Bite Your Lip, Hold Their Nose

Titicut Follies {Fred Wiseman, 1967}

Pictures that involve reform, in my opinion, all deserve to be produced under the same canopy of "direct cinema" as Titicut Follies. It is this tight-lipped cinematic style that makes the images of Follies cause a similar delirium in its viewers as in the patients of the facility it documents.

Wiseman seats his camera ambiguously in the back of the room, often cutting only between the figures in full, and then to their faces, which carry a range of both vacant and terrifying expressions. We sit in our auditorium chairs as viewers, staring back ourselves with the same vacant and terrifying expressions. Often the patients walk bare across cold cement floors contrasted by a gaggle of guards clad still in their uniforms accompanying them. This regulatory practice of stripping patients to prevent the transportation of dangerous items (razors, rope, etc.) calls into question a different ethical dilemma when captured so implicitly on film. Does the artistic dictum of ambivalent truth really justify the shedding of these helplessly inturned people's most basic layers of privacy?

Also, what of the film's initially passive but ultimately relentless scrutiny of the administrators present in the institution? Is there an understood right of the public to be allowed access to every minute detail or procedure that goes on in the penitentiaries funded by their tax dollars?

In my personal opinion, there is a strange limbo in the limits of privacy that becomes muddled when someone of seemingly little personal or psychological restraint, who having lost some level of control is accused of a crime and sentenced to imprisonment alongside medical treatment. It seems that the criminal act, if judged correctly by our system of law, should warrant the kinds of humiliating but often sadly necessary statutes that exist within these institutions.

That being said, I am of the opinion that the public has a right to know what goes on behind any closed door, and thus, I feel that Wiseman is perfectly within his bounds as an artist and a public servant in making this film. Now whether or not you think this film is a cake walk, is the real question. I personally enjoy how remorselessly Wiseman shoves his imagery down your nose and funnels it in your tummy, whether you're able to stomach it or not. And we all know, censors and of course federal legislators have the weakest stomachs of them all.

Intimately Lightweight

Primary {Robert Drew & Co, 1960}

As an extension of LIFE magazine's photojournalistic methodology, Primary does something quite outstanding in progressing the realm of candid art. The economy and mobility offered by the introduction of the first lightweight synchronized sound systems certainly spawned the first instances of true reportage in documentary cinema. Also, the collectivist approach of Robert Drew's team in both the editing and capturing created what has become the modern standard of "coverage" in following cultural and political happenings.

What struck me as unique about Primary is the sense of historical present offered by the absence of both interviews and inserted text. This observational film escapes the limitations of narrative reorganization (whether intentional or accidental) by arranging its material in a forthright, highly photographic manner. It shows the two candidates out in public working, not as talking heads, or up on pulpits. It even shows, without a fixed perspective, the mundanely repetitive nature of the work that these candidates assign themselves. The film makes its purpose one of revelation, not motivation, and thus frees itself from being in any way idiosyncratic or commanding in its examination.