Frederick Wiseman’s films often document the insipid, noxious operations of bureaucracies. This is certainly the case with High School, released in the auspicious year 1968. If At Berkeley can be read as a sequel to that earlier film, what becomes clear is that it is not only the character of educational institutions that has changed over the past fifty years—like the Fordist factory in the era of globalization, the factory-like public school has faded as well (although many schools have at the same time become increasingly prison-like)—but also the character of the director, who has become, notes one reviewer, “something of an institution himself.”
Another way of putting this comes from Wiseman’s reflections on the documentary form itself. The following comes from a Q&A panel after a screening at the New York Film Festival (above), but it’s an argument Wiseman repeats in nearly every discussion of the film:
People
don’t want to believe that other people can act the way they sometimes do. Both
good and bad—not necessarily just because it shows people doing difficult,
uncomfortable or occasionally sadistic or cruel, but it’s equally true that
some people don’t want to admit that other people can do nice, kind, helpful
things. And in part that’s related to the idea that documentary film should
always be an expose, should reveal something bad about government or people’s
behavior. . . . I think it’s equally important when people are doing a good job
and care and are kind and sensitive to other people, that’s an equally good
subject for a documentary.
Ambiguity is certainly
important, but in his critique of the exposé Wiseman may have moved too far in
the opposite direction. He explicitly glosses At Berkeley as a kind of reverse-exposé, a study of “people [who
are] doing a good job and care and are kind and sensitive to other people.” And
it’s not just any “people” he's talking about. In an early
interview with Daniel Kasman, Wiseman fleshes out the same argument by identifying the person he’s talking about:
From what I saw, he [then-chancellor
Robert Birgeneau] commanded the situation. What impressed me most about him,
aside from his obvious intelligence, is he cared, and that’s really nice. He
cared about low-income students, and middle class students, and he was in a
position to do something about it and he did. There are a lot of people who
think the only true subject of documentary films are unpleasant things and
nasty people, but it’s just as important to show people who are intelligent,
sensitive, and responsible.
Wiseman’s documentary
technique is well known—long takes, no voice over narration, no interviews, no
identifying information for any of the figures who appear, and so on. To some,
these techniques give the impression of objectivity, that the scenes were
filmed essentially at random, that no story or argument is being presented. Of
course, this is a mistaken impression. Wiseman explains how he constructs a story through the editing process during the Q&A:
I’ve
got this great glob of material, 250 hours, which has no form except insofar as
I impose a form on it as a consequence of editing. So it’s a question of
watching the material a lot and trying to think my way through the experience,
so that in one sense the final film is a report on what I’ve learned as a
consequence of studying the material, and the experience of being at the place.
The question,
then, is what kind of story is crafted, what kind of narrative woven, what kind
of form imposed. Wiseman explains to Kasman that he is “concerned about
avoiding didacticism.” When Kasman asks whether this meant that the documentary
was something like an open text, Wiseman responds: “Not open in the sense that
it doesn’t have a point-of-view or well defined points-of-view. Whenever you
deal with reality as a subject, it should be complicated and ambiguous.” The
form of the film, then, is one of apprehending, making sense of, and in the
final instance managing the complexity and ambiguity that define and traverse
the institution.
One way of
approaching that question is to see how other reviewers have seen and talked about it. What you
find is strikingly consistent. But this shouldn’t come as a surprise—although
the film appears to do away with many formal elements of narration,
Wiseman is, as he acknowledges, imposing a form. The fact that so many reviewers read the film in
similar ways reveals his skill at doing so.
What most reviewers see is this: a public university in crisis, balancing budget cuts with a public mission, costs with affordability—and a caring, capable chancellor working to hold it all together. The brutish principal of High School has matured into the sensitive, capable chancellor of At Berkeley. And he is everywhere, the only figure in the film who escapes anonymity: “Birgeneau, who is easily picked out by his bright white hair, distinctive Canadian accent, and near-constant presence.” He is not only in organizational terms the one responsible for holding all the disparate parts of the university together, but also in formal terms the common element tying together the otherwise fragmented scenes that make up the film. “[The film’s] star is the university's chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, a Canadian-born physicist with white-blond hair and a flashing smile, whose placid, diplomatic manner makes him the perfect academic administrator.” He is the administrator’s administrator. “The then-chancellor of the school seems to be everywhere . . . like he’s this omniscient presence. He seems so calm and in control, he’s a very strong character.”
