Adjustment & Work could perhaps be the names of any number of Wiseman films. They are certainly subjects of continuing interest to him. Both Blind and Deaf felt like pretty self-contained films, but with this third part we can now see what was left dangling - what happens to the students when they get out of those first two schools, and what about those who come upon blindness or deafness a little later in life? In roughly two parts (reflected by that title) we see here some of the ways this institution deals with those questions - first in the E.H. Gentry Technical Facility, which is mostly the adjustment part, and then about halfway through we pretty quietly shift to the Alabama Industries for the Blind, still part of the same school, where a number of things are actually made and vocational training continues. Somehow this feels even less a documentary than the others. It’s more like a series of life situations, and short portraits of people facing up to what they can and want to do with their lives. It also has a nice way of assuming we’ve seen the first two films, so this is like the free examination of some problems that Wiseman sees as worth continuing. I must say I found it totally riveting, which I really hadn’t expected. There’s a way you can clearly see in this one what problems are being engaged with that makes it unusually involving, and the people shown are given just enough time for us to see what they’re each going through that makes this more a kind of “people film” than most Wiseman so far.
Gentry was mentioned several times in Blind as the place where some of the problem students would eventually be dealt with, and they do deal with challenges. What comes through more clearly in this film than in any I’ve ever seen is some of the basic challenges the blind must deal with in order to function - just the two needs of knowing where things are in a room and how to get from one place to another are given a good deal of attention. That’s a great Wiseman talent, to look at things we might take for granted or think we know about already, and show us more of how it actually works. A first instance of this is a blind man who is learning how to clear a table and put out some dishes. It sounds easy, but in practice becomes at times excruciating - the fear of dropping things, not finding others, forgetting where drawers or counters are located, how far apart things are. When the man has to put some items on the floor, we get an unusual for Wiseman shot looking down toward the floor as he tries to sort things out and it feels like a huge challenge. His teacher, like all of them in each of these films, sounds patient to a fault in coaching him, but the strategy is not to tell him too much, so that he can learn by trying, however hard it is and however many mistakes have to be made along the way. It’s the first but not the last time in the film that we hear about needing to “find your landmark”, the point of orientation needed to move from one area to another. "Don't get frustrated because you're still learning" the teacher says, but we get a little frustrated watching, I think imagining how difficult for us it would be if we were in his situation. He more or less accomplishes the task of clearing the table, and gets a compliment in return as she tells him "you're improving”. “I don’t know about that” is his answer, as the scene ends. This kind of uneasy resolution, a difficult task attempted and perhaps partly accomplished, is the tone throughout. Even when people do well, it gives us a sigh of relief rather than a sense of success. They’re happy to make small bits of progress. While their determination is admirable, even stirring sometimes, it’s hard not to feel the unfairness of life that requires these great efforts to live something like normal lives.
I won’t go through any of the complex scenes like last time or list my favorite moments, though both abound. What’s interesting here are some of the stylistic experiments and the surprise revelations that seem deliberately at times to be kept for us. The film is an exercise in structure - from short montage sequences to lengthier ones that test both people in them and us viewers who can only watch and of course not directly intervene. One section in the earlier part of the film is a series of what turn out to be evaluative experiments - prospective students doing things like screwing nuts into bolts, a man putting pieces into holes in a turning disc, a woman maneuvering a ball through a maze-like contraption. We get quick close-up glimpses sometimes of labels on the boxes they’re manipulating, saying things like "Eye-Hand-Foot-Coordination” and “Simulated Assembly” - our clues that these are tests they’re undertaking and not some unfun games. It can be satisfying to figure these things out by watching, and by the film not talking down to us and overly spelling things out. Following a set of these evaluations, we get down to a specific case, a meeting of five of the staff looking at the file of a 35-year-old blind man who has been in college for twelve years but now wants to take a short course in commercial sewing. It’s one of those let’s talk about him and then have him come in scenes, and I’ll go straight for a couple of the big takeaways. They are wondering why he doesn’t finish college and when he gives them an answer, it’s both touching and surely honest, that he hasn’t been able to get a job because repeatedly he “writes the resume and goes down there with my cane and they change their mind.” His goal is “gainful employment” as quickly as possible, the first of a number of times in the film when the effort to be self-supporting is strongly expressed. No one here wants to be a ward of the state or on any kind of welfare. With this fellow, the inevitable family problems and complications also complexify the situation, here no less than his sister having gone on trial for murder the past Monday. But the fellow is cheerful and clearly motivated, and proud of his ability to get around himself on busses. The staff has listened closely to his concerns and give him a yes to start there right away, having asked very smart questions and given his situation close attention. It’s impressive, I must say. When the scene ends, we get a shot in a hallway with a poster that says “Adjustment Services - An Important Part of Vocational Education”. I think we’ve just seen a fine example of that.
Our next extensive montage collection sneaks up on us - that regular Wiseman ploy of not allowing us to know when a sequence will be short, and even whether it will be wordless. I think I wound up counting something like six locations that we visit quickly - maybe for a shot or two each - every time seeing a different vocation being trained for, every time with no dialog. Sometimes we see blind students, sometimes deaf students being signed to. The first time it’s training in automobile mechanics, then a big room with lots of people learning sewing, then furniture, then some kind of writing, then a room with big machines producing rope. The Wiseman visual punctuation is usually a quick shot of the exterior of a building, then in we go for a fast look at another vocational option. The variety looks promising, but once again, rather than feel a sense of success, we get a tough meeting where a student has been evaluated for either auto mechanics or carpentry, which we’re told were his two vocational choices. He sits in the room never speaking while a supervisor evaluates him and gingerly but firmly says he’s not suitable for either. Like with the guy clearing the table earlier in the film, none of this turns out to be too easy, and we don’t get happy results all that much. This evaluation ends with the concluding line "he'd probably fit in better with some counseling”, meaning the evaluator doesn’t really know what to suggest. The abrupt ending of a scene with a line like that is another regular Wiseman technique. He’s really good with final statements, because by the time we get there, we’ve earned them. They do sum up a situation, but we generally see that it took some effort for all concerned, including ourselves, to get there.
