The Cinematheque

“A major work of subversive cinema … The camera flinches from nothing: here it is, it says, and since you are not doing anything about eliminating this, at least have the courage to watch.”

Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art

Frederick Wiseman’s landmark debut remains one of his most powerful, controversial, and influential works. The process of being institutionalized at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, is fractured in Wiseman’s editing into a dehumanizing routine of naked searches, verbal abuse, and total deterioration, which is ballasted by the musical routines that emerge both at an organized event (the ​“follies” of the title) and impromptu during downtime. The presence of Dr. Ross, a German psychiatrist and reported ex-Wehrmacht, makes the ideological roots of the social control on display unignorable. From his first film, Wiseman established a principle that hovers, in slightly less shocking form, over all the work to come: that behind the closed door or curtain, one finds a theatre that in its mix of absurdity and self-awareness is a shape of what we call reality. There were attempts to ban the film, but not close the prison. Both endure.

“Wiseman is able to establish the film’s gaze at a point above the psychiatrists, and include them within it. In this way, the privacy that is being violated is actually that of the act of confinement itself.”

Joanne Nucho, Reverse Shot

“Whatever idealistic notions I had were trampled out of me as a result of the Titicut Follies experience.”

Frederick Wiseman