If you walk east from the Conservatory Garden in Central Park on 106th Street just one block to Madison Avenue, it’s the location of Central Park East Secondary School, where Wiseman filmed High School II, which we’ll call HS II from here on out. It’s twenty-six years since the first High School, and the differences are so obvious that I’m not going to spend any time in direct comparison of the two. What’s more interesting is to look at the real maturity of approach in this one, that it’s not just a portrait of a school (although it is that) but I think an examination of what it means to learn, in ways that very directly suggest Wiseman examining his own ways of working - that the school expresses a philosophy very much in tune with his own. It’s probably the least ironic and most straightforward of his movies, and it’s interesting to see him go this way - once more a combination of some consistent elements with new experiments.
It’s a standard comment about his films (I’ve already said it a bunch of times) that he chooses not to follow a single character, in contrast to most narrative films and large numbers of documentaries. A couple of aspects of that are worth expanding upon. One that deserves more respect is how steadfastly he has avoided celebrity - no movie stars, sports figures, famous politicians. Considering the cinema verite group that began around the same time as he did - Drew, Leacock, Pennebaker, the Maysles - theirs was more of a let’s-follow-an-interesting-person-around type of film-making, and a fair number of times those subjects were the Kennedys, Jane Fonda, Stravinsky, Marlon Brando, The Beatles. Clearly not so with Wiseman. We’re going to come up soon to some films about performers, and we’ll see there too a much greater interest in group interactions. It’s fun to notice a few times when he couldn’t quite avoid celebrities, and how he handled those. (This will connect soon to HS II - it’s really not a tangent.) I’d think first of Central Park and Pavarotti’s appearance. For one, the big free celebrity performances are a Central Park mainstay, so somebody would have to show up, but it’s not going to be a Streisand or Simon and Garfunkel for Wiseman, and when it’s Pavarotti, he’s there with Kathleen Battle and characteristically, I don’t think their names are even mentioned. And the one rock group is the interesting but less than a household name Midnight Oil, there probably to mine the content of their song than to exploit their appearance. He’s probably most interested in Francis Ford Coppola, but more to compare that director’s way of doing things with his own. There are a couple of celeb appearances too in Aspen, a town where big names can be easily spotted, and I think I already mentioned how Ed Bradley (CBS 60 minutes newsman) gets barely acknowledged with just one close-up while exercising in a gym. I didn’t mention the other big Aspen celebrity, also shown in a characteristic Wiseman manner - just popping up and without his name ever being said out loud. It comes during a bar rendition of the song “Great Balls of Fire” by a local singer who’s also not identified, but in the middle of her song, John Denver casually appears onstage to do a chorus or two, and then he’s gone while she finishes the number. It’s like Wiseman will just not make a big deal of it, because that’s not his way. Model you would think would flirt seriously with celebrity, but I’d guess that’s among the reasons there are no fashion walkways in the film, so no chance to catch celebrities in the front rows. Andy Warhol’s appearance is as close as we get to a real big name, but even there his scene seems much more about the male models in the room than about Warhol being there too. And on the political side, I can only think of Alexander Haig in Manoeuvre, who seems mostly ridiculed for his “where are you from, soldier” ordinary questions and again seems barely identified.
This is all to say that HS II is something a departure, in that we see Wiseman’s idea of a celebrity, Deborah Meier, who is the founder of the school and a well-known educator. She shares with Wiseman having been a MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, and I think she gets more screen time than anyone in these first twenty-six films. HS II can be looked at as Wiseman examining the similarities between his own ideas of what films should be and her ideas of education, as the two seem very much in sync. We do see lots of educational activities and also see lots of situations with her and other teachers dealing with pressing problems like underperforming students, teen pregnancy, and a bunch of other stuff, but what really pops out are the frequent times when the school’s educational approach is voiced, many times by Meier herself, and things are said which reflect back on Wiseman too, and I’ll try to give a few examples of that.
