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Titicut Follies (Size: 978.63 MB)
Description  The only American film banned from release for reasons other than obscenity or national security Titicut Follies chronicles a few days in the lives of both inmates and guards at the infamous Bridgewater State Hospital, a home for the criminally insane in Bridgewater, Massachsetts. If you assume that nothing here is staged, the only possible explanation for some of the footage we have here (aside from the assumption by the guards that they are somehow above the law) is that Wiseman and his crew shot a whole lot of footage before what we see here, and had been around long enough to become somewhat invisible, so that any of the guards' self-consciousness in front of the camera was shed before the actual footage we've got. There are times when some of the guards seem rather solicitous, even friendly towards some of the inmates, but those are not the scenes that people who have seen this film remember. It's the casual, almost quotidian brutality that will stay with you after you watch this film, a brutality which, I believe, stems from the guards not considering their charges to be in any way human. But then, I wonder why the film crew were allowed in in the first place; Bridgewater's problems were endemic long before filming began, including massive overcrowding (five hundred inmates in a three hundred person facility as of 1967) and prisoners who got "lost in the shuffle." I quote Wikipedia here: "An example of this was a patient named Charles, who was sentenced to Bridgewater in 1910 for breaking and entering. The maximum time for this felony was two years, [but] he still remained in the prison [as of] 1967." Lost in the shuffle, indeed. Gives "institutionalized" a whole new meaning. How do you look at your record, when it's like this, and say to an enterprising filmmaker, "sure, drop in and get all the footage you want."? Assuming brainlessness on the parts of the administrators who allowed the filming, however, is probably not the best way to go, although there's really no other rational explanation. I keep coming back to the idea that these people, who obviously represented the law, came to believe they were, themselves, above it. Thankfully, Titicut Follies sparked a firestorm of criticism, leading to a series of hearings that led to changes in the facility in 1972. It still, however, remains open today. Unbiased? Absolutely not. But the images Wiseman captured on film, and released to the public, are horrifying in the truest sense of the word. I have heard, and read, any number of people say that they have seen this movie once, and no matter how long ago it was, they will never see it again. That's the kind of movie Titicut Follies is; you will only see it once. But you should see it. History forgotten always repeats itself. Related Torrents
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