Frederick Wiseman (1968)
I first read about Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries, and High School in particular, in 1975, when I bought Pauline Kael’s Deeper into Movies collection of reviews. Half a century later, and despite being aware throughout that time of his reputation, I’d still not seen a single Wiseman film. BFI’s current retrospective of his work, curated by Sandra Hebron, has provided the opportunity to change that, though it’s long odds against my getting anywhere near to grips with the Wiseman oeuvre: he’s the director, according to IMDb, of fifty pieces of television and cinema.
Coming to the film so late, it’s hard to appreciate the relative novelty of Wiseman’s documentary style at the time High School, his second feature, was made. That style is what has now long been commonly known as ‘fly-on-the-wall’ filmmaking. (In Britain, the term seemed to take off with the 1974 BBC TV series, The Family, although that wasn’t television’s first fly-on-the-wall documentary – Richard Cawston’s one-off Royal Family, for example, got there five years before Paul Watson and Franc Roddam’s ordinary-family series.) A swift Google search suggests the fly-on-the-wall label may be somewhat resented by documentarians, who prefer ‘Direct Cinema’ to describe a technique ‘that avoids interviews, voice-overs, and reenactments, allowing [them] to observe and record … reality’. As Wiseman himself told the Guardian in 2018, ‘Most flies I know aren’t conscious at all, and I like to think I’m at least 2% conscious’.
His title location is Northeast High School in Philadelphia, where Wiseman filmed for five weeks in March and April 1968. High School was shot in black and white; at this distance in time, Black and White in their ethnic sense are also significant in the film. The opening sequence, as Wiseman’s camera approaches the school entrance, is accompanied by Otis Redding’s ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay’. (Redding had died in a plane crash a few months before Wiseman began his Philadelphia shoot.) So, a famous Black voice gets High School underway; it’s some time, though, before a Black face appears on the screen. We do eventually see students of colour, but only five of them – all boys, only one of whom speaks – in what, to British eyes at least, looks to be a very large school[1]. Martin Luther King was assassinated while Wiseman was filming; at one point, a member of teaching staff announces the time and location for a student discussion of the assassination. Much more striking, though, is a class in which another teacher asks for a show of hands: how many students would be comfortable or otherwise about joining a club which had a ‘minority of Negro members’? Most of the class vote for comfortable. And if the membership was half and half? Sensing some shyness about giving an honest response to this second question, the teacher assures his white students that there’s ‘no right or wrong answer’.
Wiseman’s choice of ‘The Dock of the Bay’ at the start has less to do with the song’s singer than with its lyrics – in particular, the closing phrase of the chorus. ‘Wastin’ time’ is an important theme of High School: Northeast is portrayed as a place that insists on conformity and stifles imagination in those whom it educates. Much less is heard from the students than from the teaching staff who – especially those chiefly responsible for discipline – get plenty of chances to condemn themselves out of their own mouth. ‘It’s nice to be individualistic, but there are certain places to be individualistic,’ says one; you’re left wondering where those places are. High School wasn’t shown in Philadelphia at the time of its original release, owing to Wiseman’s concerns about the possibility of a lawsuit, presumably brought by Northeast or the city’s educational authorities. Pauline Kael excoriates, even when the teaching is well intentioned, ‘the dullness of high-school education … [the] same old pseudo-knowledge … used to support what the schools [sic] think is moral’. More than twenty years and a generation of critics later, David Denby charged ‘Many of the [Northeast] teachers and administrators’ with ‘exercising a bland and frightened dictatorship; their speech is deadened as if any sign of life might inspire the students to break out of control’.
I have to admit that, reading these comments after seeing High School, the seeming consensus about its polemic agenda surprised me a bit. You can’t fail to be struck by Northeast’s many rules and regulations yet they didn’t shock me as much as the teacher’s ‘no right or wrong answer’ about racial prejudice. Kael and Denby both point out how bored the students usually seem – Denby refers to their ’resentful torpor’. It’s true that, when one student, in class, describes the school as ‘morally and socially garbage’, the remark comes across as mechanical and desultory rather than authentically subversive. At the same time, since the boy concerned isn’t in any way censured for what he says, I couldn’t help thinking the school system wasn’t really that oppressive.
These reactions are no doubt a consequence of coming to High School for the first time in 2025 rather than 1968: nostalgia for the 1960s, on the part of someone now in the last month of his sixties, may well have limited and softened my responses. I admired the film as a time capsule: the sex education classes; the discussions about skirt length; a student project involving several days of simulated space travel; a letter to the school, read out by the Northeast principal, from an ex-pupil now serving in Vietnam. Pop songs are a key part of what this viewer experienced as a reminiscent texture; unlike the Otis Redding, the rest of the music is played within the school rather than chosen by Wiseman. One young teacher uses Simon & Garfunkel lyrics for educational purposes. Drum majorettes (girls and some older boys in drag) perform a stage routine to ‘Hey! Look Me Over!’ A girls’ gym class does aerobics to 1910 Fruitgum Company’s ‘Simon Says’.
Do the close-ups of the girls’ backsides and bare legs, as they move to ‘Simon Says’, timestamp the filmmaker as much as the institution he’s critiquing? Maybe, but it seems fair to assume that Wiseman has continued to move with the times. He was still making films as recently as 2023 although he did indicate earlier this year that he was now retiring because he didn’t ‘have the energy’ for a new production. Fair enough: on New Year’s Day 2026, Frederick Wiseman will be ninety-six.
1 November 2025
[1] Amy Cohen’s 2020 article on the Hidden City (Exploring Philadelphia’s Urban Landscape) website gives an instructive explanation of how Northeast’s Black student community had declined between 1957 and 1968 – https://hiddencityphila.org/2020/09/a-lesson-on-structural-racism-and-redemption-at-northeast-high-school/.
