The Screengrab : titicut follies

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:15:00 GMT

TITICUT FOLLIES (1967)

Before I got my driver’s license, the only way to get to Boston from my hometown of Middleboro, Massachusetts (besides a ride from Mom & Dad) was a local bus that stopped at a prison in the neighboring town of Bridgewater to pick up the newly released ex-cons and ship ‘em home (or the nearest equivalent). Years later, I discovered the prison was actually the notorious state hospital for alcoholics, sex offenders and the criminally insane profiled in Frederick Wiseman’s controversial documentary Titicut Follies, a movie even more disturbing than all those long-ago bus rides. In stark black and white, Wiseman shows the subhuman conditions of the 1960s version of the facility and the desperation of the inmates (including one poor bastard I still remember vividly, years after the first and only time I watched the film, who keeps explaining, over and over again, that he’s perfectly sane and would really, really, really like to leave the premises). As an avid psychedelic drug enthusiast in my younger days, winding up in a mental hospital (mistakenly or not) has always been high on my list of worst-case scenarios, but Titicut Follies (named for the grimly surreal inmate “talent show” depicted in the film) is worst-case by way of 18th century Bedlam: “We see men needlessly stripped bare, insulted, herded about callously, mocked, taunted,” Robert Coles wrote of the film in The New Republic. “We see them ignored or locked interminably in cells. We hear the craziness in the air...” Massachusetts was so embarrassed by the film they tried not only to ban it, but also to have all copies destroyed (!) on the grounds that somehow the documentary violated the patients’ dignity more than, say, being held indefinitely in cell blocks without toilets and periodically hosed down. Wiseman asserted repeatedly that he’d received permission from all the patients who appeared in the film (or their guardians), yet (according to Wikipedia, at least) the film wasn’t legally cleared for general public release until 1991, at which point the Massachusetts State Supreme Court also stipulated the film would need to include a “brief explanation...that changes and improvements have taken place at Massachusetts' Correctional Institution in Bridgewater since 1966.” One would hope.

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)

In this year of Rachel Getting Married, it’s not at all hard to see why Jonathan Demme once made a movie that swept the Oscars. What’s surprising is that he won it for The Silence of the Lambs, a movie that in lesser hands, with a lesser cast, would have been little more than a clever genre exercise. But Demme’s capable direction, a masterful sense of mood and tone, and some stunning performances carried it into the realms of greatness, with Anthony Hopkins’ brutally mannered performance proving what a great villain can do for a movie. Some prison films are all about the experience of being on the inside, but others derive their tension and power from the time-honored tradition of the jailbreak. While Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s escape from his dismal subterranean dungeon (where he’s kept from touching anything solid, even a pen cap) is inevitable, it differs from most escape yarns in that the criminal’s liberation is something that fills us with dread instead of excitement. Lecter’s cruel psychological manipulation leads him out from the underground, and his brutal violence unleashes him on the world again after a decade of imprisonment. The movie’s final scenes are less a triumph than a threat: Satan unleashed upon the world again.

ANIMAL FACTORY (2000)

Steve Buscemi does an admirable job, in his second full-length directorial effort, of conveying the casual brutality and bizarre social cycles of prison life. By refusing both glamorization and utter degradation, he keeps his storytelling solid and balanced, allowing the powerful action on screen to work itself out in more subtle ways. Edward Furlong’s young convict finds himself totally unprepared for prison life, and even after he’s taken under the wing of ex-gang boss Willem Dafoe, he finds himself given over to fear that shapes his reactions to the prison world as much as any real violence or sexual assault. Buscemi’s simple, un-flashy approach is perfect for the material, and he wisely keeps himself off camera and lets his actors and situations tell the story. Of course, he’s aided and abetted, so to speak, by a worthy bunch of co-conspirators: the screenplay to Animal Factory was written by Eddie Bunker – best known as Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs, but also an established writer, actor, and career criminal whose own stints in prison inspired the script. Bunker’s friend Danny Trejo – a man he spent time with in prison and who, like him, was redeemed through his art – also has a leading role in the film, which is one of the reasons it reeks of authenticity.

