Review of Titicut Follies

Titicut Follies is a documentary of social denunciation characterised by an unheard-of conceptual power, documenting the condition suffered by the patients of the criminal asylum "Massachusetts Correctional intitution", complex of buildings located in Titicut Street, in Bridgewater. Here the patients are treated and kept in inhuman conditions: they live in small cells with insufficient hygienic conditions in the cramped common rooms, in the grip of their delusions originated from their "mental pathologies". As if that were not enough, their sad condition contrasts the behaviour of the nurses: they abuse their authority by forcing the detainees to undergo physical beatings and extremely degrading psychological violence They are punished and yanked with force, forced to nudity in the presence of anyone in the vicinity, repressed and insulted with abusive words or mockery and forced to commit actions against their will (for example, they are taken by force or regulated in their physiological needs without the possibility of modification according to the actual needs). Remarkable sequence of dialogue in the central part, in which a patient argues with the director of the penitentiary regarding that unrequested aid that is literally being forced on him, although he seems to be perfectly able to understand (he admits his paranoid delusions and his pathology, linked to schizophrenia, but denounces unjust and oppressive treatment), exposing the controversy itself of the definition of insanity, obtained with a mere medical-psychological test that may not represent a unilaterally approved diagnosis. In addition, sequences of medical tests in pitiful conditions are shown: mere intuations made by the nurses with the cigarette in the hand or mouth, questionable controls that have dubious clinical usefulness as well as interviews made to degrade the integrity of the prisoner. Many events, such as the episode of a man forced into bare isolation, have such a visual power that shocks us his lack of concealment: the mistreat of the deents happens without concern and some moments are so tragic to seem directed ad hoc (while reports of the subsequent investigation reveal acts even worse than those shown).

A mirror that exposes the authorized deprivation of dignity revealing its tremendous essence: Wiseman seeks, as it may, to restore to the condemned their humanity, stolen by the institution that has reduced them to serial numbers. A reality that describes a condition that seems immutable if not by dying, with extreme impact and enormous journalistic consequences. Its direct and disturbing language amplifies the will of divulgation and the incessant attempt to censore it, fortunately, was not enough to conceal this cry of rebellion against the corrupt institution. An exposure to the light of the condition of "human slaughter" men rendered useless by social labels and degraded to survive as mere livestock.