The mother is someone who has internalized society’s expectations. I was brought up that way, my husband was brought up that way.” In the two-shot we contrast her composure with her daughter’s contorted expression. One mother, her fingers nervously picking at her handbag in close up, agrees with the teacher disciplining her student. Respect and conformity are heirlooms bestowed with pride. “I have to wear a long gown,” a teacher explains, “and I can’t walk in it!”Īnd such is the tenuous reasoning behind much of the enforcement of the rules – it’s a gift between generations. While individualism is a good trait, the teen is told, there’s no excuse for not wearing the proper attire to prom, (up to and including not being able to afford it). There’s an extended conversation about the length of a skirt and what constitutes “above the knee” (turns out the knee is not above nor below itself). By the time we reach an extended shot of gym class calisthenics in drab uniforms set to the bubble-gum pop song “Simon Says,” each new vignette becomes a new attempt by the teachers to get these students in line before the real world outside gets them.ĭuring a rehearsal for a design and fashion show the girls are taught how to walk in the clothes they designed and sewed (this scene gets uncomfortable when one girl is singled out with “a weight problem, she knows it”). The students rarely feature as the scene’s subject except when trying to explain themselves to adults. “I don’t like the ‘sir’ business,” says the teacher when the fighter tries politeness. Crewcut takes a down a contrite student who threw the first punch against a smaller boy. He convinces the student to take the detention to demonstrate his character (the student emphasizes he will do so under protest). He debates another student over not whether his detention is deserved, but what the situation actually represents. The teacher points his pen provocatively and hands out a suspension like an angry dad wielding a belt buckle. He argues with a student who is reluctant (or unable) to change for gym. The Paul Simon words stick longer, with the music carrying over the next scenes.Īnother teacher, sporting a military crew cut, features in three separate vignettes. Another reads the lyrics to Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Dangling Conversation,” asks the students to reflect on its poetic devices, then plays the song on the classroom’s turntable. One English instructor barrels through “Casey at the Bat” aloud. We see a few different ideas of what a teacher looks like. We’re not seeing a record of candid human behavior in these scenarios but we are seeing people act according to the expectations on their behavior. Interference is inevitable –nobody is unaware that a 16mm camera and a Nagra sound recorder are running in the room and everybody adjusts their performances accordingly. Observational documentaries avoid intrusion, though it would be more accurate to say they hide their intrusion, keeping it off frame like the microphones and camera operators. Philadelphia’s Northeast High School, like all high schools, is a ripe setting for the vérité style with its constant procession of small dramas. It’s only after an accumulation of these scenes that we begin to glean a pattern and only when Wiseman cuts to black at the end that this pattern coalesces into a meaning. The observational veneer means that many scenes of pithy life advice fly by for us, the incidental audience, just as much as they do for the film’s students, the intended audience. This is the second of several observational documentaries by Frederick Wiseman who used the advantages of lighter film and sound technologies to record fly-on-the-wall scenes in America’s institutions. One creates his tomorrow at every moment by his motives, thoughts and deeds today.’” “A notice you hear somewhere might change your whole life,” the teacher tells his class before relaying the Thought for the Day from the paper bulletin in his hand.
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