Titicut Follies

Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies is a landmark of cinéma vérité. It documents the day to day routines within Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Bridgewater, a mental hospital for the criminally insane. What is most striking about Wiseman’s film however is how quiet this movie is. True to vérité style, the film never showcases anything as above ordinary, makes no judgment calls for the spectator. It challenges our sense of the everyday by forcing us to observe, and to wonder, what constitutes everyday life at a mental hospital for criminals. Its focus is on violence that is as daily as the newspaper, the unspectacular coercion by which the institution maintains itself. It is the incredible accomplishment of the film to incite the viewer…

like Frederick Wiseman who focused more on long, drawn out, and more realistic camera shots in his Titicut Follies. Again not a bad thing at all. This is just two different styles that try to tell their own stories. Sound and music in direct cinema are two other medias that are also very scrutinized when it comes to classifying what is Direct Cinema. Most people would consider a soundtrack or a voiceover to be an obstruction to a true unbiased perspective, but I think in some places it works.…

The documentary Titicut Follies which takes place at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution located within Bridgewater takes a look into what a total institution was and still is. Goffman’s various definitions on what makes an institution a total intuition from his novel Asylums are very prevalent within the film. Such as his definition of a total institution which separates three spheres of life. It also shows multiple stereotypes between the inmate, staff relationship of what each group…

documentary, music is often used in the background to kind of give you a gangster vibe that the film is talking about. There are parts of silence used but that is only when Gold is talking and it’s night time. Gold uses the music as an attraction to the film because the music is not loud and distracting but it is relevant to the scene and the mood they’re trying to create. In terms of the way it was directed, the Vice documentary was directed by Danny Gold, I thought that this direction was…