And though he denied that his movies had any political agenda, he was no stranger to controversy. His directorial debut, “Titicut Follies” (1967), a harrowing portrait of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts, remains the only film ever banned in the United States for reasons other than obscenity, immorality or national security....
“Titicut Follies” became the stylistic template for Mr. Wiseman’s subsequent films, which were free of narration and shot with available light, and which often concerned public institutions and the abuses therein. Among his better-known works are “High School” (1968), “Welfare” (1975), “Public Housing” (1997) and “Domestic Violence” (2002)....
“There’s a common assumption that my movies are exposés,” Mr. Wiseman said in a 2011 interview for this obituary, “and I don’t think they are. You can certainly argue that a movie like ‘Titicut Follies’ is in part an exposé, but you couldn’t make a movie about Bridgewater without showing how horrible it was.... There are people who think if I don’t make a movie about how poor people are being taken advantage of by the system, it’s not a real Fred Wiseman movie. And I think that shows a complete misunderstanding about what I’m doing."
ADDED: My son John has a good post (from a few years back) about Wiseman's movie "High School." Here's a nice clip from it:
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19 टिप्पणियां:
Sounds like an interesting director. I'll have to watch some. Although I doubt they are "rigorously objective".
Never saw "Titicut Follies", but I've seen Skid Row in L.A. on my way to court. It was convenient when you could just ban seeing stuff.
Holy cow! I think I had that same teacher. At least, I recall the exact same class.
I remember being equally bored as those poor young men in the film.
There's also this one which seems right in line with Althouse interests: Wiseman films Oscar de la Renta Backstage NYC 1980 Film, fashion, NYC, 1980, and all the associated things
Titicut Follies hits home for me. In 1966, when the film was shot, I entered kindergarten in Massachusetts. The neighborhood where I lived was surrounded by state mental institutions, including the oldest and largest in the country, the Fernald School (originally named the "Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth"). Most of them were not kids, however, they were adult lifers.
My elementary school was essentially a postage stamp on periphery of the massive grounds of the institution, adjacent to the other state institutions. Walking to and from school, as well as after school generally, we'd often encounter the adult patients who were let out for the day and, on occasion, had escaped. Plus they'd wander on the school playground during recess. By 5th grade we tried to bring some back into class with us to prank the teacher. Some were funny and affable albeit completely insane, some were downright scarily deranged like in the movie, and everything in between. The "feebs," as they were called then, dressed in their institutional garb, actually kinda integrated into the life of neighborhood, and for the most part everyone got along until one would walk into somebody's house, drop his pants or grab a kid. Strangely, I do think the experience of growing up in that totally bizarre "Mayberry on acid" environment was formative and enriching in many ways.
They used to warn us kids that if we misbehaved we be sent to the Fernald. What they told the patients at the Fernald, if you misbehave, you'll be sent to Bridgewater. From what I learned since from the testimonies of former patients, that was more than just an idle threat on both levels. A impactful warning for us kids when you could hear the tortured screams of the patients from their dormitories at night! And, as it turned out, my elementary school was eventually repurposed as a school for troubled youth, I sometimes think because there were so many from my neighborhood!
Anyway, as Wiseman points out, despite all the many flaws, neglect and abuse, these institutions were probably some of the best attempts at dealing with these societal problems at the time.
In my experience, just being around some of these guys -- and they almost exclusively guys -- there needed to be and still needs to be a Bridgewater for the truly dangerous criminally insane. The problem comes in, I think, when the lines get blurred by bureaucratic "necessity" of dealing with what else are we going to do with these people?
With deinstitutionalization, a small group of cottages housed the remaining patients. Even those were eventually closed over the objection of the families who thought it was a perfect setting for these profoundly disable people.
The grounds today have been transformed into a small kiddy amusement park.
Perhaps where Cameron Crow got the inspiration for the tapping on the S&G album cover scene in "Almost Famous"?
"Simon and Garfunkel is the poetry of drugs and promiscuous sex."
Crowe.