Contrast this with Wiseman’s view of the student protesters
(which differs significantly from his view of both the rest of the student body
and of workers on campus). We will look a little more at the context below, but
for now what’s important is that there’s a protest toward the end of the film.
Wiseman discusses it with Kasman:
KASMAN:
It was very moving when he [Birgeneau] was genuinely incensed that students who
were protesting fees didn’t even know the statistics, which had changed
positively. What was your impression of the protest?
WISEMAN:
My impression is what you see in the movie, what did you see?
KASMAN:
It seemed like it was going OK until the students started talking!
WISEMAN:
[laughs] That’s the problem!
KASMAN:
It reminded me so much of Occupy Wall Street, which happened just about a year
later. The confusion that the students feel as a unified body is not something
you sense in the classrooms, it’s in their group protest. When they’re in the
classrooms they’re different people with different opinions but the moment
they’re together and given a microphone…
WISEMAN:
They’re intelligent, but…
Respect for authority, insults for protesters. Here Wiseman
goes out of his way to elicit a reading from his interviewer, and the response seems to resonate with the director's own feelings. It is also more or less consistent
across the reviews. Serena Golden’s piece
at Inside Higher Ed is representative:
But the film’s climax, insofar as
there is one, is anticlimactic. When the day comes, students march chanting
through campus and take over a library reading room, sending Birgeneau a list
of their demands. But the protest is fragmented, disorganized, the demands many
and divergent. A variety of speakers agree that the protesters must formulate a
goal, but each offers a very different vision of what that goal might be.
“It’s actually helpful that the list
[of demands] is so crazy,” we hear Birgeneau tell another administrator via
speakerphone. “If they had a list of three things that we could conceivably be
able to address, that would be much more effective.”
His administration responds with a
deliberately vague statement in support of accessible public education, which
the protesters boo – but the rally dies down quickly, with no evident impact. A
shot of the same reading room later that evening shows it to be neat, empty,
silent. A worker begins taking down the protest banner tacked above the library
door.
In an administrative meeting
afterward, Birgeneau dismisses the protest as “classic oppositional politics;
there was no underlying philosophy.”
What stands out most in this analysis is not so much that
Golden seems to have been asleep during the Occupy movement but rather that
she has projected the film’s formal characteristics onto the character of the
protest itself. The film has no clear plotlines to develop or narrator to
explain the gaps to the viewer; its “disparate elements” are juxtaposed and
spliced together and as a result “[t]he effect is at times disorienting.” Similarly, she describes the protest as “fragmented” and “disorganized,” with
demands that are “many and divergent.” Like Birgeneau (and many a political pundit in the era of Occupy), Golden would prefer for
the protesters to make their demands more focused, more reasonable. The
implication is not so much that the film is doing the PR work of the
administration—though this may be the case as well—but that it ends up reproducing the
administration’s way of seeing the world. What Golden has read in the film is
the form that Wiseman has imposed, and that form resembles in important ways
the lens of the UC Berkeley administration.
In spite (or more accurately because) of the fact that he had dismissed the protesters in the film, Birgeneau, who along with his second-in-command George
Breslauer participated in the Q&A in New York, attempts to moderate his scorn:
Actually
one thing I wanted to say in defense of our students, since I was quite harsh
on them in terms of the incoherence of the protest, there were many very
coherent protests which were quite effective, actually. But they focused on
undocumented students, black students, the Black Student Union organized really
terrific protests in terms of the challenges that African-Americans face on our
campus and every other campus, the Multicultural Center. So you know protests
are part of the Berkeley culture, but somehow during the time period that Fred
[Wiseman] was there it happened to have deteriorated. [interviewer chuckles]
There’s a lot we could say about those comments—it’s
interesting, for example, that the neoliberal language of diversity seems to be
the one that the administration best understands—but the point we want to
insist on here is simply that the logic of the film, as articulated by Wiseman
himself, parroted by reviewers, and stated by the film’s main protagonist, mirrors
the logic of the administration. Whatever its intention, At Berkeley creates the conditions, at the level of both form and
content, for the viewer to see like the administration.
