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Titicut Follies For over 30 years Frederick Wiseman has trained his camera on American life and institutions, having no obvious polemical stance but merely observing, sometimes in minute detail, what he finds. He shoots for many hours, so that his subjects begin to ignore the camera, and edits the collected material for much longer. The surprise is that what he finds is often nothing like what we, or even he, might expect. (reserves. library) Wiseman have been criticised deeply for his first and most expressive effort, Titicut Follies, about life in a prison for the criminally insane. That became mired in litigation with the state authorities and gave Wiseman the reputation of a controversial attacker of the system. The first thing to note about Titicut Follies is that although it was made a quarter of a century ago, only now is it available for public viewing.
This is because of legal disputes over its invasion of privacy, its presentation of bodies, and the threat it posed to certain political, bureaucratic and therapeutic careers. (Thomas, 542) The second thing to note is that it deals with the occupants of a hospital for the criminally insane. These occupants include doctors, warders, volunteers, filmmakers and, perhaps least spectacularly, forced residents. Some of the above comments could also be made about Fremantle Prison. (Gerald, 5) The initial fuss over this text arose because a former social worker read a newspaper report of the film which indicated that male genitals were prominently displayed. The fuss developed over the issue of privacy for the inmates and privacy for the career hopes of those responsible for them.
Twenty years after it was made, Titicut Follies was used as evidence to have the prison it represents - the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater - reformed. (Curry, 35) The doctrine of direct cinema tries to get away from the comp licitness of the camera in conventional regimes of representation, to dispense with the polite norms of picturing which are required by orthodox film literacy. Instead, direct cinema claims to be beholden to the material objects - and the relations between them - which are present in front of the camera. The recording device takes in what is before it in a comparatively non-distortional way (Armstrong, 140). So the ideology of the social aspect to documentary is prevented from doing its work of seamless quilting, work which makes dietetic space and time singular and encourages spectators to conclude their experience of the text at the same time as their viewing of it. In contrast, direct cinema eschews a concentration on identifiable film characters and the mnemonic guide to an expressive totality of their human achievements or imperfections. Direct cinema moves away from such romantic stories and towards an engagement with the audience's knowledge of history and the social order.
In place of asking how cinema holds together as a narrative, this poses implicit questions about mainstream documentary cinema's techniques of knowledge mobilised to produce anecdotes and audience reactions (Benson, 31 - 33). Wiseman's work stimulates the posing of difficult questions over what it is to be an ethical subject, and, equally, about the abject desire not to know about our abject selves. Example: Wiseman's film Primate details a research centre funded by the US military which looks at monkeys in order to develop techniques of behavioural manipulation. When the film was broadcast on national public TV in North America in 1974, the New York station screening it was deluged with criticism, a bomb scare and a threat to kill Wiseman. Titicut Follies is a difficult film to follow. It moves backwards and forwards from a revue party of song and dance to interviews between doctors and patients, exercise-yard demagoguery, appeals to release boards, funerals, lady-of-the-manor largesse, cell-time, acts of resistance and response, strip searches, nudity, monologues, bath-time and a recurring hallway wander, a left motif of Wiseman's work.
This is associational narration; it works by prodding recollection and fear, suggestion-through-confrontation. It is not a horror film; in fact much of it is tame and oblique. But it decidedly deals with the abject, with that which we should rather get behind us. There is no narrative and no categorical imperative from the filmmaker. Wiseman sees his work as open-ended, in that whilst it interrogates ideological institutions, it offers no options for doing things any other way. That is for the spectator to decide.
Viewers are offered not so much a document of policy, but an invitation to citizenship. Because of this complexity, the spectator to the Follies is required to read keenly, to follow associatively. We move through an array of sequences that fold back onto one another. (Cunningham, 89) After a psychiatrist has told the inmate Mr Malinowski that 'if you don't eat food we are going to feed you with tube, ' the prisoner is shot in close-up, zooming out to a medium shot of the screws as they apply restraints to his wrists and flank him. We cut to a close-up of the psych. sniffing liquid food.
As the naked Malinowski is placed prone on a table, the zoom closes in on the shrink, who is smoking an endlessly ashing cigarette as he greases the appliances and shoves the tube into the patient-prisoner's nose, whose groin and eyes alone are covered. Then this scene is abruptly interlaced for just two seconds via an extreme close-up of Mr Malinowski being shaved. His eyes are open, a fly is on his brow, and soap on his jaw. Then we are jagged back to the cigarette and its therapist prior to a series of edits which cut between the states of invasion and torpor until what is clearly the work of a mortician sees cotton buds work their way into the dead Malinowski's eyes. This is followed by a series of parallel movements between psychiatrist and mortician: one finishes with a fed Malinowski, the other with a dead one.