I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (1932)

The melodramatic tone of most ‘30s films leads to an inevitable graying, and Mervyn LeRoy’s then-controversial I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang hasn’t aged like a fine wine. But it’s still an extremely worthwhile movie, with a harrowing escape scene and the nervous, twitchy shoulders of Oscar-nominated Paul Muni as a World War I vet who fled the intolerably brutal justice of the Georgia prison system. Based on a true story – in fact, Robert Burns, the man on whom Muni’s character was based, served as a technical adviser on the film while still a fugitive until he was forced to hit the road again – Chain Gang fudged the facts a bit. It’s no secret that the movie’s particulars were a bit glossed over in order to make Muni more appealing to audiences hard-hit by the Depression. But it certainly doesn’t make him a noble figure by any means; his downward spiral and lowlife ways only make it more shocking when we see how he’s systematically dehumanized by the chain gang system, which was little more than state-sponsored slavery. Even 75 years later, the movie’s final scene packs a punch, as Muni answers the question of how he manages to live with a simple, harsh response: “I steal.”

DOWN BY LAW (1986)

You don’t often hear the phrase “quirky prison comedy”, but if anyone can carry off that particular genre blend, it’s Jim Jarmusch. Assembling a unique cast – John Lurie as a big-talking pimp, Tom Waits as a laconic disc jockey, and Roberto Begnini (in his first English-speaking role, if you can call it that) as a bewildered Italian tourist – he deftly mixes together screwball comedy, existential drama, and the kind of quiet indie strangeness that would become his hallmark over the years to come. Compelled to escape from prison more or less because they can’t stand being stuck in the same cell with one another anymore (their scenes in jail are probably the funniest prison scenes this side of the end of The Producers), the three break out and trudge through the gorgeously photographed Louisiana bayou; they escape imprisonment, but they can’t escape each other, and freedom seems to have precious little to distinguish itself from jail for them. A perfect companion piece to Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law is perhaps the greatest of Jarmusch’s "beautiful losers" movies, and the whole thing should be experienced like your last night before heading off to jail: through a cloud of smoke and a fog of booze, with a good-looking and dangerous girl by your side.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

The Movie Moment: High School (1968, Frederick Wiseman)

Paul Clark — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

My father, a much more avid reader than I, once told me that “the more books you read, the more you need to read.” In my experience, that’s just as true for movie watching, and every year I find myself with more directors whose films I feel compelled to seek out. This year, one of my biggest moviegoing resolutions has been to acquaint myself with the work of Frederick Wiseman, who over the past four decades has become one of the most celebrated documentarians in film history.

Wiseman was an early proponent of a style called “direct cinema.” During the 1960s, the availability of handheld 16mm cameras and portable sound recorders afforded filmmakers to chronicle their subjects relatively unobtrusively. “Direct cinema” capitalized on this technology, and its practitioners attempted to overturn the traditional documentary style. By doing away with such artifices as narrators and talking-head interviews, directors like Wiseman, D.A. Pennebaker, and the Maysles brothers told their stories primarily through footage shot on the fly.

Wiseman’s 1968 film High School was only his second feature after 1967’s Titicut Follies, a muckraking portrait of a mental hospital. In High School, the surroundings are much more mundane, but the students are in their own ways just as institutionalized as Follies’ inmates. The world of High School is a place of learning, not just about academics but also about the traditional order of things. If Wiseman’s greatness as a filmmaker lies, to paraphrase Film Comment’s Kent Jones, in his portrayal of how institutions work rather than how they fail, then High School is as relevant today as it was forty years ago.

Consider an early scene in the Dean’s office, in which the Dean speaks with a student named Michael about an incident involving Michael and his teacher. Michael protests his assigned detention because he believes he was falsely accused of the initial infraction, plus in his words, “I don’t feel like I have to take anybody screaming at me.” But the Dean isn’t about to excuse Michael from his responsibility in the incident, for having stormed out of the classroom. According to the Dean, Michael needs to respect those in authority even when he disagrees, and to accept the detention he’s been given. “We have to establish that you can be a man and that you can take orders,” says the Dean, and Michael acquiesces, saying that he’ll take the detention, “but under protest.”

