RERC screening of "High School" (October 10th, 2009)

October 10, 2009 Nicole’s place

Documentary Film: High School

Attending: Nicole, Ben, Monique, David, Amber, Malcolm, Gabriel and Deanna

Watched the documentary High School (1968) by Frederick Wiseman.

The 1960s technology of hand-held 16mm cameras and portable sound recorders allowed documentary filmmakers to operate relatively unobtrusively to tell stories. Wiseman was an early practitioner of “direct cinema.”

High School was captured at Northeast High School, a large middle class, mostly white, school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

As an examination of how an educational institution works to transmit the dominant social values of a community, it is as relevant today as it was more than forty years ago. When High School was released, the relationship Wiseman had with school administrators deteriorated. To avoid a lawsuit the film was banned in Philadelphia.

Wiseman followed up High School 25 years later with High School II (1994) at a very different institution, the alternative school Central Park East Secondary School in Harlem, New York. This is the school that RERC discussed at an earlier meeting.