Documentaries & Censorship #2 - Titicut Follies by Frederick Wiseman - psychiatric censorship in a crisis-ridden America
Trigger Warning : Some images may be disturbing. Physical violence and nudity.
After discussing the context of censorship by the French colonial government using the example of René Vautier’s Afrique 50, we will shift to a different decade and sociopolitical context by examining censorship in the United States during the late 1960s. The recent passing of Frederick Wiseman has brought to light the prolific and fascinating body of work by this filmmaker, who was by no means destined to make documentaries. Now considered one of the masters of direct cinema, his first film, Titicut Follies, was nevertheless banned from public screenings in the United States for over 20 years.
Filmed within the walls of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Titicut Follies lays bare the taboos of an American society in crisis. The film sets out to show, without commentary, what our “penal world”- to borrow Michel Foucault’s term from his book Madness and Civilization - has kept hidden. The sick, the disturbed, the sexual deviants, and the schizophrenics, all criminals, appear one after another before Wiseman’s watchful camera. Enough to shock the average housewife of capitalist America in the late 1960s!
But the most shocking aspect of the film remains the inhumane treatment meted out to the inmates. In scenes that are almost unbearable to watch, the guards at the asylum deliberately humiliate the patients. As a patient named Jim is being shaved, the medical staff openly mocks him in an attempt to provoke a breakdown, which seems to amuse them greatly. The patients are paraded around completely naked from room to room and treated like animals, in conditions reminiscent of those in concentration camps.
The violence of the prison and medical systems reaches its peak in the Malinowski case. A mentally ill patient who refused to eat, Malinowski had a feeding tube inserted so that food could be delivered directly into his stomach. During the insertion of the tube, the line between care and punishment blurs in a way that is deeply unsettling for the viewer. Wiseman’s editing, which intercut these shots with images of Malinowski’s coffin—he died just a few days later—explicitly condemns the institution’s violence against the bodies and lives of the patients themselves.
Shocking for the violence of its scenes, Titicut Follies was immediately censored by the Massachusetts Supreme Court on the grounds that it failed to respect the dignity of the patients/inmates. In reality, the film was released at a time when the American Way of Life and its institutions were being fiercely questioned across the country, at a time when the Vietnam War was exposing the contradictions of a U.S. capitalist model that was running out of steam.
Among these social and intellectual movements was the anti-psychiatry movement, led by figures such as Michel Foucault and R.D. Laing. In 1963, the issue of the inhumane treatment of the mentally ill had reached the general public with the release of the critically acclaimed fiction film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Milos Forman. Researchers today are reexamining the censorship of Titicut Follies in light of its subversive potential in the eyes of the U.S. government in the late 1960s.
In the next article, we will turn to the issue of geopolitical censorship, using the example of the French Ministry of Culture’s censorship of Road 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel in 2004.
Daphné
