Taking a Look at Wiseman's, "Titicut Follies"

The short health-related videos that are common today are very different from classic health-related documentaries, such as Frederick Wiseman's classic, Titicut Follies  which we screened last week (9/8/09).    There is an excellent book (not assigned in the class) that I highly recommend if you'd like to read more about Wiseman's film and the controversy surrounding it:  Documentary Dilemmas: Frederick Wiseman's “Titicut Follies” by Carolyn Anderson, Thomas W. Benson (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991).   For now, I'm going to review some of the key points about the film - drawn mostly from Anderson and Benson's work - that we discussed in class.

Wiseman's work stands as an interesting case study in "independent documentary film making and in the legal, ethical, aesthetic, and rhetorical issues that the case has raised”  (Anderson and Benson, 1991, p.4).  It's also one of the earliest films that can be pointed to as a kind of social change film that the filmmaker really intended to use to bring about change in a social institution (but more about that in a moment).   Before I get to that, let me review some of the background on the film and the controversy surrounding it.

Controversy: Just before the film was due to be shown at the 1967 New York Film Festival, the government of Massachusetts tried to get an injunction banning its release. The state claimed that the film violated the patients' privacy and dignity. Although Wiseman received verbal permission from all the people portrayed or the hospital superintendent (their legal guardian), Massachusetts claimed that this oral permission could not take the place of valid release forms from the inmates. It also claimed that Wiseman breached an "oral contract" giving the state government editorial control over the film. However, a New York state court allowed the film to be shown. In 1968, however, Massachusetts Superior Court judge Harry Kalus ordered the film pulled from distribution and called for all copies to be destroyed, citing the state's concerns about violations of the "patients' privacy and dignity." While "privacy and dignity" became the stated reason for stopping the film's distribution, and certainly a cause for concern, many critics of the court's decision - most notably Wiseman himself - argued that the state of Massachusetts, concerned that the film portrayed a state institution in a bad light, intervened to protect its own reputation.

Legal Limbo: Wiseman appealed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which in 1969 allowed it to be shown only to doctors, lawyers, judges, health-care professionals, social workers, and students in these and related fields. Wiseman appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case.  Thus, from 1969 for the next twenty years or more, Wiseman's film existed in this rather bizarre and completely unique, legal limbo in which distribution was blocked except for the screenings for certain kinds of 'professionals.'

Distribution: In 1991, Superior Court Judge Andrew Meyer allowed the film to be released to the general public, saying that as time had passed, privacy concerns had become less important than First Amendment concerns. He also said that many of the former patients had died, so there was little risk of a violation of their dignity.[2] The state Supreme Court has ordered that "A brief explanation shall be included in the film that changes and improvements have taken place at Massachusetts Correctional Institution Bridgewater since 1966."[12] The film was shown on PBS in 1992. The film is now legally available through the distributor, Zipporah Films, Inc., for purchase or rental on VHS, DVD and 16mm film for both educational and individual license. Zipporah Films released the DVD of the film to the home market in December 2007.

Medicalization:  One of the key sociological concepts that we discussed in relation to this film is that of 'medicalization,' that is taking a normal behavior and re-framing it as a medical condition (verb form: to medicalize).   Medicalization is a tool of social control.  Thus, those with less social power - people who are poor, not adults, not white, not male, not able-bodied - are much more vulnerable to being medicalized.  And, as we read in the Rosenhan piece, once a medical label has been attached to someone it is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to resist that labeling.    In Wiseman's film, we see a powerful example of this process as "Vladimir," tries to talk his way out of Bridgewater.  It is especially moving when he reflects on his own condition, saying “The reality is that I am here as a prisoner, and I am being ruined.”

Total Institutions:  Known at the time as an institution for the "criminally insane," the Bridgewater State Hospital featured in the film still houses 386 inmates, although state officials say that the institution has been transformed since the days that Wiseman shot his film.   In fact, all of Wiseman's films are concerned with social institutions: hospital, police, schools, and the family in the United States.    Titicut Follies is unique in that it examines a total institution.   Developed by sociologist Ervin Goffman, a total institution is an institution where all parts of life of individuals under the institution are subordinated to and dependent upon the authorities of the organization.   Some examples of total institutions include  boarding schools, concentration camps, colleges, cults, prisons, mental institutions, boot camps, monasteries, convents, nursing homes, and even cruise ships.   Wiseman's film offers a rare glimpse inside a total institution. 

Bodies Under Siege:  The bodies that Wiseman portrays are largely bodies under siege by the institutions in which they live. As such, these bodies - naked, emaciated, under total institutional control and completely without autonomy - become symbolic representations of each of us, as individuals, within society.   The body in the film which receives the most care is the dead body of the inmate – others are assaulted.  Wiseman illustrates by editing together scenes of a man being force-fed via a tube down his throat and then the relatively good care being taken with the same man's corpse after his death.  (For more on the way 'bodies' can be portrayed in film, there is a nice analysis here connecting Wiseman and Riefenstahl and how each filmmaker portrays bodies:  http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/50/titicut.htm).

