Titicut Follies is a 1967 film directed by Frederick Wiseman.
It is a documentary depicting the nightmarish conditions at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts. The film is done in what would become Wiseman's trademark "cinema verite" style, without a narrator or Talking Heads or title cards or any of the usual documentary trappings, only what the camera captures on film. What the camera captures is not pleasant. Inmates of the hospital—and they are treated like inmates, not patients in need of psychiatric care—are subjected to humiliating strip searches and paraded around in the nude. An inmate is taken, naked, to a barber's chair where he is roughly shaved and left bleeding from a cut, before the guards take him back, taunting him about his cleanliness, before tossing him still naked back in his cell. Another sentence shows an inmate being force-fed, intercut with shots of that same inmate's corpse being prepared for burial, after he died in hospital custody.
Titicut Follies was the first film in Frederick Wiseman's long, prolific career as a documentarian. After it was first screened, the state of Massachusetts sued, citing violation of patient privacy, but really because the film made the state looked so bad. Massachusetts tried to have all copies of the film destroyed, but on appeal the Massachusetts Supreme Court compromised by only allowing it to be showed to legal and health care professionals. The ban, one of the only times in American history that a film was banned on grounds other than obscenity, lasted until 1991.
Tropes:
- Bedlam House: A horrifying Real Life portrait of a state mental hospital, where patients are abused and force-fed and humiliated, at least when they aren't in the yard going on semi-coherent rants about Communism or the Pope. They are locked in cells that are indisputably prison cells, with nothing in them at all other than a mattress on the floor.
- Book Ends: Begins and ends with clips from the same grim, disturbing inmate talent show.
- Call-Back: An inmate is shown in the yard, talking to the psychiatrist, angrily protesting that he is fine and he is being fed full of drugs without his consent and that he wants to go back to regular prison. Later, that same inmate is shown pleading his case in a formal meeting of the board, telling them that the hospital is making him worse and that he wants to go back to prison. He's taken out before he's finished talking, and the chairman of the board says he'll be keeping the inmate and upping his tranquilizer dosage.
- Credits Gag: A deadly serious example. After the credits roll, a title card says "The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts 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.'" The next title card and the last thing in the movie says "Changes and improvements hae taken place at Massachusetts Correctional Institution Bridgewater since 1966."
- Deliberately Monochrome: A No Budget production shot by Wiseman on 16mm black-and-white film. In this case the grainy black-and-white photography only underlines the sense of terror and isolation.
- Documentary: Frederick Wiseman's first fly-on-the-wall documentary, as a camera captures what conditions are like inside a Massachusetts hospital for the criminally insane.
- Face Framed in Shadow: An artfully lit scene shows a woman singing on television, while an elderly inmate, his face half in shadow, tries to sing along.
- Fan Disservice: A theme of the movie right from the Shameful Strip of newly arrived inmates in the opening scene. While inmates do get prison uniforms, many of them are paraded around naked for no obvious reason. An inmate named Jim is taken out of his cell naked, led to a barber's chair while he is shaved, then taken back down the hallway, where a guard taunts him and provokes him into a tantrum before Jim is pushed, still naked, back into his completely bare cell.
- Force Feeding: A harrowing scene depicts a naked inmate, who apparently has not eaten in three days, being held down on a gurney while a tube is shoved down his nose and he is force-fed. Possibly the most disturbing part of it is how the prison psychiatrist has a cigarette clamped in his mouth and continues to smoke while inserting the tube. This scene is then intercut with clips of that same inmate, who apparently died soon after (Wiseman was only at the asylum for 29 days), being cleaned and prepared for burial.
- Leave the Camera Running: Many instances of long scenes without cuts. There is an infamous scene where a naked inmate named Jim is shaved and then taunted about the condition of his cell ("How come your room is so dirty, Jim?...You going to keep your room clean, Jim?") before he is returned to his cell, where the camera continues to roll while Jim paces around the room and does a repetitive sort of barking sound. The scene runs four minutes without a cut.
- Match Cut: A series of match cuts segues from a scene where an inmate is being force-fed to clips of that same inmate's body being cleaned and dressed for burial. The sequence ends with the door to the inmate's cell being shut, followed by a shot of the door to the storage cabinet in the morgue being slammed shut after the coffin is put inside.
- Prisoner Performance: The documentary film is Bookended by footage of a grim, disturbing talent show at a state hospital for the criminally insane.
- Scary Flashlight Face: The warden, who is enjoying the talent show a little too much and seems to regard himself as some sort of comedian, is shown at the end of the film telling a joke on the stage. The footlights of the stage light him from below, illuminating his face in a scary flashlight manner that is appropriate for the mood of this film.
- Shameful Strip: A group of what are apparently new arrival inmates are forced to strip and don their Institutional Apparel, as prison guards bark at them.
- Visual Title Drop: "TITICUT FOLLIES" is the name on the curtain backdrop, as dead-eyed inmates sing in a prison variety show in the opening scene. ("Titicut" is the Native American name for the nearby Taunton River.)
