High school documentaries
Wiseman filmed forests, successors zoom in on trees
Originally published in Current, Aug. 20, 2001
Critique by Patricia ThomsonWith summer break almost over, empathetic adults might do well to tune in to P.O.V. on Aug. 22 for a refresher course in the trauma of high school. Frederick Wiseman’s High School, one of the most incisive documentaries on this American institution, finally has its national premiere on public television, 33 years after its debut (separate story). This is definitely a case of better late than never, for its relevance has not dimmed one bit.
High School’s reappearance presents the occasion to ponder a number of matters. For baby boomers, it’s a visceral reminder of everything that made high school such a royal drag: the hallway patrols, the stern lectures about the shortness of your skirt or the length of your sideburns, the droning teachers, the humiliating gym uniforms. For documentary film lovers, it’s a reminder of why High School was worthy of being designated a National Treasure by the Library of Congress and why Wiseman is considered such a master of the verite form. For public television viewers, it’s an interesting counterpoint to the documentaries of today that focus on a similar subject—series like American High, which premiered last spring, and Senior Year, which airs this coming January.
As a group, these three programs aptly demonstrate how some things never change. High school is, was, and forever shall be a time of tempestuous forces clashing at full speed. There’s the teenager, fumbling mightily towards some form of independence and self-actualization. There’s the battalion that seems to stand in his or her way—parents, teachers, social mores, codes of conduct. Dealing with the push/pull between them gives these documentaries a superficial resemblance, but underneath they are as different in intent, approach and insights as apples and oranges. Though they cast their eyes on similar subjects, High School and the newcomers have very diverse agendas and different strengths. Both are equally valid, and both have their place on public television.
High school as institution
Like many social observers in the ’60s, Fred Wiseman, a former lawyer, was deeply interested in institutions, particularly those through which society perpetuates itself. As a filmmaker, Wiseman steadily worked his way through a host of such institutions, starting with a hospital for the criminally insane (Tuticut Follies), moving on to High School, a police station (Law and Order), an urban hospital serving the poor (Hospital), an Army training camp (Basic Training), and a monastery (Essene), to name just a few.
When Wiseman walked through the door of that public school in Philadelphia, he
wasn’t looking for fresh faces to cast in a nonfiction drama, as would be the case today, but rather was searching for something less tangible—situations that collectively reveal a system at work.
High School is an intricate mosaic of these moments. There’s the exchange in the principal’s office between a young man plaintively protesting his detention ("It
wasn’t me") and the crewcut disciplinarian ("Let’s establish that you can be a man and you can take orders"). There’s the home economics teacher who demonstrates how to walk like a lady, the pep rally with guys acting silly in cheerleader drag, and a sex-ed class that connects teenage promiscuity with adult divorce. Woven throughout are glimpses of the menagerie of teachers who try to pass along the ideas and learning they consider important—Nietzche in French class, Paul Simon’s lyrics to "Dangling Conversation" in lit class, Michael Harrington and "the other America" in social studies and a simulated outer-space flight.
In classic veritÈ style, all is offered without overt commentary. Wiseman is fond of quoting Samuel Goldwyn’s quip, "If you have a message, send a telegram." Yet this is slightly disingenuous, because High School does make its point. It’s hard to imagine why else the filmmaker would have us watch a gym full of uniformed teens bending and stretching to the tune of "Simple Simon Says." (Wiseman, of course, prefers to emphasize his films’ ambiguity and would probably counter with the anecdote about a conservative member of the Boston City Council who came up to him after a screening of High School, shook his hand, and gushed, "It was a wonderful film. I wish we could have schools like that in Boston!")
But one thing is irrefutable, and that’s the fact that Wiseman did not set out to personalize his subjects. No one is on screen long enough to become a fleshed-out character with whom we identify, and even Wiseman’s close-ups tend to turn his subjects into something more anonymous, essentializing teachers into a droning mouth or gymnasts into a twisting torso. The distance Wiseman keeps is critical to his task, for it helps us focus on the forest, not the trees. It enables us to move beyond personalities and see the systems that effect people. Rendering the invisible visible this way is a complicated task, but it’s one that Wiseman pulls off, both here and in many subsequent films. No doubt that’s one reason why public television has been such a friend to Wiseman, supporting and airing his work over the decades. And it’s a good enough reason for P.O.V. Classics to resurrect High School, for this combination of artful filmmaking and abstracted social analysis is as rare today as it ever was.