The second half of the film, largely devoted to vocational training, moves us to Alabama Industries for the Blind, as the training moves closer to actual working conditions with lots of instruction and guidance still continuing. This half has several near set-pieces - ambitious scenes that each time stay with individuals for an unusual amount of time. If you recall my gushing in Blind about the great successive sequences of the two kids navigating long walks through the halls, one starts here that at first looks like it will be a replay. A blind man and his teacher are on a city street in Talladega, and he’s about to practice a journey of a few blocks to the courthouse. I think we’re hoping this will be another triumph of skillful memory and walking purposefully, but as the teacher explains what’s needed to make the trip, it’s clear how tough this will be. They will have to "walk around the outside of the square because it's the only way of getting to the courthouse" and instructs him "all of your street crosses and all of your turns are going to be to the right”, but then starts reeling off street names and saying sometimes it’s one crossing before a right and sometimes it’s two crossings first, and I know I’d never be able to do what’s being asked. Matters become far worse as the walk gets underway, when we see how hard it is to cross streets, as the instructor explains how to listen for car noise, to "pay attention to your parallel traffic" to know when it’s safe to cross. I’d be squashed like a bug at the first corner. We see them dangerously make their way down and across a couple of streets, still some ways from their destination. The scene ends while the walk is still in progress - quite the ordeal - and we have no idea how the rest of it went. Somehow I was reminded of the poor horse in Racetrack who was operated on and who then tried to stand up, with the scene ending before we saw a successful conclusion. We can admire the considerable effort and still be left uncertain as to the outcome.
Another journey gets going back at the school, when a bubbly and extremely nice blind woman named Brenda takes a new student (Donald) through a couple of hallways, showing him how to navigate, where the men’s room is (Braille marked), how to count doors, and generally shows him the ropes as she wants him to learn where the break room is. I think we assume Brenda to be a teacher, because she really knows her way around and because she gives Donald such good advice. (“They got everything set nice for us” she cheerily remarks.) A first big discovery we have is that she is blind too and walking with a cane, but we have seen other deaf and blind teachers so we are maybe not so surprised. The bigger one comes after they reach their destination and turn around to go back, as these practice trips tend to do. He asks Brenda if she went to ASB, the standard abbreviation they use around there for the School for the Blind, and her reply is “I just became blind last year, but so far I’m adjusting, thank God.” So she’s a student too, but so genuinely optimistic and well-practiced and completely at home walking around the place that she’s ready to help newbies like Donald. After she successfully anticipates and then navigates them around a time clock (another impressive spot as blind workers punch their cards and put them in their proper slots) she asks where he has any light perception. He says yeah and her reply is “Oh good, you’re like me.” Her pluckiness and literally looking on the bright side is tremendously inspirational, and the whole journey has been another Wisemanesque set of patient discoveries.
One last tour de force is a training room scene with three students, our Brenda and Donald, and a third woman named Donna, who is having a terrible time counting quarters with her teacher, translating two and four quarters into fifty cents and a dollar. The teacher navigates between all three, as they work with electronic calculators trying to get familiar with the keys and with adding up sums and calculating sales tax. He goes from one to another to the next, expertly and once again ever so patiently coaching them in their tasks. The big reveal here comes when class is over and they all exit, and we see that the teacher is also blind and requires a cane, and can’t see well enough to recognize a person ahead of him. During the lengthy teaching scene just completed, he was so good at showing them tricky things like the location of keys on a calculator that we had just assumed he could see. Blindness certainly on my part.
In a surprise cameo and not identified, the speaker at the end of Blind, the entrepreneur A. J. Gaston, gets a short tour of the place, and we see him with a staff member in a huge room with many workers at sewing machines. The guide brags that everyone in the room “makes minimum wage or above" and that "some of them with fringe benefits are making as much as five dollars and a quarter an hour”. Even by 1986 dollars and quarters this sounds pitifully low, but his claim is "Every one of these people would be on welfare were it not for this program.” It’s likely true, but it’s hard not to see the result in front of us as both a great accomplishment for the workers and a result of near-sweatshop conditions not unlike the poor working conditions we’ve already seen in other films. This ambiguity continues in final brief scenes of the film, where workers expertly assemble different types of scrubbing brushes, and then in another room a woman at a machine does a good but repetitive job of assembling office folders, followed by a man who repetitively tapes them together, followed by another who repetitively sits in front of a gadget putting a crease along the edge of each folder. As a last shot, we see the one job Wiseman highlights as a signature activity in every place he films - there’s always someone whose job it is to sweep up. Adjustment & Work seems fully aware of both the triumph of the blind and handicapped successfully developing skills to navigate the world and acquiring sufficient abilities to be productive as workers, together with the result being they now do difficult labor for very low pay. The film still feels more on the side of marveling at their accomplishments under these terribly demanding circumstances, but we’ve certainly been made aware of how challenging those circumstances are and how the result is hard work for small wages.