Description:
Lawyer-turned-filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s foray into documentary auteurism came with Titicut Follies (1967), a cogent profile of Massachusetts’ Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane. The film’s namesake is an ambiguously demeaning and chilling talent show put on by inmates—“Titicut” being the Wampanoag word for the nearby Taunton River. This was four years after John F. Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Centers Act, which infused the system with 150 million dollars. Nevertheless, Wiseman captures a Bridgewater that is a microcosm of the horrors still alive in mental hospitals (it would not be until the 1970s that the number of individuals in such institutions was reduced from a half million in the 1950s to 160,000.) Omitting a narrator, Wiseman records and layers sound with a ghostly sparseness. Meanwhile, John Marshall’s unwavering camerawork and Wiseman’s methodical, hundred-hour editing process guides our eyes through the cells, halls, and yards of these forgotten people’s lives. Old, young, lucid, catatonic—the staff does not differentiate. It is this impersonal, mass grouping, representative of the state of the system at the time (and still perhaps today), that really exceeds our capacity to understand, especially when witnessing travesties like force-feeding. Wiseman’s booming sensitivity translates with his ability to capture many faces and voices, while also allowing ample screen time for each individual to demonstrate their humanity. There is much to glean from this breakthrough piece of direct cinema, but the loudest message is that when society turns its back on a people, we are all responsible for bringing awareness and kindness to that population.
