My father, a much more avid reader than I, once told me that “the more books you read, the more you need to read.” In my experience, that’s just as true for movie watching, and every year I find myself with more directors whose films I feel compelled to seek out. This year, one of my biggest moviegoing resolutions has been to acquaint myself with the work of Frederick Wiseman, who over the past four decades has become one of the most celebrated documentarians in film history.
Wiseman was an early proponent of a style called “direct cinema.” During the 1960s, the availability of handheld 16mm cameras and portable sound recorders afforded filmmakers to chronicle their subjects relatively unobtrusively. “Direct cinema” capitalized on this technology, and its practitioners attempted to overturn the traditional documentary style. By doing away with such artifices as narrators and talking-head interviews, directors like Wiseman, D.A. Pennebaker, and the Maysles brothers told their stories primarily through footage shot on the fly.
Wiseman’s 1968 film High School was only his second feature after 1967’s Titicut Follies, a muckraking portrait of a mental hospital. In High School, the surroundings are much more mundane, but the students are in their own ways just as institutionalized as Follies’ inmates. The world of High School is a place of learning, not just about academics but also about the traditional order of things. If Wiseman’s greatness as a filmmaker lies, to paraphrase Film Comment’s Kent Jones, in his portrayal of how institutions work rather than how they fail, then High School is as relevant today as it was forty years ago.
Consider an early scene in the Dean’s office, in which the Dean speaks with a student named Michael about an incident involving Michael and his teacher. Michael protests his assigned detention because he believes he was falsely accused of the initial infraction, plus in his words, “I don’t feel like I have to take anybody screaming at me.” But the Dean isn’t about to excuse Michael from his responsibility in the incident, for having stormed out of the classroom. According to the Dean, Michael needs to respect those in authority even when he disagrees, and to accept the detention he’s been given. “We have to establish that you can be a man and that you can take orders,” says the Dean, and Michael acquiesces, saying that he’ll take the detention, “but under protest.”
It’s scenes like this that play to the strengths of direct cinema. Rather than taking sides in the argument, Wiseman allows the scene to play out more or less in real time, with each party making his own points. A lesser film might have cut away from the scene with Michael speaking his mind, but Wiseman also shows us the Dean's side. Here’s a man who deals with disciplinary issues all day long, who’s there primarily to preserve the order in the school by upholding the authority of the teachers. It’s nothing personal- it’s just the job.
For all the talk of “objectivity” in direct cinema, the truth is that all documentaries impose to some extent their own agendas and theses on the footage they shoot. Time and again, Wiseman shows us scenes in which teachers and school administrators impart traditional notions of morality and behavior to the students: Do the work that’s assigned. No using the pay phone without a pass. Don’t have sex until you’re married. Walk tall. Type what’s on the page. Don’t jump up and down unless Simon says. As a principal tells a student, “we’re gonna do in this school what the majority wants.” Fair enough, but which majority does he mean?
