Coming to the Metrograph’s Three Wiseman series for a one-week run beginning today, Friday, March 25: HIGH SCHOOL
Frederick Wiseman’s examination of a Philadelphia high school debuted in 1968. His second feature, the film has screened in several retrospectives over the years, and was preserved by the National Film Registry in 1991.
One of the auteur’s masterful institutional studies, Wiseman’s observational film offers audiences an inside look at the goings on at Northeast High School, from language and literature classes to disciplinary meetings between teachers, students, and parents, hall pass inspections to sex-ed lectures. What soon emerges is an often wryly funny portrait of a system that stresses conformity and subservience to authority more than independent thinking or intellectual engagement. A boy who denies his involvement in bad behavior is forced to take detention anyway, though he notes he only agrees “under protest.” A girl prepping for a fashion show is criticized for her weight problem, while another is taken to task for an inappropriate dress worn to a formal. Wiseman holds up the mirror to the American educational system to capture the reflection of a factory which aims to produce obedient citizens.
what (not) to doc 