Titicut Follies Documentary Analysis

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Recommended: Objectification in media

Titicut Follies is a Direct Cinema documentary film directed by Frederic Wiseman, revealing the patients and their existence in an asylum in America. Mainly falling into the "non-narrative"(Nichols 1978) category in the style of Direct Cinema Wiseman films are capturing the reality without any comments from the film-maker and representing it truthfully. Moreover, he uses this approach in his other works like Primate and Hospital, to create unique documentaries, representing different controversial locations, questioning the relationship between cinema and reality and in precise the "objectifying representation"(Nichols 1983) of the reality in cinema. Having no creative input or any interaction with the subjects of his interest, Wiseman goes as closes to that true representation of reality as possible, yet the camera is still visible and it changes the behavior of the people in front of it. …show more content…

Furthermore, the use of extreme and disturbing images and the lack of any censorship contributes to that representation of reality. In Titicut Follies, Wiseman juxtaposes those sinister images to scenes of celebration to create a shocking factor that influences the audience and replaces the need for narration. The lack of interviews or commentary eliminates the opinion of the creator and strengthen the representation of the reality In Corner's article "The Art of the Record", he divides the discourse of a documentary into different modes and calls it "modalities of documentary language"(Corner 1996). In this essay, I will look upon the ‘principal modes of documentary discourse’ that perfectly describes Wiseman's film and their use to represent the theme of the film in an impactful

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