The rhetorical structure of Frederick Wiseman's high school

Abstract

Frederick Wiseman's film High School is a rhetorical documentary about the exercise of power in an institutional setting. Wiseman uses selection, framing, and editing within and between sequences to depict the high school as a place where power is exercised through the double bind, reducing students to conformity, boredom, apathy, and empty gestures of rebellion. The double bind is most forcefully expressed in the invisible network of contradictory messages about the relations between power and sexuality. This essay examines the verbal and visual elements of the film to describe how Wiseman invites his audience to respond.