Some of the films I see I know nothing about before I go to see them. Oh I could check up, but I prefer to go to be surprised and I know how much, well, some experimental films have high reputation which the everyday viewer will find confusing and disappointing after the film made it's reputation. So what chance did I have with a 1967 documentary filmed in an American asylum for the criminally insane?
Not as much chance as I hoped is the short answer. To put this in context Frederick Wiseman was a documentary film maker who made fifty film documentaries over fifty eight years, which are now being shown in cinemas again, after his recent death aged 95. The British Film Institute called him 'A towering figure'. 'For whom, outside the BFI?' would be a good question for the more ordinary cinema goer to ask.....
But back to 'The Titticut Follies'. It was a difficult film to watch, and process first time in the cinema for several reasons. The first reason is that to complete this film Wiseman had to wrestle control of the material from his colaborator John Marshall and edit it secretely using borrowed equipment. It was only Wiseman's second film as director. It is a film on which he was learning his craft, using a diffficult subject. The second reason is that the film has very little sense of a rythm in the way the material onscreen is cut and shaped. A third reason is that with the filming being in black and white and so apparently poorly edited, the film seems amateurish. But the biggest reason the film is confusing is the subject matter, mostly distressed mental patients who lived in an instiution where only the doctors have any exit from the insanity. If they were 'the control sample', the measure of sanity, the film does not thell the audience that, except most obliquely in how the staff are the performers for the patients at the review, the follies filmed at the beginniing and the end of the film. Not that the viewer is told that the staff are the performers and the audience are the patients, this is 1966. And this is Bridgewater, Massachusetts.
The institution colours the paitent's every word. The biggest differnce between the paitents and the staff is that the staff are phyically calmer than the patients, but both talk only in terms of where they are.
The film starts and ends with a revue. The audience don't know who is performing for who with the review. Show songs dominate the revue. In between the show songs the criminally insane seem to lead live where the staff provide a limited structure, where one of the more clear headed patients explains that he asked for help from a social worker, was directed to Bridgewater, and seems to have been dumped there with no route out of the instution. Medication is heavy part of why he unfit to leave. There were two scenes depicting the treatment of the dead for burial and one scene of what I took to be last rites. The quiet efficiency with which the dead were handled provided some of the calmest, more composed, moments in the film.
So after probably eighty mins of depictions of poorly structured lives, partial depictions of routines where there was no voice over the tell the viewer where the narrative was going or where the film might go next, the film ended by repising the beginning. The nearest to an explanation became two points, one of them made by commentators on the film that I found elsewhere. One was that state policy in the state where the criminaly insane were being kept had changed when the film was made, 1966, but the staff of the hospital were resisting change. 'Who else was resisting change? audiences might well ask. The aim of the change in policy was to close down the old huge instutions where people disappeared forever, in favour of smaller, more manageable units which could focus with more clarity on the rehabilitation and the reform of criminals. The second point was put on the screen.
At the time the film was made it was banned-part of my curiosity about it was that it had been banned as a film, to finally be seen by the public in 1991. Why was the film banned? I would answer that just as the criminally insane were left in in instiutions and hidden away from the general public 'for the public's good', so depictions of the criminally insane were banned from being seen by the public also also.
After much petitioning the film was released to be seen by the public in 1991, over thirty years after it was made and long after any point it made seemed cogent, beyond the point about self reinforcing censorship that works like a super-injunction. The film was permitted a release to the general public only with a statement from a judge at the start of the closing credits that Bridgewater no longer treats criminal mental matters this way, saying nothing about the fact that evidently Bridgewater at one time did treat criminal insanity in exactly the way the film depicted.
Seeing the film, even sixty years after it was made, was partly about unpicking how censorship rules work over the fifty states across the USA, rules which the USA might prefer to maintian did not exist, in some oblique 'Nothing to see here, please move along' type legal judgements.
The good news here is that portions of the film are available to be watched on youtube, netflix and other media vendors, where the disjointed depictions of disjointed lives due the nature of the instiutionalisation of those labelled 'criminally insane' make more sense broken up into shorter, still random, sequences. If the viewer on youtube etc feels like voyeur then so did the visitors of Victorian insane asylums who used the payments the visitors made to see and believe they were not insane, towards the upkeep of the institution....
No comments:
Post a Comment