At Berkeley is so completely up my alley. I’m an alumnus from the late Sixties, and then I’ve taught at one of the other University of California campuses for most of my life, so a meeting about tenure expectations or other administrative concerns is not strange to me. While I was an undergrad, I did a double major in math and drama, one of those cool things the school was completely flexible and encouraging about. I had great teachers in big classes and small. Something Wiseman gets so right is the excitement of listening to a professor do something like offer up a close reading of a poem or a novel. That feeling came back of what it’s like to hear someone genuinely inspiring who makes you think in ways that you hadn’t been exposed to before. Teachers can do that. So can films.
At Berkeley gets called “sprawling” often, and there’s so much to it that one can find plenty of room to respond to lots of different things. I’ll try to hit some main areas that got to me, knowing there’s lots I’m leaving out. We can pretend like we’re in a class together. As I said, At Berkeley is full of great teachers, and if it did nothing else, it would be an amazing movie just for all its classroom scenes. How great that we get a few minutes with Saul Perlmutter, not identified by name of course, but easily tracked down, an astrophysicist whose seminar where he talks about dark energy measurement and supernovae is surely included so there’s at least one talk certain to go over the heads of just about every movie viewer who tries to follow it. It’s refreshing enough when films don’t talk down to us. How even more exhilarating when it’s willing to shoot way over our heads. I don’t think there’s a single classroom discussion or talk that’s anything less than fascinating, and it’s so well done that the learning situations go everywhere from massive lectures to doctoral advisors working with dissertation students and never fail to be extremely engrossing. The range of subject matter of the classes we visit is huge, though it just scratches the surface of what a major university offers. No need to bemoan missing subject areas. The ones included are varied and always quite engrossing. They have that thrilling undergrad feel of shopping around in the bazaar of knowledge, considering what subjects might turn into majors and eventually careers. We’ve watched many teaching situations in Wiseman films, of course. How knowledge is passed on has been a major interest, as we’ve discussed more than once. We’ve seen it not just in schools (although there have been a good number of those, of course), but in dance studios and boxing gyms, with the military and with low-paid workers. Knowledge is passed down for so many reasons. To the young from those who used to do it but now choose to show others. By institutions which have deep agendas. So that careers can be made, or just so that some can survive in life. And sometimes just because there is a thirst for knowledge and a desire by people to get together and see what they can do to acquire it.
In At Berkeley, there’s also the fresh excitement of going in both temporal directions, back into history and forward into the future - keeping the past alive and vital, and also creating important new knowledge. We are properly warned about the dangers of “historical illiteracy” in a talk by probably a history professor at the “Free Speech Movement Cafe”, which I recall being part of one of the libraries. (You can, very by the way, see their menu online, where extras to the coffee drinks are listed as “amendments”.) “All too often Americans seem to forget the past”, he says quite explicitly, and warns that “we are rapidly becoming a cynical, passive, and uninformed people.” While there are quite a number in the film all too ready to relive the glory days of the Sixties, the chancellor included, the better argument for history is in the classroom, especially in the easily seen relevance of the likes of Thoreau, Donne, and Thornton Wilder. The Thoreau discussion, like so many in Wiseman films, offers insights that don’t have to apply only to the work under examination, but offers a lot that fits pretty clearly with the film(s) we’re watching. “The task . . . is, as always, to take what seems to be a jumble of observations and see if there are . . . any patterns.” Can there be a better guide to watching Wiseman films? As he takes the class through “Walden” he offers them and us a most useful suggestion “It goes by pretty quickly, but it’s tremendously important.” Wiseman is good at doing that himself, with the added large corollary that it doesn’t always have to go by quickly to still be tremendously important. And beyond the look back, in several classes we get considerations of the idea of Time itself, from an analysis of Stephen Hawking (by the well-known linguist George Lakoff) to a near-final scene of an astronomy professor speculating with a large class as to “will we be on other planetary systems, say in a thousand years.” I’m sure not coincidentally (these are the “patterns”) a thousand years is also spoken in the brief excerpt we hear from a rehearsal of a student production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” about what should go in the cornerstone of a new building to be dug up after a millennium. “People a thousand years from now, this is the way we were.” This so obviously speaks about Wiseman’s whole body of work. There is clearly no better record of life in our times than these films. (I wish we would have had the next little bit of the Stage Manager’s speech, though perhaps it’s a little too on the nose: “This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.”) Seeing the big picture of time is a great larger idea that is infused in this film. And I found no scene more moving than a simple library reading of a poem I’ve always loved on this same subject, e.e. cummings’ “anyone lived in a pretty how town”. We get, in Wiseman fashion, the entire poem, and exactly that, no extra commentary, not even a mention of who’s reading the poem. Its rendition of a typical life reflects especially on Wiseman’s “community” films like Belfast and Monrovia, and is fitting here too as part of what universities and education offer - views of life on a broader scale. And this is just the right campus to be considering a sense of time - the frequent chiming of the campanile, especially when it rings at noon, has to have an extra resonance to anyone who has ever heard it in person, or who is hearing it now for the first times.
