@berkeley

         Frederick Wiseman picks a piece of the world and films the hell out of it. He picks it because it's interesting to him, not because it's "relevant." "Relevant" being whatever corporate media thinks the public should find more important than other things at a given moment. "Relevant" acknowledges why a movie about Berkeley might be important right now, but doesn't see why such a movie has to be so long or include lengthy discussions of poetry, time, and astrophysics. ("Relevant" will have no truck with reflection or metaphor. "Relevant" is a Brueghel canvas seen through a keyhole.) "Relevant" is likely why At Berkeley (2013) aired on my local PBS station two months ago in a timeslot (11pm-3am) prohibitive to everybody but diehard cinephiles and insomniacs, slightly less of an insult in the age of DVR (which I don't have), but only slightly. "Relevant" is also why Wiseman has never been nominated for an Oscar, and why Netflix won't answer his letters. All of this is not to suggest that he's an embattled or marginalized figure (he has, as is frequently noted, become something of an institution himself) but his work represents a mode of thinking about the world that's highly unfashionable in the age of Upworthy and its like.
         Sure, At Berkeley has a more obvious bearing on the zeitgeist than his last movie, Crazy Horse (2011), a study of the Parisian burlesque club of the same name, but its "relevance" feels unforced and organic, discovered rather than imposed or assumed. The problem with some social issues-type documentaries is the filmmakers seem to know already more or less what they're going to say, and making the movie is just a matter of collecting facts and scintillating footage to support what the initial thesis is. Not that there isn't a place for that kind of documentary, but it tends to make for flat, primarily informational experiences, exhausted of their riches after a single viewing. At Berkeley makes a definite argument about the state of higher education in America, but that argument isn't immediately apparent. Instead, it's emergent, largely assembled from long blocks of time in lecture halls and meeting rooms, in which conversations between subjects are allowed to ebb and flow, as conversations do. These scenes are often fascinating in themselves, both for the heady intelligence of the discussions and the immanent quality of Wiseman's images (he seems incapable of filming a person without making one aware of the complex interweaving of historical and biological forces that have molded them into what they are). But when the scenes are juxtaposed with each other, further levels of meaning (echos and linkages, running themes and subthemes) gradually accumulate, forming a complex and cohesive statement. Perhaps due to Wiseman's spurning of the usual viewer guideposts (narration, interviews, identificatory chyrons), or the slowness with which At Berkeley builds, one feels Wiseman is unearthing his argument at the same time you are.
         I don't agree with all aspects of that argument. While the student protests that take up about an hour of the movie's second half may have been as inchoate and abortive as Wiseman suggests they were, and the administrators might be the entirely decent, principled and well-meaning people he depicts, I nonetheless found myself wishing Wiseman would sacrifice his umpteenth study in faculty meeting inertia for a scene among students discussing their hopes, worries, and longings without the mediation of an authority figure. But that one reservation aside, when At Berkeley ended I felt newly awakened to the polyphonic complexity of this grand, wacky circus we call civilization. At three in the morning, no less.*

*Which is actually when most such epiphanies occur, so maybe there was some higher logic to PBS's scheduling than I was willing to concede.

repleteness, or four minutes of Frederick Wiseman

        

         Initially, it seems we're supposed to be aghast that she's not teaching them Wordsworth or Tennyson. That might well have been Wiseman's intention, but the scene exceeds it. Sure, it's a hokey attempt to make poetry hip, and the prospect of her having them break the song down into "setting" and "thematic words" to determine what Simon and Garfunkel "want to say about our lives" is eye-roll material, and probably all too familiar to anybody who's taken English classes in an American public high school in the last 5 decades.*
         And yet the lyrics considered as poetry aren't all that bad, not outstandingly original by any means, but certainly possessing enough grist for a productive classroom discussion. Wiseman takes up the lyrics for his own purposes, to comment obliquely on the problems High School (1968) diagnoses. The many scenes where the faculty is too incompetent or mindlessly authoritarian to forge meaningful connections with the students are given an analogue in the the ennui and disconnection of the song's couple. Is the sum total of these students' experience in the public education system going to resemble that of an unfulfilling relationship, in which communication has degenerated to the level of such bourgeois banalities as "Is the theater really dead?" So we're still to some extent in the realm of critique. But when she starts up the tape recorder, the scene becomes, as do so many scenes in cinema that prominently feature a piece of pop music, about time. The most obvious cue is a closeup of a watch on a young man's arm, followed one cut later by the lyric "in syncopated time."**

         But time is also brought to mind by the succession of closeups, each an indelible snapshot of human beings existing at a particular moment. Of course that could be said of many scenes in High School, but the combination of elements here--the tender, slightly cornball tone of the song, the biting melancholy of its lyrics, how the closeups thrum with present-tense aliveness (the handheld camerawork slightly unsteady, most of the students in repose but never quite entirely still)--casts us--casts me, anyway--into the sort of reverie a certain Marcel would wholly endorse.

         And then, the song still going, we cut to a girl standing out in the empty hall: boredom, loneliness, dejection, abandonment. Or, alternately: that air of expectation that used to hang in spring gardens inhabited by nymphs and faeries, but is more often found today commingling with B.O. in the corridors of American high schools.

* While I'm absolutely in favor of nursing the critical and interpretive faculties of people from the earliest age possible, the way literature is usually taught in public schools is a bit like trying to do thoracic surgery with a buzzsaw. 
** Another resonance Wiseman plays with: the preceding lyrics "Like a poem poorly written / We are verses out of rhythm / Couplets out of rhyme" are not at all an inaccurate description of what it feels like to be your average sexually-hypertrophic adolescent spazoid.