At Berkeley, a monumental achievement by 83-year-old documentarian Frederick Wiseman is light, brisk, and ultimately hopeful, considering its epic running time of four hours.
Wiseman charts a tumultuous year on the University of California Berkeley campus, when everyone, from the regents to the incoming class, feels the effects of reduced state funding for public higher education.
The “revolution” stirs quickly, but then it also subsides quickly.
Wiseman’s camera zeroes in on idealistic and opinionated youngsters, believing that they might make a real difference in the world.
Wiseman’s films are, in his view, elaborations of a personal experience and not ideologically objective portraits of his subjects.
Wiseman has emphasized that his films are not and cannot be unbiased. In spite of the inescapable bias that is introduced in the process of “making a movie,” he still feels he has certain ethical obligations as to how he portrays events and institutions.
“The editing is highly manipulative and the shooting is highly manipulative… What you choose to shoot, the way you shoot it, the way you edit it and the way you structure it… all of those things… represent subjective choices that you have to make.”
