Kritiken

To gaze into the footlights of that demeaning opening scene is to be plunged into an ambiguity established around whether what follows will be 'fiction' or 'documentary,' and in the close of the film and this essay we come full-circle, for the film will be fiction and documentary, the one in the other, in this Cinema, this Grand Illusion, the zoom-back and now forward, brotherhood of man a possibility, or once a notion, among other images, notions: lithium-puppets, or the divinely irradiated

The main feeling is one of stripped girth and haunted eyes, an European-accented analyst doting over the details of a child molester's sex life, a patient sliding a sour trombone across the yard while another karaokes to "Chinatown," playing on a telly nearby... No escape hatch, just the director's "Now what?" -- the thirst for reform, the outrage that leads a lawyer to take up cinema as the extension of societal inquiry, and vérité images aimed to scald the memory.

Even though it is mostly remembered as a harrowing exposé, it isn't all doom and gloom. The title of the film shares its name with the play the inmates put on for their guards and nurses. It is a swirling, bizarre pageant that casts light, however dim, on the inmates' lives. This is Wiseman's signature move as a documentarian: to show that institutions, even flawed and failing ones, are a complicated web of good and bad with no easy solutions.

I was 19 when I first saw this film, and it was the beginning of my fascination with direct cinema. No film had ever so fully and deeply disturbed me. For a few days, I became restless, unable to erase from my memory the images of humiliation and degradation I had witnessed.

Though Wiseman's heavy-handedness is apparent in some episodes of didactic editing, these one-sided cuts show us the gross and pathetic effects of bureaucracy at the institution... The question with a Wiseman film always is: what emotion do you feel? Is Wiseman presenting the horror of this man's personal fate or coldly ruing bureaucratic inefficiency?

Frederick Wiseman's first documentary (1967) is a masterpiece of muckraking in which he examines the workings and inhumanities of a state mental hospital in Massachusetts.