

The message turns hopeful in the last scene. A teacher reads a letter at a faculty meeting written by the former student on station in Vietnam. Tight camera work reveals the emotion of the reader, in contrast to the non expressive faces of the previous speakers. The written word provides power after all. There's hope on the part of the student to survive outside the system, hope on the part of the administrator reading the note that they do have an impact on their charges, and hope that inside a flawed machine such as the educational system, someone gets the message.

I just tripped over this review and was brought back by the comment from geprescott in 2003. I was also a student at Northeast High School, graduating in 1970.

What I do remember about the pieces I saw was they were real but not quite true. These are images from long ago, but there was something of the fact that most teachers were trying and not intending to be caricatures as I remember them appearing in the film.

What really got me to write was the description of the disciplinarian dean. I also had him as a 12th grade history teacher. Everything said about him by geprescott was very accurate. Our class was not required to read the Sunday New York Times, but I remember the year long project was to choose a country, research it, and then write its foreign policy. I picked the Soviet Union, did my research, and wrote a paper aimed at making life as difficult as possible for the US. I don't remember the actual comments but I remember being pleased with the final grade.

I never saw this entire film and am not sure where to find it now. I'd like to watch it with my kids.

Quite a remarkable study of an anonymous high school. Wiseman's strength in this film is definitely editing. He has taken seemingly a mountain of footage from probably a year in a high school and selected choice bits to make a film that completely engages, despite the apparent lack of character development and traditional narrative. The scenes and moments are incredibly interesting and glue you to the screen. Some of the best treasures are in the tiny concrete room where kids argue about their detentions. A teacher shows girls how to strut their stuff, and boys learn all about sex from a jolly gynecologist.

If you can get your hands on a copy of this, sit back and enjoy!

Frederick Wiseman is, of course, one of the best documentary film-makers, a wonderfully evocative but not manipulative cinema verite director who has consistently been making quality documentaries for several decades. "High School" is now available from Zipporah films, albeit for a higher price than many films ($35), and it is arguably his most accessible feature.

Wiseman has directed several films that run longer than three hours, mind-numbingly intense documentaries which fiercely tear into their subject matter and are nearly completely thematically ambiguous, but "High School" is more a straightforward documentary, reminiscent in places of the sort of film the Maysles Brothers made, and of "Titicut Follies", perhaps the only other Wiseman film with a definitive approach to the subject matter. The film doesn't feature the sort of objectivity some of Wiseman's other films do, and even the sequel to this feature, "High School II", which looked at a 90's high school, is far more ambiguous and much longer than this lean 75-minute feature, but around as good.

Still, the film is not marred by simplistic messages and a preachy attitude. Wiseman's films, as they normally do, allow a remarkably candid, voyeuristic experience for the audience, letting us see some of the social attitudes of the era as well as capturing the timeless feel of the high school experience. In what is perhaps the film's greatest scene a teacher formally recites "The Dangling Conversation" by Simon and Garfunkel, then plays the song for the class. You see small mannerisms change, the teacher suddenly has a hopeful look in her eyes rather than one of a tired educator, and Wiseman brilliantly captures the class's reaction without the scene ever feeling contrived or forced. It's just the sort of scene that Wiseman does perfectly, asking the audience to interpret the images for themselves, never overstepping his boundaries and preaching to the audience.

"High School" is almost certainly Wiseman's most accessible film. At 75 minutes in length it goes by quite fast and although it isn't necessarily designed as entertainment it is more or less easy to watch except for those who had traumatic high school experiences. "High School II" is a more complex and ambitious film (and, of course, seen by far fewer people), but "High School" might have the edge in terms of just how effective and lean it is. It's a perfectly-structured documentary with a stunning final scene, and may be one of my favorite films.

10/10