Tribute to Frederic Wiseman: Ballet

 

Alessandra Ferri

Director Frederic Wiseman

Choreographer Agnes De Mille

BALLET           A                                                                                                                     USA  (170 mi)  1995  d: Frederick Wiseman

This is one of the most joyous and loving films on record, where without a word of narration, we immerse ourselves in both the onstage and behind-the-scenes cast and crew of the American Ballet Theater, profiling the managing administrators, principal and supporting dancers and choreographers as the company prepares for its European Tour in 1992.  Wiseman gives viewers an inside glimpse at what it takes to successfully stage a ballet production including rehearsals, business dealings, dancer recruitment, makeup application, photo shoots, costume fittings, and interviews with the press.  The camera is completely unobtrusive and beautifully captures the flavor and personality of the various ballet choreographers as they work with their dancers in daily rehearsals at the company’s Lower Manhattan studio, usually shown in long single takes without cuts, although the positions of the camera may change, as even if the same dance is repeated, it’s filmed differently.  Former dancers themselves, each rehearsal is superbly presented, endlessly repeated, exhibiting a performance-ready flair where they are learning to refine the interpretation, essentially a performance art film emphasizing the collaborative nature of ballet.  The film begins with a sunrise before taking us inside the studio, as the work begins with the first light of dawn, where right off the bat we witness dancers warming up, as we are lured into this intoxicating world of precision and grace, as many cutaways and transitional shots show dancers stretching, warming up, watching other dancers rehearse, and sometimes just resting.  Twice we see the staff physiotherapist working on dancers’ aching muscles, and several more are waiting to see her, reminding us that at the core these are fine-tuned athletes performing with seemingly effortless agility, with one dancer receiving the sobering prognosis that the injury might take a full year to heal.  These bodies may stretch in what seem like fantastic positions, as we see in the film’s opening montage, but they have physical limits, with one ballerina even speaking with the artistic director about personal concerns involving aging and the demands of her multiple roles.  The choreographers occasionally let their own bodies demonstrate, which is one of the most wondrous aspects of the film, particularly when we’re allowed to witness the impeccable movements of Irina Kolpakova, a former prima ballerina for the Kirov Ballet who is now a coach, whose love for the art simply can’t be contained in her outgoing smile and elegantly flowing body movements.  The poor lead dancer from the company (Susan Jaffe) pales in comparison during the rehearsal session, working together for several repeated takes, revealing the difficulty of the dance, but it’s a unique opportunity to learn from one of the greatest ballerinas in history.  Later we see her being interviewed with the aid of a Russian interpreter and her buoyant energy, her love for dance remains vibrantly alive even after she has retired from performing, which may as well be the theme for the film. 

Wiseman typically shuns narration, emphasizing the subject over individuality, but one of the film’s limitations throughout is the lack of information about who these choreographers and dancers are, many of them legendary in their own right, or what dances are being performed.  Case in point, one of the choreographers turns out to be the legendary Agnes de Mille, the niece of Cecil B. DeMille, now a gruff, plain-speaking elder spokeswoman in the last year of her life who directs from a wheelchair as she rehearses her final piece, “The Other,” occasionally spouting out sounds as directions.  “You must look like something that’s absolutely broken, and stuck up in the wind,” she tells Amanda McKerrow, her star.  Another unidentified dancer gets an eruption of applause from people witnessing her flawless execution in a rehearsal room, while another rehearses to the music of Schubert German Lieder, where the exquisite voice of the man singing at the piano only complements this art form, a wonderful merger of music and dance movement.  Early on in rehearsals, where we can see other dancers practicing off to the side during the main rehearsals, we witness the jubilant moves of percussion-laced, African-influenced dance, whose choreographer is black (Ulysses Dove), a man who can’t stop himself from being delighted by what he sees, joining in with the dancers himself, creating a brilliantly flowing work that is simply sublime, perhaps the dance of the entire film, as it veers away from established practices of traditional ballet execution and invents a new technique expressing a feeling of complete liberation, where the men and women dip and flow together miraculously in rhythm, simply an infectious feeling of energized delight, where it’s hard not to be affected by the transcendent power of art.  Interspersed with these rehearsals are dancers resting, laying on their backs in hallways bracing their legs up against the wall or getting massage treatments for specialized ailments, or we see Jane Hermann, the company director, on the phone attempting to head off foreseeable problems, explaining to the owner of a prospective venue the actual costs and considerable logistics involved in producing live ballet.  In addition to the dancers, we are reminded there is the orchestra, transportation, advertising, stagehands, per diems, and so on.  She also confronts inopportune disasters head on, where her linguistic skills, which are as precise as the dancer’s moves, turn incendiary and graphic when she learns they’ve been unexpectedly undercut by a “Russian” Kirov Ballet troupe that will be preceding them the week before their tour, programmed by the Metropolitan Opera without her knowledge, which will not only cut into the financial proceeds but duplicate some of the exact same dances, which she anticipates will drive the ticket sales down.  The contrast between the elation from the effortless freedom of dance movements and being double crossed by your own business partner couldn’t be more pronounced, but both are part of the same artistic enterprise.

