At Berkeley (NR)

synopsis

Frederick Wiseman probes The University of California at Berkeley with a typically forensic study of what amounts to a city within a city with its own police force, social structures and multibillion dollar budget. Suffering huge public funding cuts, Berkeley struggles to balance a tradition of radicalism and academic excellence against a pragmatic approach to ensuring its pre-eminent status as one of the top three rated centres of academic excellence in the world. Without comment Wiseman shows how the Berkeley campus elucidates the struggle of contemporary Western society to maintain itself in the face of global political and economic flux.