It’s scenes like this that play to the strengths of direct cinema. Rather than taking sides in the argument, Wiseman allows the scene to play out more or less in real time, with each party making his own points. A lesser film might have cut away from the scene with Michael speaking his mind, but Wiseman also shows us the Dean's side. Here’s a man who deals with disciplinary issues all day long, who’s there primarily to preserve the order in the school by upholding the authority of the teachers. It’s nothing personal- it’s just the job.

For all the talk of “objectivity” in direct cinema, the truth is that all documentaries impose to some extent their own agendas and theses on the footage they shoot. Time and again, Wiseman shows us scenes in which teachers and school administrators impart traditional notions of morality and behavior to the students: Do the work that’s assigned. No using the pay phone without a pass. Don’t have sex until you’re married. Walk tall. Type what’s on the page. Don’t jump up and down unless Simon says. As a principal tells a student, “we’re gonna do in this school what the majority wants.” Fair enough, but which majority does he mean?

Frederick Wiseman on DVD

Phil Nugent — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 16:30:00 GMT

For more than forty years, Frederick Wiseman has been one of the hardest-working and most respected documentary filmmakers in the world. Starting with the 1967 Titicut Follies, a look inside the Bridgewater, Mass., State Prison for the Criminally Insane that so rattled the prison administrators that they instigated legal proceedings that kept the film out of distribution for twenty-five years, he's made thirty films that examine one institution, activity, or way of life after another, mostly stamped with generic-sounding titles such as High School, Hospital, Basic Training, Welfare, Juvenile Court, Meat. Domestic Violence, and State Legislature. For most of his career, he's been dependent on public television not just for funding but for his widest national audience, and his films have remained dismayingly unavailable on home video. Now, finally, Wiseman's longtime theatrical distributor, Zipporah Films, is planning to make his full body of work available on DVD. They've got twenty-three movies available on disc, with the rest scheduled for eventual release. What's been the hold-up? "Nobody wanted to put out all the films," Wiseman explained to Nicolas Rapold, and he wanted all his babies out there and making new friends.

As the documentary film scene has exploded in recent years, Wiseman, even with his best-known work largely sheltered from public view, has grown legendary for his steady pace, his wide range of subjects, and for his precise yet nonjudgmental filmmaking style. Unlike some of the filmmakers who make big waves now, he doesn't charge in looking for what he's already decided he's going to find. He doesn't knock himself out with pre-production, either. "I try to get a sense of the geography and what the centers of power are. The shooting of the film is the research." Wiseman shoots with an eye towards finding the shape and rhythm of the finished picture in the editing process, and he's never gone in for narration and other explanatory devices. When he's not at the top of his game, the results can be baffling, but when he's cooking with gas, he succeeds in his goal of "trying to put you, the viewer, in the middle of these events and ask you to evaluate them based on your own experience." He's both an investigative journalist and a social realist novelist with a camera, and making his work available is one small step in seeing to it that the world make better sense.

IDA List FUBAR

Peter Smith — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

As anyone who's perused the American Film Institute's lists can tell you, consensus is boring. Unfortunately, it's hard to get around when you conduct a poll. The International Documentary Association has asked its members to select the twenty-five greatest documentaries ever made. (They voted from a list of 700 films, but that complete list doesn't seem to be available on the IDA's website.) It reveals that documentarians are just as prone to sticking with the "new release" shelves and shying away from subtitles as the rest of us. Despite the "international" in the IDA's name, only two foreign-language films made the top twenty-five — Buena Vista Social Club landed at #20 and Night and Fog at #22. Never fear, though: Michael Moore will come to save the day, with three films on the list. While including a number of landmarks (Titicut Follies, Don't Look Back, Grey Gardens), the list leans towards high-profile recent documentaries, including major films (Capturing the Friedmans, Grizzly Man) and mediocrities (Born into Brothels, Spellbound). Any films made before 1955 are missing — so much for Dziga Vertov (without whom Koyaanisqatsi, the #14 entry, would look much different) and Robert Flaherty. A strict definition of documentary seems to have kept F for Fake and Close Up at bay. All but two films are available on DVD — I wonder if this has anything to do with Netflix's sponsorship of the poll. Still, this list isn't entirely without merit in the long run — like the AFI's, it begs to be countered and is bound to spur dialogue, as it already has in the blogosphere. — Steve Erickson