Titicut Follies

Director: Frederick Wiseman
Year Released: 1967
Rating: 1.0

Wiseman takes his camera to a mental institution in Massachusetts and records the various outbursts of the patients and the treatment of those patients by the hospital staff, who talk to them, wash them and feed them. Wiseman's technique is basically to gaze 'impassively,' not adding any extra information or interviewing any of the people directly and 'letting the events speak for themselves,' only to edit said events into the story he wants: he spends weeks (or even months) at the same location, and then assembles the material later. Any attempt at neutrality is bogus, as Wiseman bookends the picture with excerpts from a song-and-dance show put on by the patients, suggesting that mental institutions are a charade (a dangerously naïve notion) - throughout, he's sure to include various tough-to-take scenes, including one patient being taunted and another patient having a feeding tube inserted through his nose in order to draw a reaction (horror seems like the correct one). While it's true that the treatment is not always excellent, the same can be true for many corporate jobs and in many schools: take your camera to any corporation, hospital, institution, etc., film for countless days and then look for the ethical indiscretions (bosses berating employees, teachers harassing students, nurses abusing Alzheimer's patients: I guarantee you there will be a lot of material to choose from). What's most impressive - and there isn't much - to say about Wiseman is his ability to gain access to these places and then vanish (he's the Solid Snake of filmmakers), and talking to crazies does produce some cheerfully absurd nuggets, like the following from a loquacious, frenetic man: "America is the female part of the Earth world and she [is] sex crazy. Her sexiness brings on wars, like the sperm that is injected by a man into a woman and by a woman in her own body." Democracy, whiskey, sexy: that's us!