Documentary
American
1967 · Directed by Frederick Wiseman · 84 min
In 1966 a young law professor turned filmmaker was allowed into a Massachusetts institution for the criminally insane, with a camera and a tape recorder. The film that resulted has no narrator, no interviews and no explanation, only people, rooms and routines observed at length.
Why it matters in cinema history
A founding work of Wiseman's institutional portraits and one of the most important American documentaries of the 1960s, it also became a test case for how far a state can censor a film on grounds of privacy.
Watch with intention
Watch it as an argument made only through selection and order: what the film shows, for how long, and what it places next to what.
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