One last consequence of Wiseman’s documentary technique, at least for our purposes here, has to do with what we could call a structural asymmetry of context. Nearly every reviewer remarks on a scene in a meeting among top-level university executives in which Chancellor Birgeneau details ongoing budget cuts, to the point that the state, which once provided 40-50 percent of the UC budget, now provides just 16 percent. These data act as a sort of mini-history of the institution, usefully framing the film as a study of the public university in crisis and locating it at the end of a long trajectory of what Birgeneau calls a “progressive disinvestment in higher education in the state of California.” It is a true, though partial story, one that students and workers have spent a lot of time and energy trying to correct. But what we want to highlight here is the differential between the administration on one hand and the protesters on the other. Because Wiseman spends so much time with administrators and especially with the chancellor, he affords them the chance to frame their own story. In this way, their actions are not only contextualized but through that context rendered reasonable.
In contrast, the protest—dismissed by administrators,
ridiculed by director and reviewers alike—has no context. It appears out of
nowhere, disconnected from everything that preceded it, further compounding the
reviewers’ view of its “fragmented” and “disorganized” character. Although
Wiseman appears to treat administrators and protesters on more or less the same
formal plane, here the asymmetry is revealed. The chancellor constructs the
administration’s present through a narration of its past. The protesters, on
the other hand, lack the same position from which to narrate their own history.
In part this is due to the difference between the univocal and stabile
character of the administration, an institution defined by (and for that matter
funded on the basis of) its continuity, and the polyphonic character of a
protest movement, defined by multiplicity and change over time. But it also has
to do with the film’s attachment to the chancellor and by extension to the
administration. It leaves no place from which to tell the recent history of
struggle at UC.
Whether or not Wiseman himself knew about the occupation
movement that swept across the UC campuses in the fall of 2009, this history is
entirely absent in reviews. The administration situates itself within a
concrete historical trajectory, while the protest has no history. This temporal
isolation is in part why so many reviewers specifically indict its efficacy—Golden,
for example, asserts that “the rally dies down quickly, with no evident impact.”
In this context, the only history of protest that can be traced is one that has
been fully mythologized and commodified by the UC Berkeley administration
itself. That is, of course, the “free speech movement” of the 1960s. So we find
critics dismissing
the protesters’ “ill-considered list of demands” next to Bob Dylan references.
The only critic who at all perceives a connection to a contemporary political
movement is Kasman, who declares that the “misguided student protest . . .
shockingly predates by a year the inspiring but confused muddle of the Occupy
Wall Street movement.” The genealogical connection to the Occupy movement is
perceptive and important, but it is incomplete and one-directional. It is
in the sequence of student occupations in 2009-2010 (which actually began in
New York in late 2008) that this history is rooted. Locked into the
structure of At Berkeley, however,
this counter-history cannot be told.
The “Day of Action” that took place on October 7, 2010, in
which a central reading room of the main library on the UC Berkeley campus was
briefly occupied by 600-800 protesters, was part not only of a longer
historical trajectory but also of a geographically dispersed movement of
struggle against austerity and the privatization of higher education, one that
resonates at both a national and a global level. It was a system-wide day
of action across both UCs and CSUs. There were rallies, sit-ins, and banner
drops at every UC campus. There was a virtual sit-in that temporarily shut down
the website of the UC Office of the President. Around the country, from
Louisiana to Wisconsin, October 7 saw 76
coordinated actions take place. The point, then, is not that the protest at
UC Berkeley was in reality highly effective or even particularly well executed.
In fact it was highly
criticized from within the
student movement at the time. Rather, what’s missing from the film is any sense
that the protest was part of something bigger, a wedge of antagonism both
distributed across and situated in time and space. The lack of context thus
intensifies the illegibility of the action.
