Madmen A person throughout his conscious life path, and it does not matter whether he is monstrously long or unbearably short, it is characteristic to go mad, lose self-control, fall into the black abyss of inhumanity, when there are no principles, frameworks, boundaries at all, when the mind ceases to obey all the laws of divine and logical, this sweet moment of total schizophrenia. Madness, this lot of human passions, is as inseparable from our emotional inner nature as joy, sadness, faith or unbelief, for madness sometimes frees us from many conventions imposed on us by society, parents, and upbringing. Insanity, real and genuine, neither pretended nor false, is in essence the final stage of the individual’s loss of his or her own direction in life; it is an apocalyptic state of despair, when it is useless to shout at the top of his throat, gradually filled with blood, and to go into black nowhere, with a noose around his neck or a gun in his mouth, makes no sense; then all that remains is left is to go mad, letting his mind go into timelessness and fever. A truly insane person can be a saint, a fool, a sinner, an executioner, and the worst criminal of all - one who never understands what he really did, one who will never repent for what he did, for the stormy whirlwinds of madness have seized him completely and irrevocably, and there is no more way out, no return.
It is about such people, mentally ill criminal criminals, sentenced to a long stay in the dungeons of the Bridgewater clinic, in Massachusetts, and made his most famous film “Mad Men of Titicata” in 1967, the famous American documentary director Frederick Weissman, master of subtle, practically molecular research of social problems in the United States during the crisis, sociocultural and psychophysiological breakdown. Moreover, this picture, which later fell into the list of the 50 most shocking films of the twentieth century, for Weissman became, perhaps, the most radical and unpleasant, deliberately repulsive in its visual cinematic service, gravitating towards a kind of indifferent fixation of everything happening on the screen, devoid of fundamentally any signs of extra-plot and extra-frame life, despite the purely documentary nature of the film. This fixation is deliberately painful, painfully distorted by the grimaces of despair and the state of insanity that cannot be cured. The monochrome, unhurried, dead-end manner of filming used by Frederick Weisman slowly but inexorably plunges viewers into a state of hypnosis, trance and some sinister complicity in the flowing incessant stream of stories of bridgewater prisoners not of their conscience, but of reason.
Cinema, as we know, is not only about storytelling, whether a film is fiction or documentary; cinema is almost always a dream projected into reality, cinema has an incredible ability to both see and create such dreams. In the case of Mad Men of Titicata, Frederick Weissman combined flesh, living text, presented in the format of many stories of Bridgewater patients, and bone, sophisticated staged games with the form of an author’s narrative, transferring to the screen the nightmare dream of the mind that gives birth to monsters. Unusually ascetic, for someone blindly revealing and guilelessly revealing, overflowing with naturalistic scenes on the edge (for the sixties certainly), the film hardly seeks a deep analysis of the causes of the madness of the characters. Weissmann first of all seeks to create some space of total unreality or even hyperreality, in which the very madness reigns, generated not so much by society as by these people in particular. It is noteworthy that appeared in the late eighties of the last century in St. Petersburg, the movement of necrorealists Maslov-Yufit, as well as partly budding to him, but actually became the creator in himself Arthur Aristakisyan, took advantage of the same sinister cinematic colors in their palettes, which were first used by Frederick Weissmann in “Mad Men of Titicatus”, which were not necrorealism at all. Ladoni is synonymous with the grim confession of dementia. . . '.
Weisman talks and observes. Before the viewer passes a string of heroes, united by the most severe psychological or physical infirmity. The camera fearlessly and dispassionately listens to their confused, strange, naive and mostly unusual stories, almost philosophical reflections on the essence of the things around them. The truth of their conclusions about God, Satan, crime and punishment, and many other things, is doubtful, but in fact they are much freer than all others than those who are admittedly normal. But what is the norm and is it even there? No matter how unusual it may sound, Weisman’s film at one time successfully managed to fit into the controversy that arose after the release of Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, the controversy about the acceptability of the use of certain methods of therapy in psychiatric hospitals in the United States, about the right to freedom and the fight for it. For all the horror of the picture, Weisman’s film does not denigrate psychiatry, however, showing that the characters are sincerely happy in their ignorance of madness, and so internally free that we did not dream, but only in the case of the truth and irrefutability of the diagnoses, and almost all the characters of the tape who have gained the right to vote in it, do not need even more freedom, because then they and all of us will only be worse. Attempts to bring them back to a healthy society make no sense, for for most people insanity turned out to be much more pleasant than health. And who is so much sicker then: the normal supposedly human, prone to accumulating stress for years without spilling it out, or the real madman of Titicata, who perhaps sees the truth more than any of us?