Critics reviews

It is also a film that yokes together disparate elements: corporeality but also ideas; formal intelligence but also nonstop, narrative micro-incident; immersiveness but also distance (the latter helped by B&W). Robert Greene edited the film, and it was shot on digital video, but I was almost fooled because it looked very film-like in B&W in its 4:3 aspect ratio.

Its black-and-white photography and institutional setting gives it the feel of a rediscovered Wiseman film from the Seventies. And Wilder's deft, intuitive camerawork recalls that of Maysles or Leacock, magnetizing to the emotional center of scenes on the fly. What feels fresh is the film's lack of overriding ideology, allowing for schoolroom sequences of both mortifying chaos and hard-fought harmony, and a general attraction to searchers actively trying, like Wilder, to figure things out.

Wilder's film is a remarkable document of a utopian experiment that shows great restraint in withholding judgment on its outcomes. Rather, it is a sketch of how people — both young and old — interact with and negotiate a nominally "free" environment, making it both a sharp character study as well a fascinating reflection on philosophies of freedom and control.

The movie is significant as a movie: it's intelligent, sensitive and expertly made. But it's also significant because of its ability to provoke introspection and arguments. In its deceptively modest way, it's as much a Rorschach test as "American Sniper." Everybody who sees it will draw a different picture of the elephant.

There's still something exhilarating about the school's experiment and the children's ability to apply democratic principles without clobbering one another (much). Frederick Wiseman's "High School II," about an alternative school in Spanish Harlem, is one clear optimistic precedent, but Ms. Wilder, in her debut feature, riskily opts to leave much of the children's educational activity fairly vague. Which gives it one more thing in common with school: You need to pay attention.

As a case study of democratic education, the film is duly fascinating: The faults and merits of the free-school movement are elucidated with a steely, journalistic rigor. More surprising is that this candid glimpse plays as exhilarating drama. As Khost's grip on order weakens, the school shades into mutiny, with one particularly defiant child all but leading a revolt; the fallout is bracing.

There's a thrilling, heedless disregard for emotional, temporal, and spatial logic within the film's first few shots: nervous children arrive for their first day of school; then a boy is half-naked and plastered in paint; then, perhaps concurrently, a girl ties her wrists and ankles together with masking tape. Rife with smash cuts and tightly focused shots of children at play, Approaching the Elephant's 90 minutes are a disorienting cyclone of destructive incidents and propulsive energy.

A nuanced and passionate documentary... Wilder's black-and-white cinematography focuses on the children's inspiring dialectics and painful conflicts, but her relationship with students, teachers, and parents, which made the film possible, is filtered out. She omits one of the story's main characters—herself—and the resulting impersonal stance seems like a needless contrivance.

The combination of jagged editing, tight framings and the levelling effect of the black and white images deliberately blurs the boundaries between different times, locations and situations, collapsing the everyday life of the school into an endlessly repeating sequence of activity, incident and discussion. The resultant flurries of faces, hands and rhetorics are in perfect harmony with the sense of freewheeling chaos that increasingly envelops the school.

Wilder, operating herself an era-specific Panasonic DVX100 (the same camera Pedro Costa used to shoot In Vanda's Room, Colossal Youth, and Ne change rien), achieves images that would be worthy of Lubtchansky under Garrel. Wiseman sets the tone but not the tempo: Wilder and gifted editor Robert Greene hew scenes smoothly here, savage there, join not just images flush or crudely, but sounds too: the mix aggravates, crescendos, turns tranquil.

Wilder's free-form vérité style, forgoing context and overt directorial intrusions, seems perfectly suited to a story in which even the subjects are finding their way as they go. At times, the movie—shown in black-and-white and in the Academy ratio of old public television—suggests a Frederick Wiseman version of Lord Of The Flies, or perhaps the dark side of Michael Apted's Seven Up!

The film works as a parodic demonstration of a nascent democracy, as a portrait of feckless youth, and a study in how charismatic jerks abuse their leeway; it's a multivalent winner, all the better for its deliberate, focused confinement to one space.