The rawest of documentaries

TITICUT FOLLIES (1967)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

How does one react to a documentary so honest and heartbreaking that one is compelled to turn away from its tragic outlook? Well, it is tough to watch Frederick Wiseman's cinema verite documentary, "Titicut Follies," a disturbing look at a mental institution fraught with impracticalities, but it must be seen (and it has recently made it to DVD).

Wiseman frames the opening and closing moments of this film with a song-and-dance routine performed annually by the institution's residents - the name of the show is "Titicut Follies." Gradually, in almost bleached-out black-and-white, we see the conditions at the Bridgewater Correctional Institution where the patients are awakened each morning, strip-searched, shaven, and then interviewed by the doctors about their personal histories. They are then escorted back to their empty cells naked, and locked in with an unerring sense of closure and solidity.

The patients are a mixed bag, some crazier than others. There are a few who babble on a variety of topics without interruption, a former math teacher who incoherently screams at the guards, and one patient who feels that he is sane and wants to go to prison after a nearly one-year stay. This particular patient insists that the doctors are wrong, and tries to prove his case.

This Massachusetts institute is like a journey through hell - one patient is forced fed with a tube through his nose while the doctor performs the procedure and smokes! Another patient is carried out in a coffin - the only one to get out of this hellhole. There is an effective scene where a group of doctors decide that increasing the dosage for one patient, who complains of sickness from the medicine, is the best solution. There is a lot more taking place, most of it disquieting in its immediacy and the atmosphere of such an environment. It is no wonder that a Massachusetts judge banned the film from being shown for many years because it invaded the privacy of the patients, housed in what looks like a prison facility. What the film really does is to show how the patients are treated - like slabs of meat, not people.

"Titicut Follies" is virtually unwatchable and all too realistic - a document of sad times when mental illness was synonymous with animal behavior. With Wiseman's hand-held camera, we feel we are there witnessing one grueling event after another, unable to help except to bear witness to the patients' behavior. And it is to the director's credit that we see the glint of humanity within these patients - they are people like anyone else. Misunderstood, and possibly quite insane, but still human. "Titicut Follies" is a tough film to put out of your mind, and it will linger longer in your mind than any fictional film dealing with similar subject matter would. Although Wiseman hates the French term, cinema verite, "Titicut Follies" is a haunting masterpiece that heralded the standard for all documentaries to come.