EN
“Many of us grow to hate documentaries in school, because the use of movies to teach us something seems a cheat - a pill disguised as candy - and documentaries always seem to be about something we're not interested in. But Wiseman's documentaries show what is left out of both fictional movies and standard documentaries that simplify for a purpose, and his films deal with the primary institutions of our lives.
[…]
High School is so familiar and so extraordinarily evocative that a feeling of empathy with the students floods over us. How did we live through it? How did we keep any spirit? When you see a kid trying to make a phone call and being interrupted with "Do you have a pass to use the phone?" it all floods back - the low ceilings and pale-green walls of the basement where the lockers were, the constant defensiveness, that sense of always being in danger of breaking some pointless, petty rule. When since that time has one ever needed a pass to make a phone call? This movie takes one back to where, one discovers, time has stood still.
[…]
Wiseman extends our understanding of our common life the way novelists used to - a way largely abandoned by the modern novel and left to the journalists but not often picked up by them. What he's doing is so simple and so basic that it's like a rediscovery of what we knew, or should know. We often want more information about the people and their predicaments than he gives, but this is perhaps less a criticism of Wiseman's method than it is a testimonial to his success in making us care about his subjects. With fictional movies using so little of our shared experience, and with the big TV news ‘specials’ increasingly using that idiot ‘Mcluhanite’ fragmentation technique that scrambles all experience – as if the deliberate purpose were to make us indifferent to the life around us – it's a good sign when a movie sends us out wanting to know more and feeling that there is more to know.”
Pauline Kael