The mood of the film changes when they get to their European destinations and finally perform onstage, literally opening up their world and liberating them from the endless hours of rehearsals, spending a week in the outdoor Acropolis in Athens, where nightfall is illuminated by the moonlight, also performing in Rome and Copenhagen, where the dances are filmed using only two cameras, one in front zooming in or out while meticulously following a precise path of movement, not always following the lead action, sometimes sticking with off-lead performers, but always capturing the beauty of the moment.  Another camera is just offstage, a memorable view in Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT (1952), which is able to capture a different line of movement from the side angle.  These two cameras are amazingly effective, lead camera by John Davey, assistant camera by film director Lodge Kerrigan, the maker of CLAIRE DOLAN (1998) and KEANE (2004), who also worked with Wiseman in Tribute to Frederic Wiseman: High School II (1994), and essentially offer the viewer front row seats.  The speed of the free-flowing movements from multiple directions can at times resemble slow motion or fast action photography, but everything is filmed in natural time, shooting in long takes mostly without close-ups.  The authenticity of the performances is one of the special features of the film, as is the action captured offstage after the performances, such as the next day under a brilliant sun when the company hits the beach, or spends time together having fun on the roller coaster and carnival rides at Tivoli in Copenhagen, and most especially at a night club one night when the company hits the dance floor, an unforgettable picture of these dancers letting loose, where their undeniable rhythm and grace is nothing less than phenomenal.  Always in these group moments there is plenty of camaraderie, applause, and joyous laughter, balancing the precision of performance with moments of carefree joy.  Traveling informally with this relaxed group is an unexpected delight, which when added to the pleasure of witnessing them perform onstage at such a high level of expertise just increases our appreciation for them over time, closing with long scenes from Romeo and Juliet, where at one point Romeo runs toward the wings in a moment of dramatic blocking, as if he were running toward the camera and directly towards us, becoming so much more effective than seeing it from a distance live on stage, ending as the lovers depart from the balcony scene, where we’re in the midst of the story, as if it never ends.  Despite the 3-hour running time, this is a near perfect film.  There isn’t a moment that doesn’t radiate with a special degree of warmth and love, a film that may produce tears of joy from the sheer beauty of it all, leaving the viewer with a feeling that you just might want to share this with the whole world.

Some of the music and principal performers:

Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty” and “Swan Lake,” Cesar Frank’s “Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra,” Bruch’s “Violin Concerto No. 1,” Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” and Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet.”   

Choreographers/ballet masters: Agnes de Mille, Irina Kolpakova, David Richardson, Georgina Parkinson, Natalia Makarova, and Michael Somes.

Principal dancers: Alessandra Ferri, Cynthia Harvey, Susan Jaffe, José Carreño, Amanda McKerrow, Christine Dunham, Robert Hill, Julio Bocca, Julie Kent, Angel Corella, and Wes Chapman.

Performers

The Other – Amanda McKerrow                                                                                                  Bruch “Violin Concerto” – Robert Hill and Julie Kent                                                                  Prokofiev “Romeo and Juliet” – Alessandra Ferri and Julio Bocca                                            Tchaikovsky “Swan Lake” – Susan Jaffe and José Carreño                                                        Stravinsky “Rite of Spring” – too many to name

Choreographers

Kenneth MacMillan … “Romeo and Juliet,” “Sleeping Beauty”                                                    Glen Tetley … “The Rite of Spring”                                                                                              Frederick Ashton … “Symphonic Variations”                                                                                Clark Tippet … “Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1”                                                                              Agnes de Mille … “The Other”                                                                                                      Ulysses Dove … “Red Angels”

Tribute to Frederic Wiseman: High School II

 

