Frederick Wiseman’s documentary study of the University of California at Berkeley offers his familiar directorial signatures: long takes, no voiceovers, no interviews, no subtitles indicating exactly who or what we are looking at. At just over four hours, At Berkeley almost ceases to function as a documentary in the normal sense and becomes something nearer to an archive resource, or an audio-visual database.

Its star is the university’s chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, a Canadian-born physicist with white-blond hair and a flashing smile, whose placid, diplomatic manner makes him the perfect academic administrator and neutraliser of student activists, for whom he appears to have a polite disregard. There are a lot of talking heads – and a lot of talking.

If the film has a theme, it is middle-class angst. The students debate the new bourgeois financial anxiety and white suburban poverty. It is their own problem. Does the new middle-class anxiety manifest itself in the film? It’s not clear. There are some tense discussions about whether or not students are doing enough to include black people in informal study groups. But these discussions would have been as tense, maybe more tense, during the good times. Certainly Berkeley does not seem to be in a 90s-style uproar over political correctness. The once controversial “Western Civ” course isn’t even mentioned.

As with Wiseman’s previous film about the Crazy Horse nightclub in Paris, At Berkeley does look offputtingly like a promotional video for the host institution, but everything here is so unworldly and high-minded that the emphasis on ideas is refreshing.