a recreation of something not present, especially an event or feeling from the past.
High School (1968) by Frederick Wiseman .
"High School is so familiar and so extraordinary evocative that the 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."" .
The film I have chosen is High School' 1968 by Frederick Wiseman. In order to explore how the film creates an evocation of place', space' and time' I will begin by looking at how Wiseman was able to produce High School'. Wiseman at this time made a lot of films focusing of social institutions. His films came under the category of Direct Cinema'. This was a time when the camera and sound equipment had become a lot lighter and cheaper, which meant the documentary filmmaker could be put right into appealing situations capturing the moment as it happens. From Direct Cinema' came different types of documentary filmmaking including filmmakers such as Robert Drew whose films where focused more upon situations of high drama or high-stake. Cinéma vérité was one of the spin offs from this type of filmmaking, vérité' meaning truth', where the common practice was making films that "emphasized interpersonal situations- Wisemans films are often categorized as cinéma vérité but he took a different approach to his type of filmmaking, he put himself in the more mundane, overlooked situations. High School' was one of the institutions that can effectively evoke memories or feelings of anybody who went to school and is very familiar to the American audience who have been to any American high school institute.
