Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, New and Expanded Edition

15. “Ethnography in the First Person”: Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies

Chapter 15 “Ethnography in the First Person” Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies Barry Keith Grant Titicut Follies (1967) is a powerful documentary that exposes the appalling conditions at Bridgewater, a state institution for the criminally insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. The first in a series of documentaries about American institutional life by Frederick Wiseman, it has also been one of his most controversial. Testifying to its power is the tangled history of litigation it engendered.1 Wiseman began making films in the 1960s, working contemporaneously with such filmmakers as Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and David and Albert Maysles during the great period of American direct cinema. But he has developed his own distinctive style and vision, one already evident in Titicut Follies. Like his subsequent films, Titicut Follies not only explores the situation at Bridgewater but deftly uses its subject metaphorically to explore broad social issues as well as the ethical implications of its own approach to documentary. Observational Cinema and Personal Expression Wiseman sees his films as a series of works that presents “a natural history of the way we live” (quoted in Eames 97), and, in a sense, his work constitutes a form of ethnographic cinema that looks at the filmmaker’s own culture rather than another.2 Each of his films focuses on a different 254 B A R R Y K E I T H G R A N T American institution. In the twenty-seven feature-length documentaries Wiseman has made in as many years, he has ranged from examining institutions concentrated within individual buildings (High School, 1968) to those international in scope (Sinai Field Mission, 1978), from specific government institutions of social service (Juvenile Court, 1973; Welfare, 1975) to those less tangible ones organized by principles of ideology and culture (Canal Zone, 1977; Model, 1980). He has broadly defined an institution as “a series of activities that take place in a limited geographical area with a more or less consistent group of people being involved” (quoted in Rosenthal 69). Unlike the rich and famous individuals chronicled in the films of Leacock, Pennebaker, and the Maysles, Wiseman claims to want to make documentaries in which “The institutions will be the star” (Rosenthal 69). Two successive five-year contracts with WNET, New York’s PBS station, allowed Wiseman to make one film a year, from 1971 to 1981, beginning with Essene (1972), without constraint as to subject matter or running time.3 Generally, the WNET showings have been followed by national PBS broadcasts and, with the exception of Titicut Follies, all of Wiseman’s documentaries have been broadcast on PBS stations. As well, they have been shown on television in numerous European countries. In all these films, Wiseman combines detached observation and expressive manipulation, merging observational cinema’s aesthetic of the seemingly “uninvolved bystander” (Barnouw 254–55) with an expressive use of mise-en-scène and montage. The result is what Jean Rouch has called “ethnographic cinema in the first person” (quoted in Eaton 23). This unique approach has garnered consistent praise from appreciative critics, who have called him “the most sophisticated intelligence in documentary ” (Kael 204) and even “the most interesting of American directors” (Bromwich 508). Titicut Follies was shot by ethnographic filmmaker John Marshall (The Hunters, 1958), a choice that suggests Wiseman’s approach to Bridgewater is that of a detached observer. Yet the film is also carefully structured to advance its maker’s personal sense of moral outrage. Wiseman says he began making films out of an urge for social reform, and Titicut Follies, his first film, is in fact his most overtly didactic. Before becoming a filmmaker, he taught courses in criminal law, family law, legal medicine, and psychiatry and the law at Boston and Brandeis universities beginning in 1958. Wiseman got the idea for Titicut Follies from visits he made with his students to Bridgewater , feeling that they should know where they might be sending convicted criminals later on when they became district attorneys and judges. He says that “the idea of the movie came out of the absolute sense of shock about Titicut Follies 255 what Bridgewater was about” (quoted in Robb 29), and the film works to evoke a similar response in most viewers. In Titicut Follies, as always, Wiseman uses lightweight, portable 16-mm cameras and sync-sound equipment, filming with a handheld camera rather than a tripod, and capturing events as they happen, without...