Appreciative audiences have enjoyed Girltalk and Billy in the Lowlands the last two nights. The third screening to help celebrate the release of Big Screen Boston is of Frederick Wiseman's squirm-inducing 1967 documentary, Titicut Follies, which I'll be introducing at the Museum of Fine Arts, on Saturday [May 3] at Noon. Here is the book's section on this disturbing and unforgettable movie.
1967. Directed by Frederick Wiseman. Cinematography by John Marshall.
FREDERICK WISEMAN’S FIRST DOCUMENTARY is still shocking today. Just imagine what Titicut Follies was like in 1967, when it was first shown. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts banned his peek behind the walls at Bridgewater State Hospital, claiming the movie invaded the privacy of patients there, who are often shown nude and in various states of helplessness. Of course, the ban—finally lifted in 1991—couldn’t have had anything to do with the cruelty with which the institution often treats those patients, right?
Although Wiseman (High School, Domestic Violence) has long been a pillar of the documentary, he came to filmmaking in a roundabout way in the 1960s. He was already a lawyer when he made Titicut Follies, having lectured in law at Boston University from 1958 to 1961 and taken his students to Bridgewater State Hospital during that time. After working on Shirley Clarke’s minor independent classic Cool World, he decided to make a movie about the hospital. He asked for permission in 1964, and ultimately was allowed to film there in 1966.
From the moment the movie begins, we enter a sort of absurd hellhole. The absurdity comes through mainly in the talent show that gives the movie its name (and bookends it). First, we see a group of uncomfortable men sing “Strike Up the Band”; then an eager emcee tells a corny joke about two beetles and a priest. But, wait, in the next sequence, in which guards search the belongings of stripped patients, we see that this emcee is not a patient, but a guard. One thing is sure: there is no scorecard to tell us who’s sane and who’s insane, who’s dangerous and who’s not dangerous.
What follows—as is so often the case in Wiseman’s films about various institutions—is an impressionistic portrait of the hospital. Sometimes Wiseman focuses on specific threads, like a psychiatrist’s therapy session with a man sent to Bridgewater for molesting an underage girl, while other times there’s a more random series of sights and sounds, as when we follow the goings-on in the courtyard outlined by the hospital’s buildings. The treatment is never sensational.
These glimpses of daily life can be amusing. One incessant ranter (in photo above; courtesy Zipporah Films) lets loose a stream-of- consciousness barrage of gibberish, real words and famous names that’s a cross between a jazz solo, a sermon and a stand-up routine. A later shot of the guy spewing verbiage in the courtyard while, behind him, another fellow stands on his head and sings a hymn may be the emblematic image of the collision of individual realities in the movie.
But, mostly, Titicut Follies is grim and disturbing. Clearly Bridgewater, an exile for the maladjusted, presents a tough situation for staff there to handle. It is practically a no-win situation. But the casual cruelty dished out by the same staff can be striking, particularly in two instances. The first comes when one guard repeatedly questions a patient named Jim about his cell’s cleanliness. “How’s that room gonna be?” he asks over and over. And after nearly every reply from Jim, he says “What’d you say?” Treat the most normal person like this, and he or she will get agitated; try it on someone who’s locked up and vulnerable, and the effect is tragic. Later, a force-feeding of a patient who won’t eat—the movie’s most squirm-inducing sequence— is performed so casually that the psychiatrist doesn’t even put down his cigarette as he shoves inch after inch of tubing up the patient’s nose and funnels soup into the guy’s stomach. To make the action even more unsettling, Wiseman inserts shots of the patient’s corpse— presumably, taken not long after—into the sequence.
Rejecting the cinema vérité label and the objectivity it implies, Wiseman has regularly examined the relationship between individuals and society’s institutions in his movies (including Near Death, filmed at Beth Israel Hospital). Titicut Follies remains one of his most potent looks at this difficult relationship.
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