In 1887 Nelly Bly wrote an expose of the deplorable conditions in the New York City Lunatic Asylum, causing a popular outcry. Eighty years later Frederick Wiseman filmed an expose of the deplorable conditions in Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, causing a popular outcry. These kinds of institutions no longer exist.
Instead, we let these people fend for themselves, often cycling between homelessness and prison. I asked Google AI how much money we spend per homeless person per year:
‘The $100,759 figure is an average for the chronically homeless. Costs are significantly skewed by the most vulnerable 10% of the chronically homeless population [which] can soar to $439,787 per person due to acute medical crises and constant legal intervention.
The proper care of the criminally insane is a difficult problem and I don’t know how much progress we’ve made over the last 140 years.
Nuts!
I've done legal clearance review for more than a hundred documentaries, mostly left wing, some even commie-adjacent. The excerpt from High School skirts the boundary of fair use. I wonder if Wiseman paid a license fee.
My father was a psychiatrist, an assistant superintendent at a major mental hospital. I worked there for a couple of summers assisting an art therapist, and even led some art therapy classes. That was in the late 60s. More recently I’ve seen homeless camps that were set up in my town, especially during the Covid time. Without a doubt, the conditions in those homeless camps were far more horrible than anything I witnessed in the mental institution. It breaks my heart to see people living on the sidewalk having to fend for themselves, on drugs and obviously psychotic.
Turns out, based on the "main streaming" evidence on the streets of this country, that asylums were awful because the patients were crazy.
I believe many of those living "on the sidewalk" choose that over alternatives imposing any. degree of "order". Imagining life there is not that big a stretch.
People who are "bat shit crazy" are a part of most of our lives. Situationally crazed, perhaps, but a long, long way from truly crazy.
Change and loss left me with time on my hands, in the early 80s. I coped by spending a lot of time in the pleasant public library near my home. Pre-internet, the library was the go-to haven for info-junkies; newspapers from everywhere and reference material for deeper dives.
One afternoon, I was distracted by a group of young people near me in the reading room. They weren't "acting-up" but there was something strange about them. Unsettling.
I felt someone staring at me and turned to look. BAM!!!
There she was: about six feet away; heart-breakingly beautiful, modestly dressed, quiet and unblinking; a kindness in her eyes and a hunger. I think about 12-14 years old. At least one foot firmly planted in a world other my own.
She did not look away. She made no sound. I had no doubt she knew everything about me and wanted me to know everything about her.
I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to save her. I could not move out of fear she would follow or physically intervene. To my relief, a man and woman had noticed and came to take the girl away. She didn't resist, just seemed resigned.
It was explained to me that the kids were on a supervised outing from the institution where they were housed and treated.
That experience remains vivid after more than 40 years. It's not hard to imagine what would have happened to the precious young creature, I "met" at the library, living on the street.
The people who wrecked institutional care for the mentally ill are assholes of the first order.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill (speaking on democracy), mental institutions are the worst possible thing for the patients except for all of the alternatives. Budget cutters in MI (mostly R's) combined with the medical-pharmaceutical complex (mostly D's) convinced the legislature here to close all these places and put all the patients in group homes where minimum wage contractors supervised them and gave them their drugs back in early '90s. Corruption, molestation, embezzlement, soon followed, but taxpayer money was saved.
I'm less interested in his "social justice" films, then in his more current films about Central Park or the Paris Opera. Just found a place where I watch some of them.
So is this one of the guys who dishonestly pushed deinstitutionalization, and thus got the insane out on the streets where they could victimize and be victimized far more than ever happened in the institutions?
FWIW, while Grok admits that David Rosenhan's 1973 study "On Being Sane in Insane Places" has been debunked, it claims that Wiseman's work is still considered solid
Coincidentally, last week I picked up a copy of his "Ex Libris: The New York Public Library" at my local public library. I haven't seen it yet, but the local public library liked it -- or at least what it's about -- enough to put it on display.
Thomas Szasz, take a bow!
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