Director Frederic Wiseman

Deborah Meier

Tribute to Frederic Wiseman:  HIGH SCHOOL II               A                                                 USA  (220 mi)  1994  d: Frederick Wiseman

High School was the second movie I made, and whether anybody else thinks so or not, I like to think I’ve learned something in the intervening 24 years.                                                            —Director Frederick Wiseman

One of the best films about education ever made, alongside Jan Troell’s 1969 Swedish film EENY MEENY MINY MOE, and one of the better Wiseman efforts, simply a brilliant observation of an excellent school as it goes about its business of educating, the first of Wiseman’s films to revisit an earlier subject, a pretty clear answer to what was just his second film, the brilliant HIGH SCHOOL (1968) shot 24 years earlier, choosing in this case the Central Park East Secondary School in Spanish Harlem on Manhattan’s upper East Side, a diverse inner city New York City alternative school of gifted kids that graduates more than 90% of its students, as opposed to 50% for the city as a whole, and has an excellent record in sending and preparing students for college.  While the earlier film looked at a predominately white school in Philadelphia, it presented a collage of images and sequences portraying life inside of the school, capturing the way institutions, in this case schools, molded the people operating inside of them, with the teachers doing the majority of the talking, establishing absolute authority, where a teacher was always patrolling the hallways like a prison guard, often relying upon rigid rules of conformity to supersede classroom learning, expecting students to simply obey.  What stands out today is how utterly mind-deadening an institution it was, as the school was desperately trying to maintain its position of authority in the face of enormous social change of the 60’s, with the pressure of the Vietnam War and the “counterculture” pushing from the outside, all but ignoring the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King that occurred during the filming, where the ideology and repressive values of the school emerged as they reproduced social conditioning from generation to generation, where even today many will still recognize the familiarity of the experience.  The relationship of domination and submission to authority were placed at the same level as the institution’s purely educational missions, becoming, in essence, a time capsule of an earlier era, added to the Library of Congress Film Registry in 1991.  Here the student body is largely black or Latino, 45% black, 45% Latino, and 10% white, the faculty and administrative staff are largely white, which is directly brought into the discussion with a black student who claims at times he vehemently dislikes his white teachers, while his mother is there reminding him that he could just as easily dislike a black teacher, that the real focus should be that nothing should deter him from making his best effort in the classroom.  Unlike the earlier film, there are scenes of students talking among themselves, as students are encouraged to talk openly, providing a look at styles and behaviors while also offering classroom activities, discussions of race, class, and gender, faculty meetings, family conferences, disciplinary problems, sex education, conflict resolution by students, and student council meetings, all of which illustrate the school’s approach to learning.   

A purely observational film, from the very first moments you can tell this school has a completely different agenda from the earlier effort, allowing student input and topical interests, reflective of a more diverse humanity, extolling the virtues of progressive education, where there’s a sincere effort to understand all the different points of view.  The nearly four-hour runtime of the film is essential, as it allows Wiseman to follow discussions and their shifting points of view in greater detail, discovering the classroom sizes are smaller, while the subjects being discussed reflect the social realities faced by the students, with an emphasis on tolerance and respect for other minorities.  We hear an interesting conversation with the principal, who happens to be one of those fussy grandmotherly types who always seems active and alert along with a few advisors who are talking with a returning 15-year old Latina girl who recently had a baby, with her mother and the baby’s father present, discussing the kinds of problems she would likely encounter, including a possible violent conflict with another girl now out of school who may still have unresolved issues to settle, the huge amount of time a newborn demands, the lack of sleep, the pressures of wanting to be with other kids and still having time for her schoolwork, while politely advising her that there are alternative schools that allow young mothers to bring their babies to class.  This is an interesting introduction to some of the school staff while also revealing the special accommodations they are willing to make for students, while at the same time offering a brief glimpse of the student’s home life.  Later we see two students called on the carpet for creating a disturbance, where one teacher is trying to get to the bottom of the problem, and is meandering around the subject, never really getting to the point when one kid bluntly states that the other kid is just trying to be annoying, which brings a smile to this kid’s face, like a light goes on in his head that finally somebody understands.  An hour or so later on into the film, we see this same kid in a peer mediation group discussing a punching and pushing incident over some ill-advised verbal taunting.  This session was one of the more aggravating of the entire film, as they again speak at length talking around the issues, with two older black students as well as a teacher never really holding either kid accountable for their behavior, where the annoying white kid continually states he has no interest in being this black kid’s friend, where the recommended solution is simply to ignore one another, yet they are in every class together, spending more time in each other’s company than with their own families, so this felt like a feeble and untenable solution, never addressing the racial conflict and obvious disrespect the white student was showing his fellow black student.   

