We need to start by dealing with a matter that is far from obvious, which is to ask “What makes a film a documentary?” I think we have to ask it because Frederick Wiseman is always described as a documentary film-maker, and while of course in a certain sense that is true, it has also led to a certain kind of dismissal, as if being a documentary film-maker means you are somehow not to be thought of at the level of great fiction film-makers. A main reason I’m embarking on this journal (and journey) is to argue that these are the films of a great artist, one who belongs in any pantheon with Hitchcock, Ford, Lang, and whoever else you hold high up for their cinematic accomplishments. Besides multiple masterpieces, the body of work is staggering, and I think they need to be looked at the way all films are: for what they offer us as art works, full of ideas, visual style, complex narrative, humor, connections to the world, and all the things we hope to get from movies.
When we watch a documentary, we tend to think mainly in terms of the issues it raises or the problems it explores. This is well and good, but with Wiseman, there is no need to stop there. Or rather, they can be documentaries, but they can be plenty of other things too. So that’s what I’m going to go for a lot here: what are the things when you watch these films that you can come away with. What, I would dare, makes them works of art, or at least films worth appreciating and thinking about for more than the issues they might be seen to be about. This can mean going beyond a documentary point-of-view, in considering what else we take from Wiseman films than simply their topical content.
In watching Titicut Follies (and always I’ll just capitalized the film titles to save all those quotation marks or italics), for example, why are there all of those songs? This is a film shot in an institution for the criminally insane, yet it starts and ends with songs, and there are at least three or four more along the way. Somehow it’s appropriate that Wiseman’s body of films begins with “Strike Up the Band”, as if he’s announcing the start of a life’s work. The strangeness of the Follies, where appropriately we can’t tell if we’re watching a show of inmates or of guards or of some combination, can tip us off right away to how we have to watch: not being guided to what we should think about what we see, and perhaps not even knowing why what we’re looking at matters. There’s an artificiality too to starting on stage, and an absurdity. A great moment comes quickly when the group singing onstage reveals they’ve been hiding cheerleader-like pom poms, and their song also breaks out into a strange dance routine. Theatricality, absurdity, odd and unpredictable behavior, presented without clear cues as to what’s going on. There’s also a degree of cinematic style. The opening shot of the song and dance is all in one shot, starting on the whole group, then moving in to pan across their faces, and then moving out again - an elaborate movement that looks planned but likely is not since these are not activities in the control of the film-maker or which could be restaged for the sake of a different vantage point.
So, back to those songs. We return at the end to the Follies stage, for the song “So Long for Now”, as if the film has had a clear beginning and ending. So the whole film has been framed by these same Follies. The film certainly then has a structure, just not a chronological one. One of the challenges we have is to consider (as we do in all movies) why does one scene follow another? Are there recurring characters? Is there ever a temporal order? Our overriding sense here is of being stuck inside an institution. Whether one thing happens on a Monday and the next maybe the Friday before generally doesn’t matter. This itself is an extraordinary way to make films. Back in the day I thought of this as a “mosaic” structure, which is partly true but strikes me now as rather simplistic. Mosaic pieces fit. These can be more Eisenstinian - they can collide, or they can mark moments of surprise or shifts of tone or do a number of other interesting things. They might be organized to continue an idea, or to contradict it. And the work of acknowledging these connections can become a principal activity of the viewer, as they must have been for Wiseman in the many months he spends in editing. A film which has a chronology or is organized around specific issues can come together easily. Wiseman’s take time, because non-conventional narrative, complexity, and ambiguity are far more of a challenge, and then hopefully far more of a reward.
If one wants to view Titicut Follies as an expose of an appalling institution, there’s certainly plenty to support that. Men being forced to empty pails of their own waste each morning, too many scenes of nakedness and cavalier treatment, a forced feeding through a tube inserted through an inmate’s nose, inmates made worse by their supposed hospitalization - it’s clearly a horrific place to spend any time. But it’s needlessly limiting to see this as the film’s “purpose” or to take that as its principal for reason for being. As an extreme version of a Wiseman film, in that it’s so clearly filmed in a place with serious problems, even here we can see a lot more going on and more to consider.
Beyond those times when we’re not sure whether we’re seeing guards or inmates comes those many moments when the supposedly insane say very smart or amusing things. Wiseman has an appreciation for unusual speech - as in rants which somehow still have moments of wisdom. He’s there to watch and listen, and to present it in a way that isn’t clouded by his own judgement. We get to witness these distilled moments for ourselves and to be horrified or amused or sometimes both at once. A guy may engage in a disjointed rant about Viet Nam, and it can turn into a serious discussion of communism, and then be followed by another guy standing on his head while singing “Ballad of the Green Berets” (another song). There’s an absurdity and a sadness and still some ideas, all at once.
Irony is frequently at work, but that’s almost too simple a word. It’s not just knowing sometimes that either serious matters have a humorous edge or that there are more ways than just at face value we can view what we’re seeing. The ironies can be knowing there are no simple answers being offered, or no one way to take what we’re looking at. When we see an inmate being interviewed by a heavily German-accented doctor, at first it can seem funny. Then we find out that the man is an admitted repeat pedophile, and of course then we see this is a guy that needs to be locked up somewhere, if not perhaps in a place so harsh as this. The institution changes from a place we’re judging to a site of revealing human experience - this is how some people are and let’s see what we can make of all this. Maybe the film isn’t making judgements like we think it is. That would be too easy, and too simple.
Towards the end of the film, I was also very struck by the methodical and thorough approach Wiseman takes to showing the process of one inmate’s death, in a long sequence just before we return to the Follies. A body is removed from a morgue drawer and placed in a wooden casket. We see the morgue drawer slid shut. Then we watch individual screws put in to close the lid, and the casket then carried to a hearse waiting just outside the door. For the only time, we leave the grounds of the institution to go to the burial site, where the man’s body seems treated more respectfully than when he was alive. We see a priest offer the words “Remember man that thou are dust and to dust thou shall return”. It is not the last time we will see death in a Wiseman film. Here it brings the institution back out into the world, perhaps reminding us of the common experiences we have been witnessing, however grotesque they might have appeared.
I take from Titicut Follies more a sense of how strange this place is, yet how recognizable. There are scenes that look like they are invoking concentration camps. Others make me feel like it’s full of people who are maybe just more extreme cases of how lots of people are. I was especially struck by a long sequence, at least a few minutes, of a naked man stomping around in his cell doing a surreal kind of dance, for a time banging on a window, obviously very mentally disturbed. After a good deal of this, a guard gets out of him that he was for a time a junior high school math teacher. Somehow we needed to see for a fair amount of time how sick this man is before we learn something of his earlier life. We need a little patience as a viewer, and a way of watching that leaves us open to unexpected reveals.
It should be said about Titicut Follies, as it’s the first and oldest of Wiseman’s films, that it doesn’t seem dated or less relevant for its age. Technically it can feel a little primitive, because cameras then were obviously not what they are now in terms of portability and image quality. The sound particularly can be difficult to hear. Yet it’s not a historical relic. It’s a funny, scary, horrific, complex experience.
It ends on a bit of humor I had never noticed before, after the final credits. A card comes on which says: “The Supreme 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.” You would think that card itself would have done the job it’s meant to. Instead, it’s followed by another card which says “Changes and improvements have taken place at Massachusetts Correctional Institution Bridgewater since 1966.” If you can figure out why that second card is funny, and you had the patience to keep watching for this payoff, then I’d say you’re a good Wiseman viewer.