Flash forward
When Wiseman marched into his chosen institutions, he never worried about permissions or clearances. In his view, since these were public institutions, the public had every right to know what was going on inside them. What Wiseman didn’t get access to in High School, however, is the very thing that today’s chroniclers of high school consider the ultimate goal—the inside of teenagers’ heads.
Gaining entry to that turf is no small feat. Teenagers are notoriously cliquish, suspicious of outsiders of all kinds and particularly toward adults with an agenda. Getting them to open up, to act naturally and reveal their thoughts and growing pains is frankly a formidable challenge. But that’s exactly what producers R.J. Cutler and David Zeiger set out to do in American High and Senior Year, respectively.
These two series were originally made for different outlets—American High for Fox TV and Senior Year for PBS. Yet it’s uncanny how similar they are. In structure, they’re nearly identical. Both producers picked a high school, cast their series with a dozen or so students of various backgrounds and interests and asked some to keep video diaries with digital minicams. Their professional crews also followed the students for a year, amassing a mountain of material—a whopping 2,000 hours of documentary footage and 800 hours of video diaries in the case of American High. The editors then worked their magic, finding the narrative threads that would turn the raw footage into "dramatic nonfiction" series of 13 episodes each, complete with rounded characters, conflicts, plot points and denouements. Both intersperse their narratives with teens offerings thoughts on various themes—what they fear and what they think of kissing, for example. Both also have extensive web sites, with chat groups, message boards and other interactive features targeted towards this cyber-savvy age group.
Measured against all these common denominators, the differences between these series seem relatively minor—a matter of pacing (American High is cut a beat or two quicker), polish (American High, hands down), language (Senior Year has fewer bleeps and a slightly gentler tone overall) and the complexion of the cast and their particular problems. Zeiger’s alma mater and subject, Fairfax High in Los Angeles, is more ethnically mixed than American High’s Highland Park High School in the suburbs of Chicago, which puts it more in step with public television and its quest for diversity. Cutler, in turn, was consciously aiming for the suburban milieu of successful Fox teen series.
Senior Year works in several ethnic identity storylines, but otherwise the series share many of the same issues: the anxiety over college admissions, problems related to parental absence or over-involvement, sibling relations, romantic relations, attention deficit disorder and prescription drug culture, the uncertainty of life after high school.
Unlike Wiseman’s High School, these series have teens in mind as their core audience. Loud music, graffiti graphics and quick cutting all contribute to the youthful edge. But more important than these stylistic flourishes or even the narrative arcs is the programs’ level of intimacy and honesty. Teens can sniff out a fake faster than you can say "snow job."
Cutler and Zeiger were aided in their quest for the real thing by ideas and equipment that were just becoming available back in 1968. The video revolution gave rise to digital minicams, used to create the student video diaries that provide some of the most intimate moments in American High and Senior Year. This technological development was paralleled by the emergence of identity politics, which has repeatedly asked "who’s representing who?" The steady drumbeat of that question now has many younger documentarians dancing to a different tune, either filming from inside their own ethnic or cultural group, or else collaborating with their subjects in a substantive way. This is far different than the "neutral observer" stance assumed by Wiseman and his peers.
An offshoot of identity politics has been the Youth Media movement. As part of this grassroots phenomenon, quietly gathering strength over the past several decades, media training programs for children and teens have sprung up in public and private schools, nonprofit media arts centers and youth-at-risk programs across the country. Though rarely seen on mainstream television, it’s a parallel universe of great vitality that feeds directly into American High and Senior Year. The difference here is that the musings, rants and dear-diary confessions of youngsters coming of age are elevated a notch by virtue of the fact that they’re given structure and context by seasoned video producers. But at the same time, according to Cutler, the video diaries are what provide American High with its "heart and soul."
Without question, the student-shot footage bares messy family dynamics that an outsider with a camera would never be privy to. Who can forget the moment when Morgan, American High’s self-styled bad boy, taunts his beleaguered parents, leading his father to spew a stream of invective as the son races to the refuge of his bedroom. Likewise in Senior Year, the video diaries capture moments of intense and raw emotions. We see teens being sucked downward into the vortex of their parents’ divorce—students like Jean, a budding Mexican-American artist who struggles with guilt after his father attempts suicide in front of his mother and blames the family. The video diaries reveal teens battling with personal demons—like Elizabeth, a shy Korean on the speech team who wrote a prize-winning essay about her family’s pattern of physical abuse and now feels as if she’s bringing shame to her mother each time she delivers that speech. The diaries also capture the ache of romantic love and its loss—like Sarah in American High, who dreads her boyfriend’s departure for college, or Jacqueline in Senior Year, who’s losing interest in her love. Capturing a moment that’s both sweet and sad, Jacqueline sets up the camera in her bathroom at 2:30 in the morning, just after her boyfriend stopped by to deliver a beautifully drawn love poem. She steps forward to show it to the camera. "That was sweet of him," she whispers, fearful of waking her parents, "but now I feel even worse saying goodbye."
