Let the viewer decide: documentarian Frederick Wiseman on free speech, complexity, and the trouble with Michael Moore.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Interview

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

IT HAS BEEN 40 years since the premiere of Titicut Follies, a bleak and scathing documentary about an asylum for the criminally insane. The audience at that first screening saw a cascade of disturbing images of mistreatment and neglect, most notoriously a brutal force-feeding of a naked inmate. As the prisoner is fed through the nose, a guard tells him to "chew your food"; the tube itself is lubricated with grease, and a doctor dangles a burning cigarette over the funnel.

But the most grotesque detail may be the follies of the title: an annual musical revue put on by the prisoners and guards. The revue frames the film, which begins with a row of madmen with pompoms singing "Strike Up the Band" and ends with the cast crooning "So Long for Now." It's a strange and darkly comic performance, part Ziegfeld and part Bedlam.

The movie was both a landmark piece of journalism and a landmark work of art. It made the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater one of the most infamous madhouses in the country, and it is now one of the most celebrated documentaries of the '60s. It is also notable for two reasons that have nothing to do with its merits. It was the first picture to be directed by Frederick Wiseman, a former law professor who at age 37 was beginning a long series of rich and challenging films. And it is the only movie in U.S. history to be banned for reasons other than obscenity or national security.

The staff at the asylum cooperated with Wiseman as he shot the picture, and by his account they initially liked the movie. But as audiences' horrified reactions to what they were seeing became clear, the authorities turned against the film, arguing that it violated the privacy of the prisoners and moving to have it legally suppressed. (For a modern parallel, imagine applying the same argument to the photos taken at Abu Ghraib.)

Nudity-averse conservatives denounced the picture as an X-rated exploitation flick. Privacy-conscious liberals refused to defend it. The controversy attracted national attention, which led in turn to more reviews for the movie, many of them glowing. (Time said it "deserves to stand with works like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle as an accusation and a plea for reform.") But in much of the public debate--almost all of it conducted by people who had never seen the film--a documentary that exposed the mistreatment of inmates was itself accused of mistreating the inmates.

On January 4, 1968, Superior Court Judge Harry Kalus ruled for the state, denouncing Titicut Follies as "80 minutes of brutal sordidness and human degradation?' Playing critic as well as judge, he also attacked its experimental structure ("a hodgepodge of sequences") and its willingness to let viewers find their own meaning in the material ("There is no narrative accompanying the film, nor are there any subtitles"). He not only ruled that all screenings should cease but called for the movie itself to be destroyed. An appeals court only partially reversed the decision: The picture could still be shown in Massachusetts, it declared, but just to professionals and students in relevant fields. Since Wiseman was a citizen of Massachusetts, he wasn't able to show it freely outside the commonwealth either--and he controlled nearly all the copies of the film. The ban wasn't lifted until 1991.

Meanwhile, Wiseman kept making movies. Many of them, like Titicut Follies, look at life within bureaucracies and other hierarchical institutions: a public school (High School, 1968), an urban hospital (Hospital, 1970), a military training camp (Basic Training, 1971), a monastery (Essene, 1972), a welfare office (Welfare, 1975), a housing project (Public Housing, 1997). Certain topics keep recurring: power, coercion, dehumanization, and the ways we help and victimize both each other and ourselves. Some of his documentaries are remarkably long--Near Death (1989), about the intensive care unit at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital, clocks in at more than six hours--and all are told without...