“High School II is the greatest instructional film about instruction that I can think of.” That line comes from a review at a website I wanted to mention called notcoming.com. It’s got a tremendous number of well-done reviews of interesting films, though it sadly ceased doing new stuff in 2014. Among their wealth of good writing are pieces on twenty-seven Wiseman films. (The quote is from one by Leo Goldsmith.) I think he’s right on the nose with that - an instructional film about instruction. The trick here though is what is meant by “instruction”, as calling something an instructional film usually harkens back to terrible high school sessions about driver or sex education. (HS II actually sort of parodies these in one sequence about condom usage.) Instruction would mean some boring narrator telling you what to think - the worst kind of documentary. HS II approaches this very differently, by attempting a structure which practices what the people in the film are preaching. To some this might feel almost too direct - too lengthy and repetitious - but I’d say education doesn’t come fast - and 3 hours and 41 minutes yields more solid ideas than any few dozen TED talks or MasterClasses of your choice. It’s too easy to forget that one result of these films is that we might actually ourselves learn some useful stuff from them. Wiseman dares to give it a patient and thorough try.
Meier’s main principles she has called “Habits of Mind” and you can google various versions of it. She very unassumedly has suggested these questions should be the basis for class lesson plans, but they also express an educational philosophy, or as she says at the end of HS II, a life philosophy, a way of looking at things. One version of her five is to pose the following five questions:
1. “How do we know what we know? Or: What’s the evidence?”
2. “Could it have been different? How else, supposing that?”
3. “Is there another viewpoint—in fact, viewpoints? Who and why?”
4. “Is there a pattern? How are things related to each other? What are the connections?”
5. “Who cares? Why does it matter and to whom?”
I’m listing these not to suggest a one-to-one correspondence with how Wiseman works, but there’s enough resonance to at least consider some strong connections. The way they connect is that they offer methods to a viewer that are in accord with how the films are constructed. The one that really jumps out at me is the fourth, which is what every Wiseman film asks practically all the time, and which requires us to answer - the film is at most suggestive of this but leaves to us to think about it. Things can relate thematically - be about the same ideas. Or they can conflict or bounce off each other. That’s work that’s put on us - to do otherwise would not encourage thought. I’m not going to go down the full list, but you might give it a try. I’d say, though, that it’s great that her number one comes first - isn’t that what a Wiseman film starts with? Here’s what I found by spending a month or two at a place. Let’s take that basic material and shape it into something. At one point in HS II this approach is likened to the scientific method, and that’s rather a reduction, but this idea of starting by collecting stuff, seeing what’s out there, seems to have a close cinematic counterpart in Wiseman’s work. The collecting of material precedes the structuring, the “is there a pattern” subsequent step.
Another bold move in HS II are the forms of repetition, something that conventional movies aren’t supposed to do, where change, dramatic development, and chronology suggest not going back over the same ground. But learning doesn’t work that way. Sometimes we have to go over the same material for the ideas to sink in. Wiseman can’t force us to see the same movie twice or more (though it’s a fine idea) so I think he pushes it here by giving us close but different versions of similar situations. The closest comparisons would be maybe to music or poetry, just for the sense that repetitions play an accepted role and we obviously don’t get upset by motifs returning or rhymes serving as a structuring device. It’s seen by some as a danger that too much repetition leads to boredom, but education or instruction has to take that chance - new ideas and complex thoughts just don’t always become clear the first time around. (For some weird reason, the Hollywood trade paper Variety reviewed HS II, and warned that because of its length “As is, commercial and even PBS prospects are dim.” Warning that PBS could have problems is going pretty far.) But we should also recognize that with repetition can come complexity, the start of recognizing those patterns.
One such repetition is the considerable number of scenes of one teacher and one student working through a problem. It may be going over a paper the student has written, their plan for a science experiment, or their ideas about a piece of literature. “You have to play around with different combinations and come to some possible conclusion,” a teacher tells a student regarding a mutation experiment, but it might well be Wiseman commenting about his own method. I don’t think the importance of one-on-one guidance is ever explicitly stated anywhere in the 3 hours and 41 minutes, but the need for it becomes evident the more we see of it. And it’s not just telling students what to do. HS II is full of half-sentences by teachers, where they successfully invite the student to continue the thought on their own, to see for themselves where a project should go. It’s also a big deal both that the students speak a good amount and are listened to by the teachers. It’s something else not explicitly stated, it’s just expected. The movie is dialog upon dialog.
