Titicut Follies

Frederick Wiseman’s debut is a harrowing look inside a Massachusetts psychiatric hospital for people with mental illnesses who have been convicted of crimes. The camera captures the daily lives of patients and staff: conversations, procedures, humiliation and violence. The institution’s rules and power structures emerge through people’s behaviour and the language they use every day. The film provoked intense debate. Public screenings in the United States were restricted until 1991. Titicut Follies remains one of Wiseman’s most important examinations of institutional power and the limits of human dignity. As the boundary between observation and participation begins to blur, viewers become witnesses to this unsettling everyday reality.

Frederick Wiseman – One of the most important and influential documentary filmmakers,he has made more than 45 films about institutions, districts, and small towns. The principles of his filmmaking: no filmed interviews, no explanatory commentary, no additional music, and a montage that does not structure what is shown on the basis of an otherwise common chronological narration, but orders individual sequences according to rhetorical arguments