Titicut Follies

Joseph Wiseman's searing documentary of the poor medical and social services on view at Massachusets Correctional Institution Bridge can still make. this viewer wince more than half a century later.

At the time, the government of Massachusetts claimed it was biased and purposefully sensational. Doctors and nurses going through their routines tend to look uncaring. However, details like the dirty water hydrotherapy patients are stuck in tell a different story. Massachusetts fought its release for years, and it was banned from showing in that state for decades.

Titicut had a long and troubled history. At times a almshouse, a workhouse and a prison for the criminally insane, at the time this movie was made, the staff was short-handed and undercrtrained, and the administration was a disgrace. There was one 'patient' who had been sent there in 1910 for an evaluation during his two-year prison term, and was still there in 1968.

Bridgewater is still open.

I saw this film while in college back in the 1970's and was amazed and disturbed. I think it was banned or hard to find at that time. My professor was able to get a copy. It is difficult to describe this documentary. It was sad, harshly realistic and horrific. This was how inmates/patients were treated, but again, it was the 1960's. They were likely using the same treatment methods since the 1920's. One interesting note, I met one of the patients who was in the film. He had been released and apparently was doing well enough. I'll not identify him because he was well known in his community. He remembered the filming, but did not know that he was famous for it. He has since passed away, but many people remember him fondly. If there can be a bright side to this film, I guess that's it.

Over a year ago, I talked about Let There Be Light, a film made by famed director John Huston that details the mental anguish patients of a mental hospital go through on a daily basis. The film documented World War II veterans, and most of them are traumatized because of their own terrible experiences, not because they were mistreated by the staff. Despite this, the film was considered so shocking that it wasn't released until 1980. Titicut Follies has a very similar premise, except here, I think the suffering is even more extreme. Titicut Follies is filmed at the Bridgewater Correctional Institution in Massachusetts, which resembles a real version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. This is because not only are the patients depicted made to live in their own filth for days on end and forced to live in squalid conditions, but the medical staff show truly grotesque behavior towards them. Some scenes in this documentary are so awful I don't know if I can discuss them. One scene has a few guards escort a man (who used to be a math teacher) into a room in order to shave him. All the while, one of the guards keeps repeating that he can't hear whatever he was saying. He's only doing this to agitate and get a reaction out of him, since he seems to take great enjoyment in bothering him. Later, they take him to another room that has absolutely no furniture, toilet, or anything in it at all (except a window). I really don't get what the point of such a hellish place is, especially in a mental institution. It makes even a prison cell look pleasant. Another part has some guy doing what looks like squats in a similar room, while he screams at the top of his lungs. Probably the most egregious scene has guards taking someone out of his room since he refused to eat for 3 whole days. They lay him down and put a tube into his nose which extends all the way into his stomach. It shows how life in this place was so horrible, some people were willing to kill themselves to escape it, but the guards couldn't let them do that. While it's easy in retrospect to pin the blame for this kind of treatment on the ones running and staffing the facility, it's not entirely their fault. By the time this movie was made, they didn't have the types of medicine we now do. It's kind of like how lobotomies used to be seen as an effective way of curing those who were thought to be mentally incurable, but now, the lobotomy is understood to be a grossly barbaric procedure. Interspliced with all these disturbing things, there's clips of musical performances, mental patients playing games, and other bizzare spectacles. While I think this film is quite important because of what it represents, I'd be out of my mind to recommend it to anybody. Let's just say it's not the kind of thing you would watch for entertainment. I'm generally used to violent films and tv programs involving war, but many of the things shown in Titicut Follies are real sickening. It's also worth pointing out that because of this film, the authorities at Bridgewater have strove to do better and make more hospitable living conditions for the patients there, which may or may not mean anything. Overall, this movie is undeniably difficult to look at, but it is historically important because it woke people up and gave them a glimpse into how inhumane a lot of these places were. Wiseman lived up to his name when he decided to expose this place.

"Titicut Follies" is a controversial documentary by Frederick Wiseman. The film records events at the Bridgewater State Prison For the Criminally Insane. It was shot in 1967, but was subjected to a worldwide ban until 1992. The Judicial Court ruled that the film was an invasion of inmate privacy, but in reality Wiseman had been granted full permission to film at the prison. The ban was merely an attempt by the authorities to silence the uneasy truths that Wiseman's camera had uncovered.

Wiseman is oft said to be of the leading proponents of cinéma verité. His films have no narration, music or titles. He simply observes his subjects with cool, clinical detachment. Whatever Wiseman records, the viewer is left to interpret for themselves. Nothing is explained.

Along with Emile de Antonio, Wiseman is one of the godfathers of documentary cinema. Throughout his career, he'd established the standard for what is now known as "observational" or "objective" documentary film-making. Unfortunately, this tag obfuscates the many symbolic, didactic and "engineered contrasts" found in Wiseman's films. Wiseman's films aren't strictly "objective". They have points to make, and are never free of his subjective biases.

