At Berkeley

At Berkeley

Frederick Wiseman’s “At Berkeley,” a four-hour documentary about the University of California at Berkeley during the 2010 state budget crisis, has me pining for a dual rating system: one for people who like this kind of movie, and another for people who can’t stand it. The rating at the top of this page would be aimed at the first group; there’d be a zero star rating for the second group, which wouldn’t get within ten miles of something like this.

That second group doesn’t bother Wiseman, I’m sure. He’s been making films like “At Berkeley” for half a century: long movies with no narration, no talking heads (interviewees’ names are rarely given), no identifying titles or timestamps nothing to orient you except what’s in the title and what people on screen are saying or doing.

But “At Berkeley” is not mainly interested in taking stock of public universities, though it does that too. It wants to put you in a place and let you soak there awhile, through its quiet montages and long scenes some of which let an academic or administrator or student make their point and then stay with them for another minute, or three minutes, or five.

So it’s not just giving you issues facing Berkeley and the people who go to Berkeley and work at Berkeley; it’s also giving you what it feels like to be at Berkeley what it means to be Berkeley righteous, Berkeley caring; Berkeley clueless, but also just irritatingly so? (“Faculty meetings go on twice as long” because participants “are used to hearing themselves speak,” says former U.S. Treasury Secretary turned professor Robert Reich, “and they are used to seeing people nod in response.”)

Wiseman also gives you an idea of what Berkeley looks like: its beautiful campus with old buildings here and new ones there some elegant, some characterless and how the light bathes them when the sun slips behind a cloud, and how shadow-fingers creep across the quad and fountains and bike racks and ivy-covered walls.

“High School,” “Hospital,” “Basic Training,” “Welfare,” “Canal Zone,” “Belfast, Maine” (a personal favorite), “Domestic Violence” (a must-see), “Boxing Gym”: The title of each Wiseman documentary is a place. Some have journalistic pegs (“At Berkeley” spends its second half with students protesting their school’s strangulation by economic forces, while administrators express sympathy but leave room for harsh measures), but they don’t derive all of their power from recent history; they embody certain truths that were true at a certain time and always will be. He’s America’s greatest living portraitist of institutions and their mind-sets: a great pure reporter.

And so all of the stuff is in here the political and economic forces that caused fees to rise while staff got laid off; that made students worry about their futures while making administrators worry about Berkeley’s future; that led Reich to say he never met an institution where people hated each other more than Berkeley.

An unknown veteran of the “Free Speech” movement criticizes what he calls a “complete lack of recognition or understanding” among students today, which he believes will turn them into “a passive, cynical and misinformed people.” A TV news crew interviews an unnamed expert who says that public education is in trouble because a few state legislators (mostly Republicans) signed pledges never to raise taxes for any reason; this forced the state to balance its budget by cutting government staff and services.

“Yachts, fourth homes, billionaires, we can’t raise taxes on them,” he says. “But what we can do is fire janitors, gardeners, kindergarten teachers, preschool teachers, lecturers and raise student fees.” These moments can feel like cheats: as if Wiseman has found a not quite sneaky way to do exposition without technically breaking his no-exposition pledge.

Mostly though “At Berkeley” makes its points in quick cuts: shots that seem metaphorically ripe, sometimes mysteriously so but that don’t flower in the mind until you think about several of them together in sequence and in context with the rest of the movie. You see a student tightrope walker and then listen to administrators describe their professional balancing acts.

Construction workers and groundskeepers and men with leaf blowers appear simply atmospheric until economic details creep into the soundtrack; then they seem like collateral damage in budget wars. A museum guide gives a speech about the Tyrannosaurus Rex; young taxidermists strip a bird carcass; mounted fossils fill close-ups these could be editorial comments on Berkeley’s future (or perhaps even predictions): robustly funded public universities will go extinct here first; then America itself will become history too, as when a miner ignores his canary.

Wiseman is also a master of Look ma no self-awareness documentaries that analyze themselves without seeming to. Sometimes he includes scenes that feel like meta-commentaries on the mindset one must adopt in order to appreciate a Wiseman film but without seeming too clever or cute. In one scene we see a student production of “Our Town” with a Stage Manager describing life in Grover’s Corners: “At Berkeley” as drama, Wiseman as narrator. In another scene, a professor gives a physics lecture that doubles as instructions for watching an eight-hour movie.

He tells his students that there is “nothing in the brain that perceives time,” and that temporal units of measure are probably just mental elaborations on the pulses of brainwaves; when you perceive time, he says, you “are relating an event…like picking up a book, or taking a drink of water” to “the measurement of days, the sun going across the sky” or to “a water clock, the measurement of drips,” or to the pulsing of Cesium atoms; what this relating does, he says, is “create time” in the imagination while our brains and bodies register events.

Watch At Berkeley For Free On Gomovies.