Titicut Follies · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A cigarette burns down between a psychiatrist's fingers while he threads a feeding tube into a man's nose. The ash gets longer. It hangs above the funnel where the liquid food is about to go in, and you find yourself watching it, waiting for it to drop, which is not what you expected to be doing during a scene like this. Wiseman doesn't cut to a reaction. He doesn't cut at all. The camera stays, and the staying is the method.

Nothing in Titicut Follies is argued. Eighty-four minutes inside the Massachusetts hospital at Bridgewater, where men judged criminally insane were held, and there is no narrator, no music except what somebody in the room is singing, no title telling you anyone's name, no thesis in words. Wiseman shot it in the spring of 1966 with a crew of two, John Marshall on camera and Wiseman himself carrying the microphone, in whatever light the fluorescent tubes and barred windows gave them, then edited alone for a year. What came out is a form: the institutional film, whose subject is a bounded organization rather than a person, revealed by its procedures instead of by a story.

Gilles Deleuze never wrote about Wiseman. He did describe, better than anyone, the thing this film is made of.

Deleuze split cinema in two. In the older regime, the movement-image, someone perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the action resolves it. Sheriff sees outlaw, draws, town saved. He called the link between perceiving and acting the sensory-motor circuit, and after 1945 he watched it break: characters who see everything and can do nothing adequate about it. That break he named the crisis of the action-image, and he found it in Italian fiction. Bridgewater supplies it with nobody writing it.

Watch Vladimir at the staff conference. He explains, lucidly and in the correct register, that the institution is making him worse and that he would like to be sent back to prison. He is not raving. He is not misunderstood. The clinicians hear him accurately and increase his medication. His reading of his own situation is the best one in the room and it has nowhere to go. That is the crisis precisely: not cruelty, not stupidity, but a cut circuit, in which seeing cannot become action. The officers can't act adequately either; they are men doing a job the conditions make impossible, which is why the indictment falls on a structure rather than on faces.

What fills the space where action used to be, Deleuze called pure optical and sound situations, opsigns and sonsigns: moments when a character, and you, can only look and listen. The lengthening ash is one. So is the naked man standing in an empty cell while officers ask him, over and over, whether his room is clean. There is nothing to do with the information and no next beat it sets up. Wiseman had the equipment for suspense; the two-person, no-lights, camera-and-Nagra rig came out of Robert Drew's unit, whose Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963) ran on a deadline. He kept the gear and dropped the clock. His sequences come out roughly equal in weight, ordered by rhyme and escalation rather than by consequence, and Deleuze's name for stretches that advance nothing is dead time, temps mort. Here it isn't a lull between events. It's the material.

Listen to what you can't see. Wiseman recorded the sound himself, standing a few feet from the lens, so the track is close and reverberant and often overloaded: clatter, echo, shouting from cells the camera never enters. Deleuze called the space a frame implies but doesn't show the out-of-field, and usually it promises somewhere else. Here it promises more of the same, which is how a shot of an empty tiled corridor communicates confinement.

Then there are the bodies. Stripped, shaved, tube-fed, laid out, embalmed, lowered. Late in life Deleuze wrote about a cinema of the body, where posture carries the duration plot used to carry, and about the gest: a bearing in which a social relation becomes visible without being stated. Bridgewater stages itself and Wiseman recognizes the staging. The strip search has choreography and he shoots it as choreography. The clinicians sit in a semicircle. The burial processes. The film opens and closes on the revue, guards and inmates singing together behind a tinsel curtain, and that is the argument, held in a posture: the line between keeper and kept is administrative, not natural. Goffman's Asylums (1961) is the obvious companion, though Wiseman refuses to be illustrating anybody's theory.

Now the cut everyone fights about. Wiseman intercuts the force-feeding with the preparation of that man's corpse for burial. The two events did not happen one after the other. The edit asserts a relation the footage cannot prove, and it asserts it across a gap, what Deleuze called the interstice: a cut that joins by "and" instead of by continuity, so the meaning belongs to neither shot but to the space between them. Here the film's contract with you turns strange. Bazin's case for realism rested on duration, on holding the shot and respecting the ambiguity of what's inside it. Marshall's camera is Bazinian to the bone. The editing is not. Wiseman calls his films "reality fictions," and the phrase is exact: the material is unstaged, the meaning is authored, and Deleuze's powers of the false is the concept for making that undecidability productive rather than shameful. Rouch and Morin had offered the opposite exit in Chronique d'un été (1961), filmmakers inside the frame provoking their subjects; here the crew registers only when a guard or an inmate glances at the lens.

Wiseman taught law before he made films, and he built this one like an exhibit list: evidence presented, verdict withheld, argument left to the finder of fact, who is you. Deleuze's lectosign is the image that has lost its sensory-motor obviousness and has to be read rather than followed. Most of the discomfort here is that reading being handed over with no help. Massachusetts grasped the danger and sued; for roughly a quarter century the film could legally be shown only to doctors, lawyers, social workers, students in those fields, and legislators. An audience of professional readers.

The debts are specific. From The Hunters (1957) Marshall brought the ethnographic discipline of holding position until an event completes itself, and the wide lens that keeps a whole room in frame around a body. Primary (1960) supplied the rig. On the Bowery (1956) had already found the theatre in men re-performing their own daily routines, which is what guards and inmates do here on cue. And The Cool World (1963), which Wiseman produced, taught him the rules he never afterward broke: real interiors, non-professionals playing versions of themselves, a track built from location ambience.

What it seeded is a practice: enter a closed institution, narrate nothing, let duration make the case. Wiseman's own forty-plus films first, from High School through Hospital, Welfare and Near Death, then Depardon's San Clemente, Philibert's La Moindre des choses, Wang Bing's 'Til Madness Do Us Part, and the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab's Leviathan, which pushes the camera well past Wiseman's restraint while keeping his premise.

Before 1967 a documentary told you what to conclude and marched toward revelation. Wiseman made one that ends where it began, with a show that will be staged again next year, and moved the whole burden of judgment onto the person watching. That move is standard practice now. And the film leaves open a question it can't answer: men who could not consent were filmed naked for strangers, and the case that this was witness rather than violation has never closed. Watching it means being asked to decide.

Watch it again for the hands. The officer's hand on a shoulder, the psychiatrist's on the tube, the hand that straightens a tie before the curtain goes up. Wiseman gives you the whole institution in what its hands are doing while its mouth is talking.