Titicut Follies

1967 documentary

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A look at an institution for the criminally insane in Massachusetts.

This is my first exposure to the work of Frederick Wiseman, and I decided to start with his very first. From what I understand, he's a documentarian who is focuses on a single location, films various goings-on and people in that place, and then assembles it into a cinema verite documentary. Sans voiceovers or any other commentary, this seems 100% objective. Of course, Wiseman is picking and choosing what he wants to show his audience and what message that might deliver which gives this a subjectivity. The most egregious example is when he juxtaposes shots of some procedure where a really long rubber tube is shoved in a patient's nose with shots of the corpse of a patient being prepared for burial by a mortician.

At times, what he chooses to show us feels exploitative. There's a lot of nudity as we see the patients examined and sometimes bathed even though it doesn't seem like anybody working here really cares all that much about hygiene. We also see the patients teased or bullied quite a bit by the staff, more alarming since this wasn't actually surreptitiously filmed by an actual fly on an actual wall and that they were more than likely aware that a movie was being made and just didn't care. And the shots provided of rambling and sometimes singing patients makes you wonder if Wiseman chose only the craziest clips he could find. Of course, there's enough of that footage to make you think that this world is likely pretty close to what the audience is seeing.

The title is a reference to a talent show that we get snippets of. This opens with a dance number complete with pom-poms, but that's not the craziest musical moment. That would likely go to a smiling singing guy doing a golden-throated rendition of "China Town." He's the kind of guy who smiles because he can't not smile. There's also an almost surreal moment where a tromboner is jamming beside a fire hydrant.

There's a doctor in this institution with a thick accent, and for the longest time, I wondered if he was actually just another patient.

Titicut Follies was more entertaining to me than it probably should have been, but there was also something really troubling about it. I'm sure Wiseman filmed more pleasant places in his career as a documentary filmmaker, and I'm looking forward to seeing some of those.