High School, in addition to its other considerable merits, should lay to rest once and for all [the] mystique of "interesting personalities" in direct-cinema films….

Frederick Wiseman's films are about indispensable institutions in conflict with the people they are supposed to be serving…. Each of his films has an episodic structure, a lack of emphasis on individual personalities, and a general diffidence about verbal information. What matters in a Wiseman film is not necessarily what people say to each other, but the tone in which they are speaking and the degree of emotion behind their words. Attitudes rather than factual information are the substantive content of his films. (p. 49)

[High School] is a series of interactions between students and their parents, teachers, and administrators. It's not a general study of educational methods or the attitudes of today's youth. We never see students at football games, dances, or even talking to each other beyond earshot of their elders. High School is a film of frustrating confrontations…. On the surface, the film might be seen as little more than a single-minded condemnation of secondary education in America. As a film-making objective this could have been sufficient, but the film would then be easy prey to the customary criticisms of bias, selectivity, and over-simplification. If High School were attempting to do no more than that, these objections might have at least partial validity. But through deliberate choices of content and structure, Wiseman suggests that his target is bigger and his attitudes more complex. The ability of High School to transcend its visible subject matter is the measure of its considerable power as a film experience. (pp. 49-50)

The idea of training (or indoctrinating) students to fit into the orderly processes of society might not be all that High School is about, but it is at least the guiding principle behind its structure. The film is concerned with the attitudes which the high school hopes to foster in its students and the all-pervasiveness of its philosophy, beyond classroom learning into matters of sexual relationships, competitiveness, dress habits, social graces, and roles within the family….

The film has the remarkable quality of appearing to be a series of random occurrences. There is no specified time sequence to the film. Individual episodes never last more than three or four minutes (and frequently are much shorter), and if people appear in more than one sequence it seems to happen more by accident than by dramatic necessity. But unmistakable patterns emerge. First, we begin to notice how rarely we hear kids talking. The students are forced to be listeners, and what they are told starts sounding pretty much the same…. Along with the verbal barrage comes the variety of subservient, competitive roles which the students are forced to enact. (p. 50)

Although this sounds as if Wiseman has fashioned a sober polemic out of his material, his visual style and sense of drama are full of a purposeful black comedy which often makes us gasp, first in surprise, and then in recognition…. High School is a marvel of visual expressiveness, a display of a fully engaged sensibility adding a quiet commentary all its own…. Wiseman's almost freakish sense of humor, allowing us to laugh at boredom and repression, keeps High School from being a chamber of horrors like Titicut Follies. (pp. 50-1)

If there are villains in High School (or in any of Wiseman's films), they exist outside the film's milieu—in a general attitude in America which imposes a rigid, traditional philosophy on the administrators of its institutions…. High School can't be placed within the "cinema of personalities." Its effectiveness stems from the interchangeability of individuals enacting their specific social roles, from ritual processes enforced by organizational relationships.

High School takes special risks because it deals with a subject that we all know about. Wiseman has not shown us people or situations which are by themselves particularly interesting or that we couldn't know about in any other way. He surmounts this problem by seeing the logical connections within his material and vesting his film with the mathematical elegance of a neatly executed proof. The fragmented, highly selective structure of the film is a result of his sensing the parts of the high school experience which are relevant to his argument, and his willingness to sacrifice dramatic continuity for a unity which isn't apparent until the film's conclusion. Wiseman does not so much give us facts to consider as recall an atmosphere we might not have been in a position to evaluate at the time we were living within it. High School does more than imply that this kind of educational system leads to willing soldiers and spacemen. It leaves us doubting seriously whether America has the capability for altering its institutions to suit the shifting expectations and needs of those who are supposed to benefit by them….

By showing attitudes within the high school rather than processes of learning and by avoiding the limitations of specificity that concentrating on certain individuals would have led to, Wiseman has adroitly left the task of what to make of all this to his audience…. Like other good cinéma-vérité filmmakers, he doesn't stumble upon "great material"—he challenges us by a personal vision of the way we live. (p. 51)