High School

Name: High School
Director: Frederick Wiseman
Genre: Documentary
Released: 1968
Duration: 1 h 15 min

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Documentary

1968
Frederick Wiseman
75 mins
12

Summary

Frederick Wiseman's riveting portrait of life inside a large city high school, where social and moral values are handed down.

IMDB

Review

A star rating of 5 out of 5.

Calum Baker

Frederick Wiseman's outstanding, highly influential second film sees the documentarian confidently settling into the approach that would come to define the remainder of his 55-year career. It uses an observational "direct cinema" approach -no interviews, no voiceover, no archive material -to present excerpts from five weeks at Philadelphia's Northeast High School, with the focus largely on lessons and disciplinary interactions. As staff members try, sometimes blandly and sometimes belligerently, to maintain order and craft their students into paragons of conformity, Wiseman uses his gently probing camera and deceptively rambling structure to craft a compelling snapshot of the generational clashes so typical of late-60s America. For all its focus and specificity, the film remains a timeless study in authority more generally. Wiseman's interest in faces pays dividends here as we watch student after student encounter admonishments, tempered encouragement and the kind of bizarre, Kafkaesque non-explanations that any viewer will recognise from their own encounters with officialdom at school and beyond. Laced with humour, interesting characters and one home economics lesson so cartoonishly sexist you almost have to laugh, this is among the great statements of Wiseman's career -and unforgettable on its own terms, too.

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7.5/10