21c Museum Foundation's Monthly Film Series with LFS Presents
Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies

Tuesday, March 18, 7pm  
Tuesday, March 18, 9pm  
Atrium Gallery
The event is free and open to the public
 

Total running time: 84 minutes. Film will be screened on 16mm prints.
Please note that due to its documentary nature, this film contains adult content.

Titicut Follies

Frederick Wiseman made his documentary debut with this controversial 84-minute survey of conditions that existed during the mid-'60s at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Made in 1967, the film was subjected to a worldwide ban until 1992 because the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that it was an invasion of inmate privacy.

The film goes behind the walls to show stark and graphic images exposing the treatment of inmates by guards, social workers, and psychiatrists. The title refers to a musical revue staged by inmates and guards. The documentary was cited as the "Best Film Dealing with the Human Condition" at the 1967 Festival Dei Popoli (Florence) and also honored as the "Best Film" at the 1967 Mannheim International Filmweek. The story behind the complicated legal issues raised by this film and the attempts to suppress it are detailed by Carolyn Anderson and Thomas W. Benson in their book, Documentary Dilemmas: Frederick Wiseman's "Titicut Follies"  (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991).

"TITICUT FOLLIES is a documentary film that tells you more than you could possibly want to know - but no more than you should know - about life behind the walls of one of those institutions where we file and forget the criminal insane... A society's treatment of the least of its citizens - and surely these are the least of ours - is perhaps the best measure of its civilization. The repulsive reality revealed in it forces us to contemplate our capacity for callousness."

 – Richard Schickel, Life Magazine

About the Filmmaker

Fred Wiseman is probably one of today’s greatest living documentary filmmakers. For close to thirty years, thanks to the Public Broadcast Service (PBS), he has created an exceptional body of work consisting of thirty full length films devoted primarily to exploring American institutions. Over time these films have become a record of the western world, since now more than ever as we approach the century’s close, nothing North American is really foreign to us.

His approach reveals the profound acknowledged and unacknowledged conformity and inequality of American society. Wiseman’s films are also a reflection on democracy. What do his films portray, the “American dream” or the “air conditioned nightmare”? Both, but also a questioning of the world and of existence.

Occasionally, his films describe less circumscribed institutions – the world of fashion, a public park, and a ski resort. In addition to examining the social and ethical questions he is not afraid to confront the “big” metaphysical questions particularly in the films about handicapped children and dying patients. The filmmaker is trying to encompass all of human experience in his films.

(Zipporah Films)

Other projects include High School (1968), Hospital (1970), Basic Training (1971), Welfare (1975), and Public Housing (1997).

21c is proud to partner with the Louisville Film Society in the continuing Monthly Film Series. LFS is a publicly supported non-profit organization; support comes from memberships, event admission, advertisement, contributions, donated materials, and services.