Another major form of repetition is the considerable number of scenes with students not doing well. In other Wiseman films, these would be the “misfit” situations - how does the institution deal with the person who isn’t fitting in or performing as expected. There are variations of this in pretty much every Wiseman film, because they test the boundaries of what the institutions are aiming for and what they’ll do to accomplish their goals. In HS II, these many scenes are the way of exposing the method - you try to learn why the problem exists (rather than just assuming you know) and then you ask as many times as needed what might be an approach the student can take to reaching goals they have acknowledged they want. It’s not an easy process, and one of the marvels of HS II is the patience of teachers. Like the doctors of Near Death, people in institutions can shine by their willingness to listen and not have preconceived notions of what needs to be done. You don’t always get the feeling that the troubled students will come around, but it won’t be for lack of sincere trying by all concerned. To realize the need for this means in HS II seeing it a lot, over and over. It’s not the same problem every time an underperforming student is brought in, but we can recognize the approach the school is taking eventually, by our own patiently watching and trying to understand what’s going on.
Even though this is clearly a great school, we are reversing the situation of the first High School, where we saw an almost entirely white school in a well-to-do neighborhood that was not doing the most desirable of educational jobs. Here, it’s a mostly Latino and Black school in an area fraught with problems that is doing quite well by their students. But that world outside can’t be kept out, and it’s another aspect of HS II that the problems from outside are brought directly in and dealt with as much as possible. It’s revealing to see Debbie Meier herself dealing with a 15-year-old student who is coming back to school after recently having had a baby. Teen pregnancies seem a common problem (we hear at length about a second one later in the film), and rather than see it avoided or passed elsewhere, the school handles it head on. Meier checks that the girl’s mother will be taking care of the baby while the girl is at school, and that they both understand what returning to school will require, and also that the girl is highly motivated to return. Meier is strongly reassuring and welcoming too, and we get one of those Wiseman end-of-scene lines when Meier tells her that she wants to make sure "that nothing happens that makes you feel that you're not safe”. HS II has so many of these moments, where an aspect of institutional philosophy gets emphasized by being the concluding line of the scene, that I may have to list a few with a later film.
The outside world also shows its presence by the timing of when Wiseman was there, during the Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King verdicts. It’s, as they say, a teachable moment, students are already writing papers about it and planning for a City Hall protest. It’s an explicit point made by Meier at the end of the film that she sees education as playing an essential role in democracy, of producing “citizens who are able to carry on that public dialog about the nature of their society”. This would certainly seem to be one of the major purposes of Wiseman’s films. They are part of that dialog, doing what educators like Meier are also engaged in. It’s obvious for me to say, but HS II in the time of Black Lives Matter is as relevant as ever. I kind of hate the word “relevant” because it suggests a topicality that comes and goes or an accident of timing, but this 1994 film looks made today, dated only by the size of the school computer screens and a nineties mustache or two sported by the teachers. One also can’t help but feel that the push itself for education of this sort is an answer to Trump-era anti-truth-and-science craziness. This film affirms democratic ideals in the best possible way.
It can feel a little tacked on, but that idea of what I called a few films ago the “Abrupt End of Scene Line” is feeling more and more evident as a very smart Wiseman device, and they’re especially important in HS II because, like the one I just mentioned, they express institutional philosophy very clearly in a way that invites us to think further about their significance. So, in the spirit of “Habits of Mind” #1, I thought I should offer some more evidence. I say “abrupt” because one effect of these lines is of a scene cut short in order to emphasize the line. We’re not expecting a scene to end, but it’s as if, when the line is spoken, there’s nothing more need be said. One such is when the co-director of the school is giving an interview about the Habits of Mind, and he says it’s "a way of seeing things in their complexity, not simplistically.” The scene and interview end right there, on a line that describes Wiseman aptly too. Elsewhere there’s a very good discussion of King Lear, much better I thought than the similar scene in Aspen where the adult book club discusses Flaubert - these kids sound more engaged and smarter. The teacher is guiding them through the web of characters in the play and their differing relationships, and observes "We have complicated lives, and lines cross all the time, and this is what literature is about.” Once again, scene over, she’s said it. And a last bit of evidence, on a point repeated multiple times in this excellent film, when a teacher is helping a student to visualize a graph, she says "See if you can find more information,” and then the scene is quits. Good advice, and Wiseman too will keep doing it, in film after film. We’ve seen lots of education and training in his films, but never examined like this, and I think never directed back so clearly at us viewers.