Titicut Follies

Nice piece of direct cinema

this was certainly an eye opening doc... the non-narration/presentation of footage only was an interesting - & quite effective - way to tell the story as well. i recommend to anyone even slightly interested.

Operating as a horrifying indictment of the ways in which the US government treated people suffering from mental illnesses back in the 60s, Titicut depicts several atrocities, including guards forcing the residents to perform for their amusement, patients being herded like cattle and set out to wander around the grounds, the denying of treatments that are expensive, doctors force-feeding those who refuse to do so themselves, guards taunting the people they're supposed to be protecting as they wander around without clothes, and the imprisonment of those clearly suffering from mild forms of mental illness who have no business being there. This brutal honesty places Titicut Follies among that special class of documentaries that unearth painful truths about the immense failings of our moral and governmental systems, this example made even more unnerving given the fact that the government tried for decades to destroy any evidence that would prove this film ever existed.

This controversial documentary was banned for many years. Originally, family of the patients in the insane asylum objected to how their incarcerated family was portrayed and exploited in the film. Later it was discovered that this was just a ploy so that the filmmaker couldn't release the movie. He did, in fact, get consent from the family members. Instead, it was the faculty that was nervous at how they were portrayed in screen, quite often very abusive and unsympathetic to the patients needs. In the end, it's a document about insanity. People who are psychotic, in denial, abnormally quiet, extremely angry or just plain weird. A scary portrait on a time, place and a people who are still sadly relevant.

I am truly speechless.

Agreed with the "time capsule" idea of this film. It seems that's the point of this, just to critic how messed up the way authorities treated prisoners in the place shown.

I have seen cinéma vérité (truthful cinema) style films before, but none quite like Titicut Follies. Wiseman included very little editing so it's as if the film is raw footage, but the little that he did made an impact. The non-existing narration says so much by letting the shocking visuals speak for themselves. He added suspense and emphasis without much editing, such as the scene where a man was being fed through a tube in his nose. Wiseman used close-ups, cross-cutting with shots of that same inmate later being prepped for burial with very little natural sound, and allowed the scene to drag on and on, creating suspense. He put so much emphasis on the dehumanization of the inmates by having many scenes that seemed to go on forever, like the scene where the inmates are stripped and forced to stand naked with groups of others. It went on forever, which only made it harder to watch. These were real people, and the fact that they weren't even able to give consent to being filmed makes the dehumanization that much worse. I praise Wiseman for being willing to cross that line to bring attention to this subject and I admire this film for its raw truth-telling, but I don't feel comfortable with the lack of consent, so I can't rate it higher than 4.5 stars.

An incredibly powerful documentary, free of narration, that will knock your legs out from under you and then repeatedly kick/stomp on you while you're down on the ground. A movie that you are guaranteed to remember for the rest of your life.

Highlight for me was the doctor with the smoke hanging out with the ash that just wouldn't fall off, no matter how much he spoke or moved!

AMAZING documentary... It's so shockingly real that you want it to be fiction...