Privacy, Dignity and Direct Cinema (cinéma vérité):  Wiseman's film is an example of 'direct cinema,' or cinéma vérité.  Watching a film shot in this style gives the viewer the sense of being in the room with someone and watching the action unfold in real time.  And, if you are used to the quick edits and jump cuts popular in much of visual media today (such as the "Girl Effect" video I posted yesterday) then this can seem a painful to watch at first until you allow yourself to relax into the pace of the film itself.   The cinéma vérité style does raise some ethical issues, however.  Here again are Anderson and Benson on this subject:

“Wiseman’s documentaries are built upon a method of film making that deliberately courts questions of invasion of privacy.  To watch the films is often to feel as if we are seeing deeply into other people’s private experiences.  In the Titicut Follies case, the issue of invasion of privacy became a legal issue; in all direct cinema it is an ethical and aesthetic issue.” (Anderson and Benson, 1991, p.4)

So several questions present themselves here: is it possible to make a film about peoples' suffering and not, simultaneously, violate their privacy?  Is it possible to create a film that both shows peoples' suffering and respects their dignity?  And, who is to decide when this has been achieved?   These are difficult, perhaps unanswerable, questions but ones that we will face again and again if we create visual media that includes images of health, illness and bodies.

In an interview, Wiseman speaks to how he sees his editing style as related to the issue of the dignity of his subjects:

Q: Could you talk about your editing style? A lot of movies and television shows today use lots of fast cuts. You seem to be in a different camp.

Wiseman: “I think I have an obligation, to the people who have consented to be in the film, to make a film that is fair to their experience. The editing of my films is a long and selective process. I do feel that when I cut a sequence, I have an obligation to the people who are in it, to cut it so that it fairly represents what I felt was going on at the time, in the original event. I don't try and cut it to meet the standards of a producer or a network or a television show.

My principal obligation is to make as good a movie as I can, and try to fairly represent the complexity of what went on. That means that sometimes the films are long, it means that sometimes the scenes are long. I don't think it's fair just to cut to the most sensational part of the scene, and then cut to another sensational scene, because that means that there's absolutely no context. In each scene, I have an obligation to provide the context and, from my point of view, the result is more dramatic than when you just cut to the most sensational aspect. The so-called juicy part of the scene is more comprehensible and more powerful because the context is clear.”

The Politics of Asking Permission:  When the controversy over the film first began, Wiseman was quick to point out that he asked and received permission from all of the people portrayed in the film or their legal guardian, in this case the superintendent of Bridgewater.   The larger question is:  is it possible to get meaningful permission from someone to be in a film if they are incapacitated or if they are institutionalized?   Does the permission of a legal guardian constitute meaningful consent?  What about the permission of the superintendent in charge of the institution where one is an inmate?   These are typically the sorts of questions that are asked of researchers when conducting research with human subjects, but these sorts of questions are relevant for documentary filmmakers as well. 

Social Change: Little changed at the Bridgewater facility where the film was made until 1987.  It was then that the families of seven inmates who died in the institution sued both the hospital and the state of Massachusetts.    Steven Schwartz represented one of the inmates. Schwartz’s client was “restrained for 2 ½ months and given six psychiatric drugs at vastly unsafe levels - - choked to death because he could not swallow his food.” Schwartz claimed that the state's order to block distribution of Titicut Follies was implicated in his client's death: 

“There is a direct connection between the decision not to show that film publicly and my client dying 20 years later, and a whole host of other people dying in between.”  

That's a remarkable claim for someone to make about a film: people died because this film was not released.   While we may discount that as lawyerly-hyperbole, there may be some bit of truth to Schwartz's claim since as he went on to point out:  "In the years since Mr. Wiseman made Titicut Follies, most of the nation’s big mental institutions have been closed or cut back by court orders.” In addition, “the film may have also influenced the closing of the institution featured in the film.” 

However, trying to make the connection between one documentary film and broader social change - even relatively small social change, like closing one institution - can be a difficult claim to support, as Wiseman himself says in this interview:

Q: I'm interested in the idea of documentary film having some social utility. Could you speak to that?

Wiseman: “Well, it's very hard to know. It's very hard to measure. When I first started out, I had a rather naive and pretentious view that there was some kind of one-to-one connection between a film and social change. But now, while I like to think there might be a connection, I think there is no real way of knowing. People have all kinds of sources of different information, and it's totally presumptuous to assume that any documentary, or any one work of any sort, is going to be that important. Which is not to say I don't hope it has an effect, but I think if it does, it's elliptical, subterranean, circuitous and certainly not measurable.”

I would disagree only slightly with Wiseman's assessment here in that I think it is possible to measure, but I agree wholeheartedly that it's difficult.  And, I think in many ways he captures something very important when he says that the effect of one film can be "elliptical, subterranean and circuitous." 


Truth and Fiction: Finally, any discussion of documentaries must also include a discussion of 'truth.'   The documentary is a defined as a "non-fiction" film and thus carries with it a special burden of truth-telling.  However, which truth gets told is entirely up to the filmmaker who decides what to shoot, what to include and what to edit out.    Wiseman is aware of this tension and is, perhaps intentionally, flip about it when he says that documentaries are fiction:
  

“Documentaries, like theatre pieces, novels or poems are forms of fiction,” (Philippe Pilard, “Frederick Wiseman, Chronicler of the Western World,”originally published in La Sept/Arte, from here.)

For good or for will, Wiseman is sometimes credited with being one of the originators of the contemporary genre known as "reality TV."    Again, Anderson and Benson offer a bit of background on the blurring of the line between truth and fiction in Wiseman's work:

“Wiseman has sometimes referred to his films as reality fictions. The term was used by Wiseman as early as 1974 and at one level is a way of referring to the same problem John Grierson pointed to when he said that documentary film was about the ‘creative treatment of actuality.’ One works from social actuality but necessarily imposes form upon that actuality, turning it into what may be implied by the terms art or fiction. ” (Anderson and Benson, 1991, p.1)

Even as Wiseman protests that his films are "fictions" like a play or a novel or a poem, the fact is that we - as an audience - approach his work differently than if we were reading a poem or a novel or seeing a play.   And, perhaps that's real distinction between truth and fiction, what we as an audience bring to each of these, and what we take away.