That future stuff is also clearly in evidence, though sometimes in an ironic Wiseman way. There’s a wordless sequence of another kind of teaching, a robot learning how to fold a towel that echoes the manual labor we’ve often seen. (And towel folding seems to link pretty directly to a similar training scene way back in Talladega.) The robot is being “taught” by a person in a lab who’s laboring over a computer simulation of the process. The machine messes up pretty badly in its first attempt, but with a little tweaking of the code and the model, the folding goes nicely the next time. Like that English teacher said, it goes by quickly, but it’s tremendously important. Are machines doing manual labor a good thing? It looks important to know that universities are where breakthroughs can happen, part of the public good that belies the drastic cutbacks to education that is a principal topic of At Berkeley. A thrilling similar sequence shows work on a prosthetic walking device. This time besides seeing a demonstration of it, we get a fairly lengthy great discussion with the doctoral student whose project this is together with a second student, the student’s advisor, and the person with a spinal cord injury who has been testing it and who offers feedback. Besides showing that this kind of work is being done at the university, it’s terrific how much of the discussion we get to see, to get a sense of the complexity of such an undertaking, and how it’s a product of a research environment, of a community dedicated to progress with a clear public benefit.
Teaching, plus how an institution is run - two of Wiseman’s big subjects, of course. At Berkeley is very administration centered, with the little twist here that the University of California system at the time was in the midst of severe budget cuts by the State Legislature (better that we’ve already seen how this type of thing goes in Idaho only four films ago). The situation is laid out in some detail repeated times, and everyone agrees it’s awful and seriously undermines what the film makes so evidently clear is tremendously worthwhile. We see the hardships on students of tuition increases and extensive loans. We hear administrators entirely aware of the effects, and a number of the meetings are devoted to how they might deal with it. There’s a general feeling that the film is strongly on the side of the affable chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, and his colleagues in how they deal with both economic issues and with unhappy students. I was actually surprised by how much criticism of the administration creeps in, both by staff and students. I guess the one meeting that got to me is one with staff, where one of them responds to the chancellor about what they refer to as the “OE Initiative”. It’s never explained in the film what that is, but the woman speaking about it does an astute analysis that what’s called “organizational simplification” actually means “further reduction in the size of the staff”. The chancellor tries to rouse the troops by talking about how furloughs saved many lower paid jobs. What he doesn’t say is that those furloughs (voluntary reductions in pay) were not voluntary, and also ominous is his Abrupt End of Scene Line - “Middle class people are in a different situation.” It’s a situation that has sounded pretty dire in previous scenes. especially one of a student in tears, so being left hanging doesn’t suggest an easy solution. What’s missing too is that OE stood for Operational Excellence, which was a report by the somewhat infamous Bain and Company for which they were paid a reported 7.5 million dollars. If you read the report (its 205 page Powerpoint is still available online), you see that the staff person got it exactly right - cutting staff is a major component of the proposal they were considering, but couched in different terms. That’s where I missed a little bit Wiseman’s usual wariness about institutional evasions through euphemism. It’s noticeable in other films, especially the military ones. I’m long enough in academia to be wary of anything called an “Initiative” - it’s usually anything but. There’s a student protest that’s covered quite extensively from both sides, but to be honest, I found it fairly routine, its veering to the unexpected only based upon disputes about tactics, and considerations of the role of the police were on the muted side. It’s accomplishment enough I guess that Wiseman has been able to keep all these campus meetings from being anything but deathly boring. Believe me, that’s hard to do.
Because there’s so much in the film, it might be useful to give another example of how scenes can bounce off each other, even if they are several hours of film time apart. I’ve mentioned the “thousand years” thing already, so let’s notice how talking about names gets an echo. It’s a funny thing for Wiseman to play around with, given his resolute penchant for not providing names, part of that important decision to neither narrate nor onscreen label. He’s so right to follow that practice, because once you go that route, there’s no end to it. Who gets identified and who doesn’t, and do you have to provide job titles and other information too? Also, it fits his style of dropping us in the middle of things and leaving it to us to figure out what’s going on. Naming names would tell us what we should be watching, so correct a no-no. But here the subject gets broached close to the start, when the leader of a meeting of graduate student instructors offers the advice right off : "I just want to stress the importance of learning your students' names" and then goes on to list reasons why this is helpful. The echo comes during a class session with Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Clinton, like everyone else not identified by name, except for all his students, who have prominently displayed printed name tags on their desks in front of them. He’s seen teaching a public policy class, offering advice on how CEO’s can get meaningful feedback. He’s in an arena-like classroom of about fifty students, and we can see clearly that their printed name cards are visible throughout the room. Reich makes a point of addressing a student by name, putting into action the suggestion made to those grad students several film hours ago, and he makes a real point of speaking to her specifically, a small lesson well demonstrated. And it’s good to finally have someone talk about how to handle meetings, since by this 38th film, we’re rather knowledgeable on the subject as well.
