An infernal vaudeville. A mortuary musical. The cognitive dissonance inscribed in the title, "Titicut Follies", is the hermeneutic key to deciphering the telluric impact of Frederick Wiseman’s first, unsurpassed masterpiece. “Follies” evokes the lavish, feathered revues of Ziegfeld, the mockery, the choreographed lightness. “Titicut” is the Wampanoag-derived name for the area where the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Massachusetts, is located. The juxtaposition is not merely ironic; it is a declaration of poetics, an oxymoron that tears through the veil of representation and plunges us into a Dantesque circle of hell, filmed with the ruthless objectivity of an autopsy report.

Wiseman, a lawyer and professor, does not enter Bridgewater with the intent of a social reformer or an investigative journalist, though his film would, in spite of itself, become a legal weapon and a document of denunciation. He enters with the gaze of a phenomenologist, with a camera that is not a compassionate eye, but an entomological lens. This is the fulcrum of his cinéma vérité, so different from the warmer, more participatory style of someone like Jean Rouch. John Marshall’s camera, operated with an almost spectral fluidity, does not judge, comment, or explain. It records. And in its recording, it dissects the complex and perverse liturgies of institutional power. The result is a work that transcends documentary to become an anthropological essay on the nature of sanity, control, and dehumanization—a visual experience so extreme it makes the most disturbing fictions of a Haneke or a Gaspar Noé pale in comparison.

The film is structured like a descent into the inferno without a Virgil to guide us. There is no linear narrative, no protagonists in the classic sense. The “characters” are interchangeable archetypes in the grand mechanism of the institution: the naked, delirious patient; the condescending doctor smoking a cigarette while a nasogastric tube is forced down a man’s throat; the guard who jokes with a casual, almost bored cruelty. We are faced with an architecture of the grotesque that brings to mind not so much cinema as the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or the etchings of Goya’s “Caprichos.” The flaccid, white flesh of the patients, exposed without shame, is reminiscent of the tortured and deformed bodies in “The Disasters of War.” It is a brutal, almost chthonic realism that lays bare not only the bodies, but the very essence of human vulnerability.

Wiseman orchestrates his material with a formidable directorial intelligence, creating a constant dialectic between word and image, sound and silence. A patient is interrogated by a psychiatrist in a dialogue that seems lifted from a play by Beckett or Ionesco: the questions are absurd, the answers circular, logic is banished. It is the perfect representation of bureaucratic and psychiatric power legitimizing itself through a language that has lost all contact with reality. Immediately after, without a cut, we are catapulted into the physical violence of a force-feeding. Language fails; the body becomes the last, desperate battlefield. This editing is not accidental; it is a thesis. Wiseman shows us how verbal and psychological violence is the prelude to, and justification for, physical violence.

And then, there are the “Follies,” the talent show that gives the film its title. In a conventional work, this might represent a moment of catharsis, a glimmer of humanity. Here, it is the apex of the grotesque. Patients and guards put on a tuneless, ramshackle variety show, a parody of normality that is more terrifying than overt madness. It is a coerced performance, an exhibition of sanity to please the jailers, which reveals the intrinsically theatrical nature of the institution itself. Everyone is playing a part: the doctor plays the part of the healer, the guard that of the guardian, the patient that of the madman. Bridgewater is not a hospital; it is a stage where the tragedy of absolute power is performed. The most fitting analogy is not with cinema, but with Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, the ideal prison described by Foucault: a structure in which the inmates, knowing they are constantly observable, internalize the surveillance and become their own controllers. Wiseman’s camera is the central tower of that Panopticon, and we, the spectators, are the invisible guards, complicit in this gaze.

The legal controversy that surrounded the film for nearly a quarter of a century, banning its public screening in Massachusetts until 1991, is an integral part of its legacy. The state argued that it violated the privacy and dignity of the patients. A seemingly noble motive, which concealed, however, the terror that this ruthless and objective gaze might reveal the moral bankruptcy of the system. Dignity, Wiseman suggests, is not violated by the camera that shows it, but by the institution that systematically denies it. The film is not voyeuristic; it is a radical act of bearing witness. It is the exact opposite of a work like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which romanticizes rebellion against the institution through a charismatic hero. In "Titicut Follies", there are no heroes. There is no rebellion. There is only the slow, methodical, almost bureaucratic dismantling of the human being.

The final sequence is perhaps one of the most chilling in the history of cinema. After having witnessed every form of humiliation of the living body, we witness its post-mortem preparation. A patient’s corpse is washed, shaved, disemboweled, and sewn back up with a coldness that is the logical consequence of everything we have seen before. The camera lingers on the details of the embalming process with the same impassivity with which it filmed the therapy sessions or the force-feedings. It is the omega point in this journey of reification: the man, stripped of his mind, his will, and his dignity, is finally reduced to a mere object to be prepared and boxed. The institution has completed its work. The editing cross-cuts these images with those of the talent show, creating a macabre counterpoint between the farce of life and the liturgy of death. It is an ending that offers neither hope nor redemption, only the observation of an eschatological cycle.

"Titicut Follies" is not a film to be “seen.” It is a work to be experienced, to be endured. It is a foundational text not only for understanding the history of documentary, but for questioning the very nature of the cinematic gaze and its ethical responsibility. Wiseman created a pure and terrible filmic object, a black monolith that stands as an imperishable memento of the fragility of our humanity in the face of the impersonal power of the structures we ourselves have created. A masterpiece that does not age, because its analysis of power and its ability to reduce the individual to a thing is not tied to a specific era, but is a terrible constant of the human condition. A work that, like a rediscovered Greek tragedy, forces us to gaze into the abyss, leaving us alone with the echo of our own, unconfessable, fears.