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Even though I’d attended two other films yesterday at the Chicago International Film Festival—the revival presentation of Nanni Moretti’s The Mass Is Over (1985) and the local premiere of Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain—I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to revisit Frederick Wiseman’s four-hours-long At Berkeley on a big screen. Every Wiseman film contains visual motifs that aren’t so easily noticeable on a television, and last night I was pleased to recognize several. In one of the early scenes of Berkeley, for instance, you can spot a student wearing a red armband, a detail that foreshadows the failed protest that comprises the movie’s climax. (In hindsight, his idealistic comments suggest the wishful beginnings of any social movement.) I also realized that the Dixieland band seen in one of the transitional sequences was playing in front of a sign that read “Old jazz for a new depression”—reminding us once again of the movie’s overarching theme of economic crisis.
I took a couple of bathroom breaks during the movie (sorry, Mr. Wiseman), though I made sure not to leave during the final third, when At Berkeley formulates its most challenging questions. After the protest and the umpteenth budgetary meeting, Wiseman returns to scenes of education (by this point, it’s easy to forget there are actual classes at Berkeley!). The film has spent a good deal of time meditating on education as a civic investment, as a guarantor of social mobility, and as a financial strain on more and more middle-class families. But what about education as an end in itself? Does anyone still enter into higher learning to better appreciate life (as one student puts it in the first red armband scene)? Moreover, is such spiritual development even possible when everybody’s constantly thinking about raising money?
