gavin6942 Documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman takes us inside Northeast High School as a fly on the wall to observe the teachers and how they interact with the students.This film came out in 1969 and I graduated in 1999. So there is a thirty year gap between these students and myself. Yet, in many ways, this seemed all too familiar. My impression is that school has increasingly become oppressive for students, but the old back-and-forth between students and authority is still here. The kid who does not want to change for gym class. We did not learn that Paul Simon was a poet, but just within the last year (2016-2017) Bob Dylan has received a Nobel Prize for Literature. So the same idea is there.The camera has a strange lingering on teenage butts. Maybe we can dismiss this as a product if its time, but today if someone went into a high school and zoomed in on a girl's butt in gym shorts, that would not be seen as very appropriate.And what is up with the gynecologist? The sexual education comes across as surprisingly progressive, but this guy is saying things he may not know to be creepy... saying he gets paid to put his fingers inside teenage girls? And laughing about it? Ummmm... what do you even say about that sort of thing? I expect locker room talk from high school boys, but doctors?

valleyjohn High school is a Frederick Wiseman fly on the wall film that was made in the year i was born , 1968. The format is pretty much the same as his first movie " Titicut Follies" but without the controversial subject matter. There is no commentary so you really do have to make your own mind up about what you are seeing. A lot of what we see is not too different from todays schools except one major thing - Politeness. These kids don't have the attitude of the modern day child and it's really nice to see. There is one scene that does show it's age though and that is when a gynaecologist takes a sex education class and it's amazing how frank yet archaic this man is. High school is OK if your a fan of Frederick Wiseman ( and i plan on watching his whole catalogue) but there are better documentaries around from this period.

tieman64 Along with Emile de Antonio, Frederick Wiseman is one of the godfathers of documentary cinema, having established the standard for what is now known as "observational" or "objective" documentary film-making (a term which Wiseman rejects). But unlike most documentary filmmakers, Wiseman's films all focus on institutions. His subjects are whole organisations, and his drama is derived from simply observing the various cogs and people at work within these societal machines. High schools, welfare offices, zoos, hospitals, ballet groups, army basic training camps, small towns, ICBM bases and business corporations are just some of the institutions he's tackled.The end result is a vast canvas, which when put together with all of Wiseman's other documentaries, creates a human panorama akin to Balzak. This is the late 20th/early 21st century rendered, in all its expansiveness, in all its complexity, with humility by a little man and a tiny camera.The importance of Wiseman is that he dares to show, not only how much humanity has accomplished, but to what extent we've become slaves to the institutions, facilities, jobs and social structures that we inhabit. Whilst most films centre on a hero or heroes scheming to overcome some obstacle or complete some quest, Wiseman's world is one in which forces continuously exert pressure on the individual, shaping how he thinks and behaves. To Wiseman, society is a complex lattice of overlapping social structures and institutions and mankind is both the God who creates them, and the pawn who succumbs to the tides of their walls.And this juxtaposition (man as God/man as pawn) permeates Wiseman's entire filmography. Though touted as a kind of "anthropological" director or a film-maker concerned about "studying institutions", Wiseman's real aim is to highlight the follies and absurdity of human nature. Think the monkeys masturbating in "Primate", the city street-sweepers who sweep snow with futility during a blizzard because "that's their job", the suburban white kids being shown how to put a condom on a giant black dildo in "High School" or the doctors so desensitised to death that they joke about their vegetable patients. This is black comedy at its darkest, its most absurd, its most surreal.Wiseman's films, when viewed in tandem, start revealing their own patterns, their own rhymes and rhythms. Watch how "Ballet" mirrors "Le Dance", "Zoo" mirrors "Primate", "Basic Training" mirrors "Missile", "High School's 1 and 2" echo his work in "Juvenile Court" and "Public Housing". Likewise, observe how "Hospital" mirrors "Near Death" and "Deaf" mirrors "Blind". This is not a film-maker jumping randomly from institution to institution, this is a human portrait on a grand scale.That said, Wiseman's "High School" works well as an individual film. Shot in a Philadelphia high school, whose academic reputation is esteemed, the film coolly observes the institution's various comings and goings on. It's all quite innocuous at first, until Wiseman's theme begins to come into focus. Education isn't the point of this institution, but socialisation and indoctrination. Consider one scene in which a teacher informs a student that he must sit detention, regardless of his guilt or innocence, because it proves that he can "be a man" and "obey orders". Consider the words of the gynaecologist brought into the school, the staff's obsession with instilling obedience to administrative authority, and the final scene, in which a teacher reads a letter from a former student fighting in Vietnam and then suggests that his service is proof that the school is succeeding in its job. It's spooky stuff.8.9/10 – Worth one viewing.

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.