The candor of these video diaries is nicely twinned in the footage shot by the professional camera crews. Both Cutler and Zeiger recognized the fact that intimacy is not just a question of physical access, but of relationships. So Zeiger assembled a team of young film students from UCLA and USC to trail Senior Year’s subjects, and Cutler also kept his videographers young. There was never any pretense about maintaining an "objective" distance. When asked in an online chat whether the cameramen ever got on his nerves, Morgan replied, "No, because cameramen were my best friends that year. We became really close. . . . It was such a laid-back sort of feeling, more like you were sharing stuff with friends than you were [with] a documentary crew."
This rapport is evident time and again, in both big and quiet ways. It’s there in Senior Year when caustic Jennifer strolls by students relaxing in the school year and covertly offers her opinion of each—curled lip, gag-with-a-finger sign, rolled eyes. (It’s impossible to imagine her doing that with Fred Wiseman.) The rapport is felt in the soul-searching questions about happiness that a camerawoman gently asks Kendra, a thoughtful teen permanently disabled in a car accident. And it’s in way the Allie lets it all hang out in her raging battles with her divorced mother in American High.
PBS and teen viewers
The intensity of American High disconcerted some adult viewers as much as did its raw language and hormonally charged teen humor. Senior Year features less of the F-word, but it, too, can pack a punch when it comes to dysfunctional families, sexual intimacy, gay identity and the racial divide.
Are series like American High and Senior Year appropriate for PBS? Emphatically yes, if public television counts teens among the public that is "underserved" — its presumed constituents. But that’s a big "if." So far, it seems public television’s commitment to youth is ambivalent, to say the least, based on its piecemeal, scattershot programming for this age group. There needs to be critical mass, or else shows like American High and Senior Year will remain a temporary fix.
The question of appropriateness is one that public television programmers answered in various ways when American High arrived last spring. But the fact is that teens are already seeing this kind of unfiltered reality, if not in their own homes, then through the videos their peers are producing during and after school. It may be new to PBS, but it’s not unfamiliar turf to many of today’s youths.
To be perfectly accurate, PBS has previously aired a few documentaries based on teen video diaries and youth-originated footage—all, notably, on P.O.V. The earliest was a.k.a. Don Bonus, shown in 1995. Produced by Spencer Nakasako, this documentary was created from video footage shot by 18-year-old Sokly Ny, who escaped the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and was struggling with resettlement in San Francisco’s inner city. This project formed a direct bridge to the Youth Media movement, for Nakasako was connected with a grassroots media-training program at the Vietnamese Youth Development Center in Los Angeles. Three years later, Nakasako came out with Kelly Loves Tony, in which a young Thai and Laotian couple from opposite sides of the track videotape their relationship for a period of 18 months. Also around that time Jane Wagner and Tina DiFeliciantonio produced the Sundance winner Girls Like Us (1997), in which four Philadelphia teens were given video cameras and documented their lives as they grappled with parenting, sexuality and relationships over four years. But otherwise very little youth video has found its way onto the air.
To hear educators tell it, there’s a vast body of youth media out there and, alongside it, plenty of young people frustrated by its invisibility outside the classroom. While the majority of youth media is too unpolished for broadcast, the vast reservoir of talent and yearning is something broadcasters have yet to tap. Shows like American High and Senior Year have just scratched the surface, demonstrating one way in which programs might utilize youth-produced media. But they also point to a broader idea—the potential for public television to offer teens something that MTV, Fox and other networks company don’t. More than another Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Dawson’s Creek, teens are hungering for images that capture their own worlds, words and concerns, created by their own hand. The commercial networks haven’t shown much interest. Public television could. If it’s truly serious about developing its teen viewership, PBS should step into that gap.
Patricia Thomson is the former editor-in-chief of The Independent Film & Video Monthly. E-mail .
. To Current's home page . Earlier news: - . Earlier news: - . Related news: New broadcast of High School is the first in the city where it was filmed, 2001. . Outside link: Wiseman's Zipporah Films.
Web page posted Aug. 30, 2001
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