Unlike many documentary filmmakers, Wiseman's films all focus on institutions. His subjects are whole organisations, and he typically generates "drama" by simply observing the various cogs and people at work within these societal machines. High schools, welfare offices, zoos, hospitals, ballet groups, army basic training camps, small towns, ICBM bases and business corporations are just some of the institutions he's tackled.

With "Titicut Follies", Wiseman goes behind the walls of a Massachusetts Mental Institution and exposes the treatment of inmates by guards and social workers. The footage he shoots is both macabre and revolting. The mental institution pretends to be a place of logic and the scientific method, but Wiseman reveals it to be a place of chaos and absurdity. Patients are deemed "mentally unsound" simply for not conforming to the institution's absurd standards. They're routinely teased and bullied, and left to roam the corridors completely naked. One articulate patient attempts to get his doctor to explain why he's being imprisoned, but the doctor has no answer.

Several inmates, one a socialist and the other an intelligent Russian, seem to be in the institution for political reasons. Both are of sound mind, but because they sympathise with the communist cause and distrust American's involvement in Vietnam, they've been labelled paranoid schizophrenics and jailed indefinitely.

The hardest scene to watch is of a forced feeding. A doctor smokes a cigarette as he inserts a long rubber tube into a patient's nostril and pours soup into a funnel. Halfway into the procedure, the doctor's cigarette falls into the funnel. In a surprisingly heavy handed directorial intrusion, Wiseman inter-cuts this painful scene with glimpses of the patient's corpse being prepared for burial.

Frederick Wiseman is a curious case in cinema. You can arguably group modernist "brain" cinema into two categories: left brain artists and right brain artists. Left brain artists (Antonioni, Kubrick, Bresson, Haneke etc) are very rare. They're logical, sequential, rational, analytical, objective and look at things in terms of parts, units or sections.

Right brain artists are more common. They're intuitive, holistic, synthesising, subjective and look at wholes. They like randomness and communities. Altman, John Sayles, Spike Lee, Fassbinder, Wenders, Malle, Fellini and Lynch are good examples.

Wiseman's form is very much like a Stanley Kubrick film. He sees his subjects in terms of sections and parts. In terms of machines and larger constructs. His camera is always distant, detached and objective. One can see echoes of "Full Metal Jacket" in Wiseman's "Basic Training" and "2001" in "Zoo".

But behind this is an artist who seems to embrace improvisation and chaos. Wiseman works fast with a single camera and a simple microphone. He catches what he can, without purpose and plan, sculpting his films entirely in the moment. This lends his films, when viewed together, a strange feel. You get the sense of large social constructs, giant institutions and sprawling communities, machine like in their workings and routines, and yet within these machines, Wiseman captures fleeting glimpses of humanity, spontaneous and wild.

8/10 – This is a nightmarish little film. It's not as great as some of Wiseman's later flicks, but it is perhaps his most influential. To this day it remains the only movie in U.S. history to be banned for reasons other than obscenity or national security. Director Milos Foreman would screen "Titicut Follies" for his crew prior to making "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" and Paddy Chayevsky would base "The Hospital" on Wiseman's "Hospital". Makes a good companion-piece to Wiseman's "Near Death".

Others have summarized this documentary well, so I would like to add my comments rather than go over ground covered by others.

It is hard to view this film and watch the dehumanization and brutalization of these patients. They are shown naked being provoked into angry outbursts by the guards, force-fed, locked in solitary confinement naked with a metal bucket for a toilet and hundreds of other indignities. Even the fact that the film-makers had such access is a shocking violation since patients committed involuntarily are unable to give informed consent.

But this was made in 1967 before modern anti-psychotic medications were developed. As a Clinical Social Worker who has worked extensively with the chronic mentally ill over the last decade, I was shocked to see how primitive the treatment methods were, even though I was prepared by my research in graduate school. Tranquilizers were being prescribed to mitigate the symptoms of paranoia, the psychiatric interviews with patients included lots of leading questions and they were treated rudely and dismissively even when the patients were making some good points about their commitments.

It was obvious that the staff and volunteers were just doing the best they could, but I have less sympathy for the Hungarian psychiatrist who at times seemed as disturbed as his patients. The volunteers running games and parties and shows reminded me of the Friendly Visitors to the Poor, those well-intentioned 19th C. socialites who volunteered to sing hymns and read the Christian bible to poor people in the tenements to "improve" their lives.

All in all, this is a very worthwhile film and highly recommended to professionals and interested others in the mental health field. Yes, there are some definite ethical problems in the way this was created, but as a historical record it is invaluable. I give this 9/10.