Watching High School a couple of days after Titicut Follies, I couldn’t help but be struck by how many songs pop up! You don’t exactly think of Wiseman films as musicals, but here we’ve got five songs, one read first by an English teacher as a poem, and then another poem tossed in. The first one is, as we say in film school, non-diegetic, meaning that it’s added on, the opening use of Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay”, whose reference to “wasting time” is used for obvious but effective (and humorous) effect. During the film, we get surprisingly full renditions of “Simon Says” (who can forget the uncredited 1910 Fruitgum Company), the Simon and Garfunkel “Dangling Conversation” (poem and then a big chunk of the song), a Northeast High Cheer song (from cross-dressing football players), “Hey Look Me Over” (going the other way, female cheerleaders marching with rifles), and then without music, the excruciating rendition of “Casey at the Bat”. I almost want to include here the typing class sample of the story about the failed hunting trip, but even without counting that, it’s a fair enough sample to see a Wiseman device in action - one of the forms of ironic commentary. They’re not so explicit after that first song (which is extremely so), but we’re left entirely free to see “Dangling Conversation” applying to more broadly to the world of the film, just as the regimentation of “Simon Says” feels entirely apt. The songs don’t always have that direct an application, but they invite our thinking about odd and seemingly accidental juxtapositions, and getting sensitive to “seemingly accidental juxtapositions” is probably one of the key approaches one needs to take, as more than chances are that not just the songs, but more importantly the ordering of scenes and the contents of discussions are very shrewdly and meaningfully arranged.
If you’ve never seen a Wiseman film, this is likely the best starting point, both for its clarity of argument, its humor, and the opportunity it provides to take familiar experiences (most of us have gone to high school) and give us new ways to think about those experiences. Fifty some years later, it’s pleasing to see how smart and funny and cogent in its argument it still looks. The only datedness comes from technology nostalgia - first a whole room full of typewriters clacking away in that typing class, and then in the student having to use hallway pay phones (while a school official naturally demands hall passes from them). The cataclysmic events of the time, Martin Luther King’s assassination (don’t worry, a school club will be talking about it after school today) and Viet Nam (a returning soldier, and the great concluding letter) do mark its moment, but mostly one feels like one could most of this stuff still going now. I think it’s a point to be made more than once. These films aren’t just historical records. Apart from these “early” ones being in black and white and the sound not always the clearest (though we’re a good step improved already from the last one), these are just as full of interest as they always are and shouldn’t be looked at as just some sort of historical record of how things looked back then in the old days.
High School is the only Wiseman film photographed by Richard Leiterman, who also was the cameraman on the excellent Allan King A Married Couple and some other Canadian films of note. His contribution here may account for the predominance of close-ups, especially of the grotesque or the suggestive, which I don’t think we see quite so much in other Wiseman films. Here we’ll really zero in on a teacher’s thick bifocals or on the finger of a gynecologist lecturing to a group of male students. It fits with the absurdist tendencies which pop up with some regularity in his films, but feels just a bit over the top as he’s adopted a more restrained and dispassionate visual style, where the camera less rarely makes snarky comments on its subjects. There’s still a certain enjoyment of discovery when we’re in too close and don’t know what we’re looking at, like the bizarre game in the gym with at least a hundred boys fighting over one ball that looks like something from the “Dawn of Man” opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and we need to watch a bit before we have a clue what’s going on. When three of the kids are locked in a capsule as astronauts and come out after eight days, we start for a while having no clue whatever as to what’s happening. Strangeness and disorientation are good strategies, requiring us of course to figure things out.
It’s a marked characteristic too to see how often the content of a class will have reverberations beyond it, even if they’re sometimes humorous. A Spanish class lesson will reference Sartre and existential philosophy and that typing class hunting trip that goes nowhere is surely not accidentally chosen either. Reflections of either institutional philosophy or issues beyond the institution abound with such frequency that they become a main feature. The many scenes outside of classrooms, particularly parent-teacher-student meetings are full of such Reader’s Digest style aphorisms. “Life is cause and effect” was one of my favorites - so empty of meaning. “It depends on the language” is another good one, in part of an argument about a flunking student. There’s also a useful “meta” quality to some of the things people say, comments which can be read as applying to the film itself, like when the teacher of Simon and Garfunkel explains that “not only the devices reinforce the themes, but also the very rhythm” it’s not just “Dangling Conversation” that we’re thinking of. Especially with Wiseman, the rhythm of speech (and of the structure of the film itself) can be crucial. I guess it’s no accident we even have some dance ahead of us.
In some book or other, Wiseman’s films have been referred to as having a “mosaic” structure, which is true to an extent, but now seems more than a bit simplistic. It’s true that his films are not chronological, and we don’t see the same people return all that often. And while mosaics can form a bigger picture, that’s not quite the appropriate metaphor to describe how the pieces of a Wiseman film might be put together. In this early High School, there’s a tendency to group segments around a theme or subject. Scenes involving sex feel grouped together, as are some disciplinary sessions, and likewise several that deal with college plans and the future. For a time the film feels more overtly political, and issues of race come up, as later do the military. The film moves along at a fairly brisk pace and no scene goes on at great length, so it feels more like it’s an accumulation of scenes close together that gives a sense of structure. (The whole movie is a mere 75 minutes, which would barely get us started in some of the films to come.)
Let’s take a look quickly at openings and closings, because they can serve as signature Wiseman moments. I already can’t remember from two days ago, but I don’t think Titicut Follies ever had a shot outside showing the front of the institution. I think High School sets off the pattern of many, maybe a few starting shots outside, then the front of the place, and then in we go, never to come out again. The opening here is especially well done, not just for Otis Redding on the soundtrack. We see a shot from a car of a row of houses, each one identical, suggesting already the cookie cutter product the high school is producing and probably the houses that the students are living in. Then we see the back of a “Penn Maid” dairy truck, our only indication of where we are. The one shot outside the school is pretty striking, as we see a couple of smokestacks for some reason, so the school looks quite factory-like already even before we’ve gone inside. There’s no sign for the place shown (though the school probably has one somewhere), which serves to maybe slightly disorient us and also make us feel like we’re in a somewhat generic spot - we could as well be in any high school.
High School’s closing sequence, for all we know, could have been shot the first day he was there. It’s closing because this borders on an essay film ready to make its argument. I won’t recount what the principal reads from the former student now in Viet Nam who thinks of himself as “only a body a doing a job”. The key moment comes after she finishes the letter, and she says “When you get a letter like this, I think it means . . . “, as she goes on to claim this proves how well the school as done. It’s that “I think it means” which is film-maker’s gold - she’s done the heavy lifting, and a film with no chronology and no narration (but lots of organization) is neatly tied together. Her summation too about what a great job they’re doing is also obviously ironic, but the point would be, perhaps many might agree with her, or at the very least, the argument isn’t spoken by the film-maker, the people within the film have made the case for themselves.
Noticeable this viewing too was how regularly and even relentlessly Wiseman references the world outside the school, even seeming to anticipate institutions to come, especially the military. The teaching of “outside” things - sex, cooking, sports, fashion, universities, family structures (to name some) is maybe obviously a point of the film, but it’s also part of Wiseman’s outlook. No institution, certainly not a high school, has a circumscribed area of concern. Instead, they are focal points for the world outside. Either it can’t help being reflected or Wiseman is especially sensitive to those moments. It makes his films of course much more ambitious and interesting. They’re not just “about” the place where they’re filmed or this type of place. They’re about the world, about human behavior, about ideas and situations of broad import. That’s what happens in good movies.