Diagonaldi Very well executed

StunnaKrypto Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Martin Teller As in TITICUT FOLLIES, Wiseman takes his camera inside an institution and exposes the authoritarianism that dominates the place. However, I have to say I was less disturbed by what I saw here. There are some clear instances of backwards attitudes: the notably different tones of the female and male sex ed lectures, what is apparently a fashion class where the teacher casually remarks of the students' physical shortcomings, and the chillingly obtuse reading of a letter from a student serving in Vietnam. But other clips that seemed designed to point out some sort of injustice or dehumanization didn't strike me as terribly egregious. Are we supposed to judge the English teacher as ridiculous for attempting to teach poetry with a Simon & Garfunkel song? When a kid says he doesn't deserve detention, are you just supposed to say "Oh, sorry about that" and let them skip it? Maybe some of the figures are a little out of touch and some are a little bit drunk on power, but I really didn't see a whole lot to make me think the school was a fascist nightmare or anything. Still, perhaps the attitudes speak louder than the actual actions, and there is a sense of isolation from the real world. And regardless of whatever messages Wiseman is trying to get across, it's a compelling look at a specific time and place.

Lee Yang In his documentary "High School", Frederick Wiseman effectively uses the "cinema verite" approach to capture the oppressive environment in which the students of Northeast High School have to face everyday. Wiseman used a number of creative decisions in composition and editing to give "High School" its rhetorical voice. Perhaps most noticeable is the film's black-and-white format. Though likely to have driven by cost, it powerfully conveys a sense of banality of the atmosphere of the high school. Audience are aware of this being a conscious choice on the part of the director to not include color, but could this very decision also be a metaphor used to represent the actions taken by the authorities of the school and their consequences – a dull, sterile environment in which students are sapped of their own individualistic colors. Also prevalent in the film is the use of juxtaposition to create situational ironies in order to further criticize, in a rhetorical matter, the institutional restraints of high school. Towards the beginning of the film, a scene is shown in which the professor is reading tasks off the bulletin of the day to a class. The next scene shows a foreign language class in which the teacher is lecturing on existentialism and various existentialist philosophers. The two scenes seem similar; in that both are in classroom settings and show a teacher lecturing and students listening, but the subjects in discussion contrast each other in their differences. The latter scene can even be interpreted as ironic itself, in that the subject lectured about, existentialism, suggests and requires abstract and free-form thinking, while it shows students reciting the material in an orderly manner. In the absence of a spoken narrative, the voice of "High School" relies much its effect on the indexical abilities of the documentary form and constructing messages out of the indexed recordings. One situation shows a student presenting a seemingly unfair scenario to a staff and expressing his disapproval of a teacher because that teacher had yelled at him and then unjustly given him detention. The staff is shown as uninterested in finding out more of the situation, and instead takes the side of the said teacher and starts to lecture the student about respecting the authority. The documentary form, especially the "cinema verite" model, has the ability to give the illusion of representing unbiased reality Wiseman's use of the indexing quality by showing various scenes in their entirety therefore strengthens the film's voice, as the audience is made to believe they are seeing the whole truth in a few scenes, and encouraged to extend that belief to the entire film. Though that is not to say the "High School" assumes a low audience activity. In fact, the role of the audience is pertinent to the effectiveness of this film. For example, Wiseman appeals to the emotions of the audience to achieve a stronger rhetorical effect. In the closing scene, a teacher tears up while reading a letter from a former student who is now a soldier serving in Vietnam. In the letter the former student does not only confess of his gratefulness for having attended that school because it made him a better person, but also reveal his devotion to the cause of the war and wants his insurance money to go to school if he is killed in Vietnam. The close-ups of the teacher's face reveal a wealth of emotions, expressing joy, perhaps out of self-gratitude for having helped in someway to shape the former student. The audience may perceive the letter as absurd and see it as a real-life consequence of the institutional constraints of the high school that reinforced blind obeying of authorities. Moreover, the tears of joy on the teacher's face may potentially reveal something even more horrifying – the teacher is actually proud of her work and stands by the function of the school as an institution and the staff as authority figures.

csmith-31 Well, I attended Northeast while Wiseman and crew were filming the movie. Twenty years later, I finally located a copy in the Indiana University libraries and watched it.I can tell you that he did NOT capture the essence of our high school, due mostly to the disruption caused by the camera crew. I received a better education than anyone else I met in college. Since I double-majored in Electrical Engineering and Humanities at Notre Dame, I was grateful for the college-prep curriculum I had received at NE. My high school Chemistry, Physics, Calculus, History, English and Latin classes left me well-prepared for college.Like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in Physics, where observing a subatomic particle changes its nature, the presence of the camera crew changes what happens in each venue. For example, there's a scene where an English teacher (Mrs. London) plays records all period because the camera's presence prevented students from paying attention to the scheduled lesson. Wiseman made it seem like "Here's what kids are learning all day long."Coincidentally, I lived in Panama for three years. Wiseman's 1977 movie "Canal Zone", about the Panama Canal, presented a similarly incorrect view. Cinema Verite - - at least Frederick Wiseman's version - - is not worth the publicity it receives.

fowlerjones Sometimes the best films are those truest to themselves. There's nothing phony about this movie. It's a time capsule. It captured a cloistered, closed system from within. The results are spellbinding.The faculty of NorthEast high school in Philadelphia are the stars. The viewer decides whether their actions are good or bad. There's certain purity at work. Is it an imperfect system? You bet it is. Do rules appear petty and draconian? Yes, they do. But there is hope inside the bubble. The faculty at NorthEast could be teachers at my high school. We have the flat-topped disciplinarian, the hip, young English teacher, the no-nonsense fashion matron, and the boring instructor with the bad teeth.The scene with the coach and the graduate who visited while on leave from Vietnam illustrated one of the prominent themes; this environment is in a bubble insulated from community and society. In this scene, the coach made a connection between a soldier's war wound and the effect on his sports career. He was so wrapped up in his role as the school coach; he immediately applied news from the outside world to his microcosmic world inside the school grounds.This theme was also reiterated by a boy in one of the rare scenes where students were the stars. The would-be bohemian said as much; this school is a cloistered, closed system. The bubble theme is further underscored by the sequence where three boys emerged from a space capsule simulator after 193 hours. There was much fanfare for the successful end to 'Project SPARC' including a telegram from astronaut Gordon Cooper, read with typical dragnet-style inflection by the sponsoring teacher.In fact, several scenes feature extended recitations of written material by instructors who suffer from chronic educational ennui. There is the flat rendition of 'Casey at the Bat', the review of the typing test text, and the dreaded retelling of the "thought for the day" from the daily bulletin. A glimpse of self-awareness offered by a young English teacher was most startling. In the course of dissecting Paul Simon's poem "The Dangling Conversation", she read it aloud first, and followed with the Simon & Garfunkel song version. She told the students to listen to both versions. The poem came alive with the music. A lingering shot of the teacher showed the hope in her eyes that someone will get the message. For me, it's the best sequence in the film. If Wiseman wanted to underscore a failure of the system, it lied not with the disciplinarian tactics or heavy-handed advice dispensed by the staff, but with the inadequacy of the delivery methods used by educators.The message turns hopeful in the last scene. A teacher reads a letter at a faculty meeting written by the former student on station in Vietnam. Tight camera work reveals the emotion of the reader, in contrast to the non expressive faces of the previous speakers. The written word provides power after all. There's hope on the part of the student to survive outside the system, hope on the part of the administrator reading the note that they do have an impact on their charges, and hope that inside a flawed machine such as the educational system, someone gets the message.