Titicut Follies (1967)

Director:

Frederick Wiseman

Release Date:

4 September 1992 (Australia)

Genre:

Documentary | Drama

Tagline:

Don't turn your back on this film... if you value your mind or your life.

Plot:

Plot Keywords:

Birthday Cake | Coffin | Schizophrenia | Psychiatry | Sexuality

Awards:

1 win

Runtime:

84 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

USA:Unrated | Australia:M | USA:(Banned) (distribution blocked by legal order, 1967-1992)

Filming Locations:

State Prison for the Criminally Insane - 20 Administration Road, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA

Trivia:

The only American film banned from release for reasons other than obscenity or national security, Titicut Follies was filmed inside the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater, a prison hospital for the criminally insane. After the Commonwealth of Massachusetts sued the filmmakers, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the film constituted was an invasion of inmate privacy and ordered the withdrawal of the film from circulation.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)

On Ethics.

I've long been interested in the issue of ethics in documentary films. No more is this question better discussed than with the controversial films of Frederick Wiseman. Although I myself am a big Wiseman fan, I can see how one can question his methods. My purpose here is not to defend his methods, and certainly not to condemn them, but merely discuss some ethical issues.

A good place to begin this discussion would be with Wiseman's first film, "Titticut Follies". The film is a record of the goings on inside the Bridgewater, Massachusetts, State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and is very disturbing to watch. One of the most famous sequences involves the intercutting of two scenes. In one scene a patient is being force fed through a tube. In the intercut scene, shows the embalming of the very same patient. Both scenes are very graphic, the former including a shot of a cigarette, held by one of the doctors, as the ash looks as it might drop into the tube used to feed the patient. Just by intercutting these two scenes it seems to be clear what Wiseman is saying: that the patient, even when alive is not treated as a real live person, but merely as a living corpse. Some might see this as being manipulative, or that Wiseman is not giving the patient any dignity by showing what is happening to him. But by showing the event, it could also be said that Wiseman is "on the patient's side," by illustrating the doctors attitudes towards him.

In an article in "Sight and Sound" magazine, Thomas R. Atkins writes: "Titticut Follies may appear one-sided at first largely because most viewers are almost totally unfamiliar with the subject; but Wiseman has carefully presented the differing arguments about Bridgewater."

As if to back him up, Richard Schickel in "Life" magazine, after listing a series of examples in which we are encouraged to identify, or at least sympathize with the inmates, writes: "A similar identification is felt with the good folks of prison society-the rough-hewn but kindly head guard; the volunteer worker who somehow manages to organize a game of 'pin the tail on the donkey' without self-consciousness or patronization; the simple-heated nurse who finds her reward in a thank-you letter form a released inmate."

Here we get the sense that even though he has shown us the inmates in a sympathetic light, and the employees in an unfavorable light, he is evening things out by showing us sympathetic images of other employees, implying that he his honestly trying to give a balanced view of the place.