At Berkeley | Little White Lies

At Berke­ley

12 Sep 2014 / Released: 12 Sep 2014

Words by Jordan Cronk

Directed by Frederick Wiseman

Starring N/A

Ornate entrance gate with intricate green metal work, flanked by tall pillars, crowded with people milling about on a sunny day.
Ornate entrance gate with intricate green metal work, flanked by tall pillars, crowded with people milling about on a sunny day.
4

Anticipation.

The direct cinema pioneer fixes his lens on one of America’s most storied scholastic institutions.

4

Enjoyment.

An occasionally exhausting but enlightening portrait.

4

In Retrospect.

Deceptively modest but slyly inquisitive and comprehensive.

Fed­er­ick Wise­man brings his insight­ful and lay­ered film­mak­ing to one of America’s most lib­er­al institutions.

Con­sid­er­ing the breadth and intel­lect of Fred­er­ick Wiseman’s fil­mog­ra­phy, it feels some­what inevitable that he’d one day take as his sub­ject the province of acad­e­mia. His sec­ond fea­ture, 1968’s High School, first betrayed an inter­est in edu­ca­tion­al eth­nol­o­gy and scholas­tic infra­struc­ture, and he would fol­low it up with a sequel over two decades lat­er. It has tak­en until his mid-’80s, how­ev­er, for the direct cin­e­ma pio­neer to look toward the domain of high­er edu­ca­tion. At Berke­ley, one in a string of ambi­tious late career works, at once inter­ro­gates the pedagogic/​ideologic insti­tu­tion­al divide as well as the prin­ci­pal tenets of Wiseman’s cin­e­ma itself.

Extend­ing the filmmaker’s greater project of obser­va­tion­al inquiry and assim­i­la­tion, At Berke­ley arrives at the Bay Area pub­lic research cam­pus with lit­tle if any mea­sur­able objec­tive, opt­ing to aggre­gate fac­ul­ty and stu­dent impres­sions, opin­ions, and assess­ments regard­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al integri­ty of the uni­ver­si­ty rather than probe or pro­ceed from any pre-estab­lished nar­ra­tive perspective.

This is Wiseman’s cus­tom­ary method­ol­o­gy, but in this instance, doc­u­ment­ing as it does such a labyrinth-like com­mu­nal envi­ron­ment, his film feels espe­cial­ly relaxed and recep­tive to hap­pen­stance and incre­men­tal dis­cov­ery. In the process, Wise­man – always a con­sci­en­tious pres­ence in his work despite his vérité sen­si­bil­i­ty – high­lights con­tra­dic­tions and par­al­lels with­in a dog­mat­ic schol­ar­ly con­tin­u­um which, by its very nature, neces­si­tates cul­tur­al, his­tor­i­cal, and insti­tu­tion­al regard.

Shoot­ing in his simul­ta­ne­ous­ly detached yet inquis­i­tive style, Wise­man maps an expan­sive topo­graph­i­cal index of the grounds between UC Berkeley’s bor­ders. Mov­ing flu­id­ly from indoors to out­doors, from halls to haunts, from class­room to com­mon areas, the film com­pre­hen­sive­ly accounts for the many per­son­al­i­ties and pro­fes­sions which ener­gise and exem­pli­fy the school.

Wise­man allots healthy por­tions of the film to the organ­i­sa­tion­al and, by exten­sion, philo­soph­i­cal oper­a­tions of the uni­ver­si­ty – how it’s per­ceived, how it func­tions in rela­tion to its Ivy League alter­na­tives, and how it defines itself with­in a polit­i­cal­ly pro­gres­sive past and present. Such top­ics prompt dis­cus­sion and debate amongst the admin­is­tra­tion, a process of delib­er­a­tion which Wise­man care­ful­ly cor­re­lates with lengthy lec­ture scenes which fre­quent­ly devolve into dis­putes amongst students.

At just over four hours in length, At Berke­ley takes its time sur­vey­ing cam­pus life and its every­day idio­syn­crasies. More so than even some of Wiseman’s oth­er cir­cum­scribed cin­e­mat­ic frame­works, indi­vid­ual inter­est in and insight into this film’s sub­ject may vary based on a num­ber of unquan­tifi­able fac­tors, tol­er­ance for col­le­giate ver­bal con­tention and sym­pa­thy for lib­er­al demon­stra­tion fore­most amongst them.

And when com­pared to the oth­er more visu­al­ly stim­u­lat­ing films Wiseman’s made this decade, such as 2011’s Crazy Horse or 2014’s Nation­al Gallery, At Berke­ley can’t help but appear the more mod­est endeav­our, despite its scope and top­i­cal­i­ty. That being said, this is a high­ly artic­u­late and engag­ing film, and one that ben­e­fits great­ly from its creator’s wis­dom and demo­c­ra­t­ic approach.

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