The sequence re-establishes an equilibrium of sorts via a lingering view of the door behind which his coffin has been slid into a cooler. (Thomas, 87) The psychiatrist has the phallic authority of the Father's law. If his sons refuse him his power or seek to act independently, they must be symbolically castrated and any right of autonomy over their bodies removed. A punitive, retributive power must be swiftly and overtly exercised in response to such insurrection. And further transgressions must be dealt with by the ultimate sanction. Remember, many of these men are sex offenders (some are not, and some are just thrown in there awaiting trial, a wait of years in some cases). (Cunningham, 91) The suggestion is there - confirmed in one instance - that incest is afoot. This is the fundamental taboo that must not be broken, because it is the taboo which distinguishes fathers from others and protects their line from violation and despoliation. (Curry, 39) For Wiseman, the textualist of film must be dedicated to institutions: the public institutions of his first dozen films, the private institutions of his next few, the international reach of the ones after that, and the impact which those institutions have on the bodies and means of sense-making available to those within their ambit.
It is for us to determine whether or not these institutions, which framed and then concluded the life of a Malinowski, are functional: in whose interests they function. Finally on this sequence, a mnemonic point: anybody who has seen Bad Timing may remember the controversial scene when we intercut between Milena having her stomach pumped and Alex violating her body. Part of the reason for the controversy surrounding both sequences is concerned with the operation of the look. The controlling power of the look is a recurring theme in Titicut Follies, but not in neat shot-reverse-shot form. The eyeliner match is more common, across shots of about half-a-minute's duration on average. Looks are exchanged between guards and guards, guards and prisoners, prisoners and prisoners, psychiatrists and prisoners, psychiatrists and psychiatrists, and all of the above - but especially the prisoners / inmates /patients - with the camera; and hence with the ultimate disciplinary gaze in cinema, that of the spectator. (Jesse Moss) We are looking at what is locked away, to protect us from a physical and psychic darkness.
The double effect of the musical revue sequence is to equate madness with the unacceptable side to playfulness, to draw out the implications of a tightly policed but undefinable distinction between madness and entertainment. What is presented is utterly mad. The maddest person of the lot is a leeringly un phlegmatic screw, whose delight in tania foolery is equalled only by his craving of attention. As Christopher Ricks has argued, 'Wiseman's art constitutes an invasion of privacy': the privacy of the viewers, their right to be left undisturbed in any passive denial of the sometimes unsightly grout which holds their social world in a normal grid (Armstrong, 151). The career of this film is an unstable one; it moves dramatically along the track of political rectitude. At one moment, Titicut Follies is the darling of civil libertarians: Wiseman speaks out against the state, offering a voice to those silenced by the bonds of prison power.
At another, the film is darkened by its invasion of the privacy of men too abject and incompetent to know the concept or seek to guard it. Some history to the film's career can explain this lineage. (reserves. library) The threat of sparking off the animation of contemporary citizenship saw a concerted effort by the State of Massachusetts to hold back Titicut Follies from public view. That text conspicuously compressed space and time to interpellate its audience in the present moment; in fact, it continues to do this. The Fremantle Prison Trust has a more comprehensive and visible - but less transparent - modus operandi. It simply translates the citizen through time, whilst remaining in the one place.
History can be brought safely up to date, up to November 1991, because it starts and ends in a monument to "Georgian Style", and a pre-emancipatory legacy that moves inevitably forwards in a grand narrative of Whiggish historiography. This monument is of heritage value, a value of disengagement with the present in the name of a preservation of the past as the past. Perhaps it is this zone which is being resisted by former prisoners, who are renowned for refusing to wear identification stickers when they return as visitors, but who are always forced back to the official tour whenever they 'break away'. This is done for what are termed 'safety reasons' (Armstrong, 178). I wonder who needs to feel safe here, and what it is that so fills their troubled minds with dread. I think that a deployed and cross-referential textualist is an interesting way of posing the question.
And of thinking through what screen cultural studies in a cinema department might look like. Bibliography: Thomas R. Atkins, "Frederick Wiseman's America: Titicut Follies to Primate", in: Lewis Jacobs, The Documentary Tradition, New York: W. W.
Norton & Company 1971, pp. 536 - 550. Curry, T. J. "Frederick Wiseman: Sociological Filmmaker?" Contemporary Sociology 14, no. 1 (1985): 35 - 39. Benson, T. W. "The Rhetorical Structure of Frederick Wiseman's Model. " Journal of Film and Video 36, no. 4 (1984): 30 - 40.
web web Armstrong, D. "Wiseman's Model and the Documentary Project: Toward a Radical Film Practice. " In the textbook. 90 - 180. Atkins, T. R. "Reality Fictions": Wiseman on Primate. " Frederick Wiseman. Ed. Thomas R. Atkins.
New York: Monarch P, 1976. 75 - 87. Jesse Moss, Indiewire, January 29 2002, web Cunningham, S. "The Look and its Revocation: Wiseman's Primate. " Australian Journal of Screen Theory nos. 11 - 12 (1982): 86 - 95. Gerald Peary, Boston Phoenix, March 1998. 5 - 7 web
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