I watched At Berkeley pretty much straight through without interruption, but should it be necessary, I just want to applaud mightily one more time Wiseman’s willingness to go beyond standard feature length, especially from this film on. The extra time in a film like this doesn’t mean that scenes go longer, it means that more are included, and I’m seriously and legitimately hard pressed to look at At Berkeley and pick what I would do without. I think it’s since about Central Park I’ve been mentioning the extremely short scenes that felt like they had the potential of whole movies in them, so it’s a curious thing that longer lengths haven’t resulted in lengthened sequences. If anything, it’s been the opposite, as if to show that total length isn’t a result of stretching anything our or just repeating for no reason. This is why Wiseman’s way of putting films together is so brilliant. Longer doesn’t mean a dragged-out chronology or more time with a main character. It means more information, more situations, more varied human behavior. Besides “sprawling” the adjective I think I’ve seen most often for this film is ”panoramic”, and I like that one better because it suggests that there’s so much to see and also that a full expanse is being covered. It means more essential sequences - more pieces to the mosaic. By not making his films about an issue or a single story or person, the films are closer to chunks of experience structured for us. The idea of going somewhere well chosen for a month or so and then seeing for the next year what to make of it is just an incredibly productive and rewarding approach to making movies. Bring them on, please.
What I really want to explore a bit further that we got started on earlier might be labelled the Case Against the Chancellor. That’s because the film has regularly been criticized as being too supporting of him and of university administration generally, at the expense of the students. I think it’s true of cinema verite direct cinema whatever we call it (ok, back to observational cinema) that if done well, and Wiseman is the best example of it, there is much leeway for responses of all sorts. The handoff that occurs when we give up narration and interviews and all that stuff and we’re not being told how to respond to what we’re viewing is that we should then be free to do exactly that - respond as we intelligently choose. There might be a fine line between separating one’s point of view from the film’s, but it’s a line nonetheless. I don’t know why, but I’ve never had a lot of patience with the notion that observational cinema is full of hidden strategies to force the viewer to think about what they’re seeing in certain ways. Camera position and editing choices of all sorts clearly mediate between us and what’s being shown, but film is still a recording medium and in responsible hands, the goal isn’t either a hatchet job or a pat on the back. That’s the wrong way to look at film. It doesn’t have to be here’s what to think but I’m too sly to come right out and say it. Better to come from a sense that the world presents many complex situations, so let’s be sensitive to that and offer the possibility of a range of responses, and then viewers can compare notes and think through ideas and figure out where they stand.
So back to that Chancellor. First, I was very unhappy with his response to the student protest that occupies a big section later in the film. His first pronouncement upon seeing the students’ list of demands is "It's actually helpful that the list is so crazy”, and he goes on to describe how he thinks they should have gone about it, sticking to no more than three, which he says would have been much more effective. Attacking tactics is an easy way to avoid direct engagement, and it’s patronizing just to say that he agrees with some of their concerns and they should appreciate how much he’s already done. At a later administrative meeting after it’s over, he’s even more critical, assessing the protest as “classic oppositional politics” with “no underlying philosophy”. From there it’s his turn to reminisce about the great days back in the Sixties, when “we looked at serious issues and we took serious risks” - in other words now it’s far from that. He’s great at smiling when he says stuff like this, but the content is pretty annoying. Why I’m talking about this is that the film provides you with these words. It’s hardly an endorsement of him even if that’s the prevailing view. I think it’s tempting to view Chancellor Birgenau as something of a performer. He’s got an established persona that works very well for him, but part of that skill may be in artful evasions. I’d offer another example of this in his meeting with other administrators where he says they’ve been opening up more positions for international students, which he cheers on by calling it “a new gig for Berkeley Admissions to cover the globe”. Left out is the likely economic gain such a move might produce. It may be a feature of institutions to put an optimistic spin on a policy decision, like that Bain and Company report that preferred to say “organizational simplification” rather than acknowledging openly that a bunch of people need to be fired. The Chancellor comes across as a highly able administrator, and while skill in getting people to do what you think is necessary may be part of the job description, the situations and ideals of the students might have used more energetic opposition to budget cuts and more sympathy for their range of concerns. At least that’s what I saw, that the film allowed me to see.
But let’s end on an up note, as At Berkeley does. Playing with credit sequences goes on, as for the first time end credits are not run over a black screen, and instead we see a student dance number while the Willie Nelson version of “City Of New Orleans” plays through to the very end. (That the dancers are in silhouette a long way from Crazy Horse may be a reason this works so well.) My guess is that it’s the line “Good morning America, how are you” that’s the draw here, and it’s a good way to leave this incredibly ambitious film, so full of important educational issues and so much more. Delving into the inner workings of a massive institution is no small feat, and I don’t even know of another that’s made the attempt. When there is a cornerstone somewhere, At Berkeley deserves a prized place.