Dictionary.com finds five entries for the word truth:
truth (tr th)
n. pl. truths (tr thz, tr ths)
1. Conformity to fact or actuality.
2. A statement proven to be or accepted as true.
3. Sincerity; integrity.
4. Fidelity to an original or standard.
5.
a. Reality; actuality.
b. That which is considered to be the supreme reality and to have the ultimate meaning and value of existence.
Throughout the history of documentary filmmaking, the question of the “truth” in documentary filmmaking comes up over and over again. Did Robert Flaherty tell “the truth” about his subject in Nanook of the North (1922)? What was “the truth” that Leni Riefenstahl was telling in Triumph of the Will (1934)? Whose “truth” was Barbara Kopple documenting in American Dream (1991) or Connie Field in The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980)? Can we believe that we are viewing the objective truth about a subject when we are viewing a documentary film and if we, as viewers, do expect “the truth” from documentary, why? Do we imagine that the makers of such films have no opinions regarding their subjects, no agendas? If that were the case what would be the point of making the films in the first place? Still, we tend, in general, to separate fictional feature filmmaking from documentary as if one holds more veracity than the other. American audiences expect that the documentarian has an obligation to “the truth” in the same way we expect to get the news from television, the unadulterated truth. (We will NOT be discussing media bias in this essay!)
I suspect part of the reason we expect “the truth” from documentary film can be accounted for by movements in documentary filmmaking that first became prominent in the 1950’s and 60’s, cinéma vérité and direct cinema. Although it might be said that cinéma vérité and direct cinema find their origins in Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda (Russian for “cinema of truth”) it is more the technique of both cinéma vérité and direct cinema that give them their true meanings. With the advent of more mobile technology in the ‘50’s and 60’s such as smaller, lighter cameras, better lenses, synchronous recording capabilities, and faster film stock, the documentary filmmaker was granted access to their subjects as never before. The technology allowed the filmmaker to become somewhat “invisible” and minimize the effect they, as intrusive filmmakers in a situation, would have on the events filmed.
In 1958, Robert Drew at Time, Inc., in New York, assembled a group of filmmakers and technicians to experiment in documentary filmmaking with the burgeoning technology. The group included such now renowned filmmakers as D.A Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, and David and Albert Maysles, all influenced by the cinéma vérité of France (such as Blood of the Beasts and Hôtel des Invalides from French filmmaker Georges Franju) and the Free Cinema filmmakers of Britain (such as Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson). With films like Primary (1960), Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963), The Chair (1963) and, ironically, The Fischer Quintuplets, which was originally entitled Happy Mother’s Day but had been heavily re-edited and renamed for public consumption by ABC in 1963, the Drew group gave, with their “observer” techniques, the American public reason to believe that what it was viewing was, in fact, the truth and influenced many other documentary filmmakers in the process.
These films looked, for all the world, like reportage. The filmmakers had unbelievable access to their subjects and with minimal voice over narration to explain to the audience what they were seeing, and with the synchronous sound recording, “the truth” appeared evident. Without access to the film editing process (we only think about it once a year at the Oscars, and even then wish the presenters would hurry up and get to the REAL awards), nor any idea of how much film stock is used in documentary filmmaking, nor any indication of what scenes might have been minimally “staged” expressly for the camera, American documentary film audiences expect veracity. And so, it’s not surprising that a film like Wiseman’s Titicut Follies was banned from public viewing for 25 years. The “truth” about the Massachusetts asylum wasn’t very pretty in Wiseman’s camera’s eye and the Massachusetts Supreme Court didn’t want the public to see it. SOMEbody believed it was the truth!
Although possibly influenced in some ways by the Drew group and it’s films, Wiseman’s films exhibit the more stringent guidelines of direct cinema including no voice-over narration, no staging of anything for the camera, and no interviews. Eric Barnouw, in Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film says of Wiseman, “He foreswore narrative explanations and comments. He selected institutions through which society propagates itself, or which cushion—and therefore reflect—its strains and tensions. All his films became studies of the exercise of power in American society—not at high levels, but at the community level.”
In Titicut Follies, Wiseman’s unflinching camera eye takes us into the inner workings of a mental institution for the criminally insane. The first scene is a performance of “Strike Up the Band” by guards and inmates during an annual show called The Titicut Follies, from which the film takes its title. Just when the viewer is getting comfortable with the performance Wiseman cuts to an uncomfortable scene of the inmates, many of them naked, lining up to receive clean clothing from the guards. The camera pans a large room where the inmates are herded through like cattle (and basically treated as such by the guards) to be given their clothing and we recognize several of the guards and inmates as having been in the previous jocular scene of the performance. It is a stark contrastt to the previous scene and typical to Wiseman films.
