High School is a 1968 American documentary film shot by Frederick Wiseman that shows a typical day for a group of students at Northeast High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was one of the first direct cinema (or cinéma vérité) documentaries. It was shot over five weeks in March and April 1968. The film was not shown in Philadelphia at the time of its release, because of Wiseman's concerns over what he called "vague talk" of a lawsuit.
The film was released in November 1968 by Zipporah Films, Wiseman's distribution company. High School has aired on PBS. Wiseman distributes his work (DVDs and 16mm prints) through Zipporah Films, which rents them to high schools, colleges, and libraries on a five-year long-term lease. High School was selected in 1991 for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Why It Rocks
While Fred Wiseman began his career during the great period of American direct cinema in the 1960s, his style is markedly different from that of other directors. Fred Wiseman employed the techniques of a burgeoning documentary style known as direct cinema to capture reality truthfully and without narration. He had roamed freely through Philadelphia's Northeast High School to document students continually clashing with administrators who confuse learning with discipline.
While other observational filmmakers tended to focus on charismatic or special individuals, Wiseman’s films, including High School which was shot in Northeast High School in Philadelphia, examine instead social and governmental institutions.
On the surface, it's loosely structured according to a conventional “day in the life of” approach, but at the same time, the school’s approach to education is presented as being similar to a manufacturing process. Wiseman has said that when he first saw the school, he was struck by how much it resembled a factory, like a General Motors plant, and in the opening sequence from the car, the exterior of the school building, with its smokestack and fences, looks as much like a factory as it does a school. So basically, the film views the American public school experience as a factory-like process, with the students becoming the socialized and standardized “products” it produces.
Wiseman’s canny editing quickly reveals the film’s scathing view of public education. After the homeroom announcements, the first lesson shown is the Spanish class discussing existentialism. The content of the lesson seems unavoidably ironic in the context of its presentation, for the teacher’s approach is to have the entire class drone in unison everything she says about a philosophical worldview that is concerned with the question of individual will. Wiseman cuts from this lesson to a percussion lesson, with the music teacher’s conducting hand, emphasized by the framing of the shot, keeping the beat for the students. Here, as in the Spanish class and everywhere else in the film, there is no room for a different drummer. Most of the scenes in one way or another emphasize depersonalization and ideological indoctrination. The similarity of the row houses glimpsed in the opening drive to school foreshadows the impersonal conformism that dominates the school’s activities and approach to education. One teacher explains to a girl who wants to wear a short dress to the school prom that “it’s nice to be individualistic, but there are certain places to be individualistic”, and the girl is forced to apologize (“I didn’t mean to be individualistic”). In the girls gym class the camera focuses not on their faces but on their bodies, clad in identical uniforms, making them indistinguishable from one another
The film also relies on framing, especially in the use of close-ups. Close-ups appear throughout the film mainly centering on the teachers' faces rather than the students'. When the vice-principal speaks to a boy who does not want to take gym, for example, the camera zooms in to a big close-up of his mouth. The image or the mouth, isolated from the rest of his face and magnified in close-up, implies that he is talking at rather than with the boy. Moreover, the mouth’s unnatural bigness on the screen gives it a menacing quality; then the camera zooms out, as if recoiling, when the vice-principal rises from his chair and approaches the boy in a threatening manner. The camera zooms into the wiggling index finger of the gynecologist who tells the assembled boys that nature has set up men to be the aggressors, comically emphasizes the doctor’s sexist perspective. The close-ups of the teacher wearing thick glasses and of the guidance counselor with extremely puffy eyelids suggest the school’s myopic, narrow vision. By contrast, close-ups of students’ faces are almost always accompanied on the soundtrack by a teacher’s voice, and so tend to suggest passivity.
Despite being only 75 minutes -- one of Wiseman's shortest documentaries -- the impact is as just memorable as his longer films.
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