High School II
First screened and reviewed in August 2024
Director: Frederick Wiseman. Documentary about day-to-day work and life in a public high school in New York City. VOR:④
Wiseman updates an old film and fills a larger canvas. Otherwise, a feat of his high-bar tried and true. Pair it with the same year's Hoop Dreams!
I don't really understand ASMR or its appeal. But I do know that after a long day of working on other things, a bath of neural contentment washed over me when I popped in a 3½-hour Frederick Wiseman movie and people immediately started having earnest if sludgy problem-solving sessions, slow builds of quotidian emotion, and extended workplace conversations. I guess a lot of people watch The Office to find their center after the sun's gone down, but I don't need your kink-shaming.
Besides, so many Wiseman documentaries could be called The Office, very much including the engrossing and inspiring High School II. Central Park East Secondary School at the Spanish Harlem intersection of 106th & Madison, where the entire movie transpires, has had a remarkable success record in educating its students, launching them into university, and combining classroom instruction with social-services support and tailored big-picture involvement to an unusual degree. But that big picture of a standout institution largely fulfilling its mission arrives, as ever, through an accrual of real-time observation rather than roll calls of statistics and honorifics. These students and educators have more than earned a silver-service banquet for what they've achieved together. Wiseman, incorrigible, because you don't corrigez what ain't broke, still serves up the same meat and vegetables he offers in every film, but nobody outside of Dodin and Eugénie slow-cooks that dish as succulently as he does.
Wiseman's poker-faced approach to social profiling, even when treating extraordinary subjects, allows the audience to receive High School II not as a profile of an exemplary institution but of what secondary schooling should and does look like all over. He hasn't cloaked the aspirational in the guise of the average so much as he's made the point that public school functions best when there are as few impediments as possible preventing or complicating the unglamorous baselines of teaching and mentorship—which themselves look a lot like the unglamorous baselines of listening, noticing, communicating, enabling, and intervening. In High School II, these fundamentals include imparting basic precepts of grammar or genetics, counseling a student whose head stays resolutely on a desk, trouble-shooting for a 15-year-old mother who's nervously but smilingly resume her studies, whacking through a thicket of adolescent excuse-making and postponement, keeping parent-teacher conferences on an even keel, getting the pupil or colleague who's not talking to contribute something, and negotiating coolly between pedagogues who don't share the same methods or necessarily the same vision of how the school would ideally work and how various subject areas would best be integrated or left discrete.
These central currents of High School II are engrossing in themselves and even more redolent of "real life" than a lot of ostensible documentaries. And the point makes itself that the candor and precision, but also the comfort with sprawl and surprise, that keep a good high school humming are also the trademarks of Wiseman's now-seasoned but rarely stale practice. His lack of editorial overlay, beyond the sly but silent steering he provides through editing, sequencing, and camera placement, also allows High School II to function as a helpful Rorschach for other viewing positions. Are you laboring under a flat preconception of how early-90s teenagers look, sound, think, and feel? Do you have a one-dimensional notion or maybe zero notion of who lives in Spanish Harlem, and how? Are you curious about the rhythms and puzzles in people's work lives, if we take away the blue-ribbon moments or the most glaring crises? Assuming you're willing to over-determine two data points, are you curious how American public education has shifted since Wiseman followed Boomers hitting the books in the first High School (1968)? Well, have at High School II.
Meanwhile, like a lot of the very best Wisemans, there's a B-plot to High School II. You couldn't call it "hidden," since it's central to the first scene, as a young man in a mock interview session parses through the hot-off-the-press acquittal of the LAPD officers who rained down violently on Rodney King. As High School II unfolds over a not-quite-clear stretch of time, the students of CPESS, mostly nonwhite and rangy in social class, grapple with their responses to what the beating, the verdict, and the riots either reveal or confirm in their worldview. From protest-planning sessions to moments of paralyzed thought to their tense reception of an all-white girls' choir who've come from Michigan to perform a madrigal at an assembly, High School II finds students, especially, but also their teachers mulling, acting, and reacting to a(nother) major breach in social contract where "no opinion" is not an option. This through-line makes a 30-year-old documentary feel all the more timely to watch in 2024. Then again, little if anything feels dated in High School II, which emblematizes Wiseman's gift for finding the durable and the universal inside thousands of nits and grits.
Then again, it's not really Wiseman who's on your mind while you watch, or afterward. It's these teachers, these co-founders, these administrators, a generous handful of deeply and differently impressive parents, and especially these bright, varied, and complicated kids. Grade:A–
(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd.) (And speaking of Letterboxd, I highly recommend Jonathan Storey's Wiseman Wednesdays reviews from earlier this year.)
