High School

When making documentaries, Frederick Wiseman has always preferred to stay in one place for an extended period of time, so that he can really sink his teeth into his subject matter: a hospital, an asylum for the criminally insane, the welfare office. In 1968, he set his sights on a high school in Philadelphia and observed the daily activities of teachers, students, and others. His investigative camera infiltrates the biology, gym, and typing classes -- yes, on old-fashioned typewriters! -- and records orientation meetings and parents' evenings. Just as always, Wiseman achieves this in a casual, non-narrative style. In , he reveals himself to be interested primarily in the ideological and political values that the school conveys to its students. The pessimistic picture that paints of life at a large metropolitan school ("You don't talk, you just listen to me!") is strongly influenced by the times in which the film was made. In the late 1960s, the height of the American protest movement, many social critics saw schools as the cornerstones of an unjust establishment. Nonetheless, some of the problems Wiseman captures are still relevant today. The recent debate about whether Muslim girls should be allowed to wear headscarves in class shows that students still are not free to dress any way they choose.