High School

High School (1968)

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064429/]

The Gist:

High School is an observational, fly on the wall, documentary. By that, it means that there is no voice of god VO, no questions being heard from the filmmaker, and an attempt to illuminate the intrusive presence of the filmmaking process altogether in hopes to capture a truer sense of reality. Of course, there are plenty of moments in this film where you can feel the subjects reacting in a way that is different than if they were not being filmed and the editing continues to add subjectivity to the content but so it goes, nothing's perfect. There is still a distilled truth at work in this documentary, both a sense of the times and something that feels very contemporary. I was the greatest fan of high school myself. It wasn't that I didn't have good teachers, because I had plenty of them, but the system itself is a claustrophobic and unnecessarily, inflexibly bureaucratic. This film reminded me a lot of my high school experience. I could feel an intense truth at work amidst the mild artifice.