Essential Frederick Wiseman true crime
the true crime that's worth your time
Titicut Follies is correctly revered as a classic, but that's not the only genre documentary on the legend's c.v.
SDB lists the others here — plus some further watching/reading — but if you’d like to get these pieces entire and ad-free in your inbox, try this…
Frederick Wiseman, the documentary-film titan who passed away earlier this week at 96 years of age, is probably best known for Titicut Follies, his 1967 feature debut about the Bridgewater (MA) State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
And rightly so – Wiseman's trademark assembly style, what we might call a purposefully unmediated build that relies on editing to shape and highlight the story, versus post-production explication like talking-head interviews or VO, is what the dispiriting realities of a midcentury prison hospital call for narratively. What Roger Ebert's review of Titicut deemed "not of high technical quality," you could just as easily see as "free of distracting signposting." It's not over-produced; in fact, it can seem barely produced at all, but rather found, transcribed.