Without utilizing any narrative, music, or inner-titles, just a fly-on-the-wall approach to observing what is taking place, always withholding judgment and allowing people to figure things out on their own, it’s clear the filmmaker’s respect for civic institutions makes him a champion of democratic values, yet it takes a while to familiarize ourselves with the players, as there are multiple discussions among students about the recent Rodney King incident where four white Los Angeles police officers were legally absolved of any responsibility in the senseless beating of a black man who offered no resistance, despite incontrovertible evidence of a videotape showing the brutality of the violence inflicted, where he may have suffered some brain damage from the severity of their actions.  The kids were outraged, so some were organizing a student march to city hall to protest the decision, while also displaying a civility about voicing their displeasure, something they felt was lacking in other schools around the country who advocated or resorted to violence.  Of interest, an out of town high school from Michigan was visiting the school, where we witness an all-white, all-girl glee club sing an ultra-whitebread choral rendition that brought many snickers from the audience, all of which was preceded by a young Latino’s speech about getting along, that he was aware of the anger many students felt, reminding them that they needed to greet these kids with respect, that this chorus was not their enemy.  We hear a meeting of the faculty discussing the best way to coordinate the curriculum, where the AP teachers appear challenged by the others, as if they are some kind of elite ivory tower establishment separate from the reality that the rest of the school faces.  One teacher skillfully reminds them that when she attended an AP seminar earlier in the year where some 40 schools were represented, all were private schools except two public schools from New York City, of which they were one, explaining it was exceedingly difficult to remain competitive with these schools and their seemingly unlimited resources, so any extra push AP classes could provide to prepare their kids for college was not only a fairly common practice, but a vitally necessary one. 

We witness classroom sessions discussing the different kinds of love in Shakespeare or Lorraine Hansberry’s changing views on the American Dream, a debate class arguing multiple points of view of the same argument on immigration, a sex education training class for teachers explaining the proper use of condoms, after-school tutoring or in-class help with class assignments or homework, conferences with parents, students and teachers, and occasionally we get views of quiet, empty hallway corridors, where the brightly colored drawings and paintings by the students are decoratively displayed on the walls.  What we never see is any physical education or sports activities, focusing entirely on academics.  The most devastating segment is near the end, when a young boy is being lectured to and berated by his own mother for not being totally forthcoming about his academic deficiencies, where the teachers are all praising his obvious intelligence and ability, but believe he is coasting along, failing to complete certain assignments.  When an interim report of “does not meet expectations” is sent home, the embarrassed mother wants answers, which only places more unbearable pressure on her kid, in a searingly emotional segment that is simply painful to endure.  After a long protracted silence filled with tears, when the kid finally begins to stand up for himself, we learn he’s one of the brightest kids in the class, and probably better than most all other students in the exact same categories for which he was being negatively evaluated, where he has to one by one disagree with the teacher’s ratings, offering his own assessment, which by the end of the discussion is accepted by all as probably being closer to the truth, but this is the school’s way of “motivating” him.  Despite the obvious good intentions, this is an agonizing scene to witness, which is calmly followed afterwards by an uninterrupted speech by the principal, who is never acknowledged, but turns out to be Deborah Meier, the school’s founder, recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (as is Wiseman) as an innovative educator, perhaps the most renowned educational reformer in America, as she speaks to a group of disinterested, vacant-faced people, describing for them her reasons for what education can provide in people’s lives, a quiet, analytic perspective on intelligence that began with her approach on capturing the attention of kindergarten-age students, utilizing the same approach for elementary and secondary schools, claiming college should be no different, that life itself is a continuing dialogue that we have with ourselves searching for more than what we already know.  

Filmed by John Davey on 16mm, directed, edited, and sound by Wiseman, this is easily one of the most intelligent and skillful approaches to filmmaking that one is ever likely to experience on how to approach the aspirations of knowledge with every new generation, offering as exhibit A an engaging group of students and faculty, capturing some of the more enlivened discussions on the subject of education that we could ever hope to find, with an intensive support system in place, where the remarkable brilliance of youth is simply captivating, where it’s impossible not to be reminded of what it was like to be feverishly young again, a time when our horizons were unclouded, where anything was possible, and where everything that troubles us today was not continually getting in our way of knowing more.