The next scene is of an inmate, another we recognize from the follies lineup, being questioned by a doctor (obviously a psychiatrist) about his crime. The camera is focused in close-up on the young man’s face as he talks. Apparently the innocent looking fellow is, in fact, a convicted pedophile. The doctor’s questioning seems to have less to do with finding out what the inmate thinks of his own crimes and more to do with shaming the young man. We feel an instant empathy and discomfort for him. Abrupt cut again to the scene of the inmates disrobing to get their clean clothes. Another abrupt cut back to the doctor questioning the young man again, this time with the camera focused on the doctor, who comes off as arrogant and intent on cornering the young man verbally. Our empathy for the young man increases. Another abrupt cut, without explanation or context, to a few seconds of another tight close-up of an inmate attempting to talk through a profound stutter, which of course makes the observer even MORE uncomfortable, then abruptly back to the doctor and the young man, this time the camera is back to the young man’s face. The doctor says “You know you’re a sick man don’t you?” Whereupon he relates a litany of the young man’s crimes back to him and concludes with “Do you think you’re a normal man?” The poor young man replies “Yeah, I need help but I don’t know where I can get it.” To which the doctor answers laconically, “Well, you get it here, I guess.” There is no narrative voice-over telling us what to think of the young man and his crimes, no explanatory information about his treatment or the qualifications of the doctor. Nothing evident to inform the audience how to feel or what to think. Wiseman’s not telling us what to feel or what to think is he? What we think we’re seeing is an unbiased document of a filmed conversation but Wiseman has, through editing, told us what he thinks is going on in the scene. A Wikipedia article on Wiseman quotes him as saying:
All aspects of documentary filmmaking involve choice and are therefore manipulative. But the ethical ... aspect of it is that you have to ... try to make [a film that] is true to the spirit of your sense of what was going on. ... My view is that these films are biased, prejudiced, condensed, compressed but fair. I think what I do is make movies that are not accurate in any objective sense, but accurate in the sense that I think they're a fair account of the experience I've had in making the movie. (Spotnitz)
In Titicut Follies, this pattern of abrupt cuts, and fragmentary views of life in the state mental hospital build to a crescendo. There is an excruciating jumble of scenes of guards hosing out dirty cells while speaking to a naked patient named Jim. The guards keep asking Jim why he has dirtied his cell. Jim has no comprehensible answers for the guards so he just keeps babbling at them, trying to answer but unable to, and the guards, who must be aware that the man can’t give them an answer, just keep badgering Jim until he starts to scream at them. In the last of this sequence of scenes, we hear an off-camera guard asking Jim about his life before coming to Bridgewater and we find out that Jim was once a school teacher, a sane man with a sane job. In another sequence of scenes we see an inmate who sounds sane attempting to explain to the doctor (who is mostly out of the frame) how being in Bridgewater is harming his mental health and arguing he should be transferred back to prison where he might have the chance of release. Later we hear the doctors discussing treatment for this same inmate. More drugs, they decide, are in order to make him less “confrontational” and more “manageable”.
In yet another excruciating sequence, we are shown another doctor putting a feeding tube through the nose and down the throat of an emaciated inmate who is all but catatonic. As the tube feeding begins the doctor’s cigarette dangles precariously from his mouth over the funnel containing the liquid nourishment. Interspersed throughout this scene are silent scenes of this same man, dead now, being prepared for burial by a technician. The implication is that the tube feeding has been in vain. But we’re not told that there is any direct correlation between the tube feeding and the man’s death. It’s just what Wiseman is implying by his editing choices.
There are very few scenes in Titicut Follies where the staff appears sympathetic or caring toward the inmates. For the most part, they seem condescending or indifferent, as if they are dealing with animals in a zoo rather than human beings. The film ends the way it began, with a different take, perhaps a rehearsal, of the same song in the Titicut Follies show, but we now see that jolly scene differently. How did Wiseman do that without voice-over narration, explanation, or any evidence of chronology of events? With careful editing, Wiseman constructed a narrative that gives the viewer the “truth” of his “experience [he] had making the movie.”
Wiseman does very little research on the subjects he chooses for his films and has often been quoted as saying they are his own explorations into the given subject matter. He became interested in making a film at Bridgewater State Hospital after taking his law students on field trips there. In an online interview with Neal Poppy of Salon.com Wiseman says, “I have no idea what the themes or the point of view are going to be until I get well into the editing. I don't have a story in mind in advance and I don't set out in these movies to prove a thesis. I discover what the themes are as I put the film together, as I edit the sequences and study the material.”
So the “truth” Frederick Wiseman is telling us is his truth, the truth of his experience making a film in a mental institution for the criminally insane, or a high school, or a basic training camp of the US Army, or Central Park, or juvenile court, or Belfast, Maine. Wiseman’s films are examinations of institutions alright, but through the process of editing, Wiseman is relating his own subjective opinion of those institutions. Titicut Follies is like a poem about a madhouse and I am reminded, in thinking about the film’s effect on me, of an Anne Sexton poem, from her book To Bedlam and Part Way Back, called Ringing the Bells :
And this is the way they ring
the bells in Bedlam
and this is the bell-lady
who comes each Tuesday morning
to give us a music lesson
and because the attendants make you go
and because we mind by instinct,
like bees caught in the wrong hive,
we are the circle of crazy ladies
who sit in the lounge of the mental house
and smile at the smiling woman
who passes us each a bell,
who points at my hand
that holds my bell, E flat,
and this is the gray dress next to me
who grumbles as if it were special
to be old, to be old,
and this is the small hunched squirrel girl
on the other side of me
who picks at the hairs over her lip,
who picks at the hairs over her lip all day,
and this is how the bells really sound,
as untroubled and clean
as a workable kitchen,
and this is always my bell responding
to my hand that responds to the lady
who points at me, E flat;
and although we are not better for it,
they tell you to go. And you do.
Both the poem and the film ask us, the audience and reader, to see through an artist’s eyes, what they are seeing. In assessing Frederick Wiseman’s film, Titicut Follies, for “truth”, I’ll go with number 3, from Dictionary.com, “sincerity, integrity”.
Sources
Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film
Oxford University Press, New York, 1993
Salon.com Frederick Wiseman
http://dir.salon.com/story/people/conv/2002/01/30/wiseman/index.html accessed 5/1/06
Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1981
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Frederick Wiseman.
(Spotnitz, Frank: "Dialogue on film" American Film v.16 n.5 (May 1991): 16-21)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Wiseman, accessed 5/1/06
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Titicut Follies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titicut_Follies accessed 5/1/06
