FREE AT LAST: "Titicut Follies," Frederick Wiseman's cold eye on abuses at Bridgewater State Hospital, will be shown in its original form at the Boston Film Festival. Made 24 years ago, the film was banned from public exhibition, then cleared for release with some...

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I must acknowledge from the outset that the mostly derisive reviews of John Maybury's The Jacket placed it very low on my reviewing priority list-until my astute Freudian-auteurist friend, Stephen Gottlieb, told me to reconsider the film. He warned me that its narrative construction didn't...

Titicut Follies is a very important film because its impact touches areas of law regarding private rights and public rights, and the final legal fate of the film will be of extreme importance, as a step forward or backward, to the future of documentary film-making. (p. 30) The film is not as exciting or lurid as I had been led to believe, nor is it especially dramatic. Its main force must lie in the viewer's awareness that he is watching real people in an institution that exists as fact. This is not ...

Ironically [Titicut Follies] is so effective because it is not another Snake Pit, another brutal and unrelenting exposé of life behind the closed doors of a mental hospital. Yes, there are some scandalous and disgusting moments, but by and large they are not those that offer us the standard "backward" scene, with its shrieks and groans and hilarious desolation or grim excitement. I have seen much worse in other state hospitals that Massachusetts maintains. Something else is at work to g...

The editing patterns in Titicut Follies are the unheralded and monstrous discoveries in the small of the mind. Two men become one, and two unrelated incidents form one episode as the intricately structured and highly organized madness reveals itself to an initiate. Perceptions and time are constantly regrouping—yet not in order that they should become credible or recognizable or even be given a name—simply changing. The film seems to have been cut as the hospital was perceived and the editing ...