Best movie of this year hands down!

Simply Perfect

I wanted to but couldn't!

Good concept, poorly executed.

I ran into this amazing movie on a site where it was available for download (www.libertv.com). They didn't offer much of a commentary other than it was a documentary about a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts. More specifically, it is a 1966 film about the realities of a state institution for criminally insane. Haunting cinematography in black and white, no overlapping commentary, as the images are powerful enough in themselves. It is deeply unsettling to see the overlapping delusional universes - the patients' and the staff's views of the world, each one right in their own eyes and at the same time utterly unable to see the reality through the eyes of the other. Also, it is unnerving to see how the professionals end up harming those they genuinely want to help. Schizophrenia is projected into the very system that is supposed to break it. The movie clearly demonstrates the system's fundamental flaw, which is its attempt to cure splitting by further splitting it (away from the world). And that may be the very reason for each, instead of mending those who suffer the system not only perpetuates sufferance but ends up broken itself.

Just got through watching it on google video. May or may not still be free upon whomever reading this but it was when I saw it.There are reasons of course this movie is banned, mostly do to the lack of consent the patients could provide due to their mental instability.And i do mean instability. Its all depicted in a mental institution and follows, briefly, the lives of some of the inmates. Most, if not all i suppose, are criminally insane.The guards act often very rude and demeaning to the inmates and if this were a stylized Hollywood version would be good villains to carry around sticks. There's no violence however just lots of taunting and name calling.I don't especially recommend this movie as it tends to drag on and on and on. Very monotonous in other words. There's scenes where the guards just wont let up on their hassling of an inmate that eventually makes you want to throw a book at the computer. Perhaps thats the intention.Sure it's banned and that sparks curiosity in all it's forms. I recommend you find a way to view this movie for free where you can skip around and fast forward through the drag of it. Not worth it being released for general rent. I can't say I'd pay anything to see it.

Not exactly the kind of movie for which star-ranking seems appropriate.As a professor at Bridgewater State College, I learned about this movie in a peculiar way: when considering a job at the college in 1997, a web search of the town name mainly yielded comments about this movie.Once I started teaching here, I learned that students did not like for us to say "Bridgewater State" because their friends back home (mostly other towns in the general region south of Boston) would always tease them about being inmates/patients at Bridgewater State Hospital. So I always say "BSC" or the full name of the college.I should say that I watched most but not all of the film. It was disturbing but not horrific. I think that the lack of dignity afforded the inmates/patients is what bothered me the most. I blame this as much on the director as on the institution itself.I like to think that 40 years later, the movie had the desired effect, though, of bringing attention to a chronically unattended problem: the treatment of mentally ill people in general and the criminally insane in particular.One last thing, as I write this while sitting in my home about three miles from the site -- in nine years of living here and being very active in the community, I have yet to meet an employee of the prison complex (which includes the State Hospital and regular prisons). I rarely hear about the movie, nor do I hear discussions of what the place might be like today.

Many say that there are problems with the way Wiseman was allowed to film inside the hospital. The fact was, he was allowed in with open access. We allow journalists inside war-zones to film and photograph these type of things every day. They will photograph dying children and adults who are fleeing their enemies. So for me that issue is moot.Now to the actual movie. This movie was amazing for its time. It shined the light onto the travesties of this hospital.The rest of us, the audience of today, are like voyeurs looking into these men's lives. Very few of the staff care, and the ones that do are using such outdated tools that I felt frustrated watching them.For years, I have wanted to see it simply for the infamous cut scene of the tube feeding and death prep. I'm not the type into death scenes but I have heard the contrast was a work of art. I must agree with this assessment. The added touch of the doctors cigarette ashes hanging over the funnel only added to the scene.For example, I actually felt the Hungarian doctor was trying to help the patients with his outdated Freudian therapy. He really seemed to be doing the best he could. Like the rest of the staff, he was under-trained and overloaded.One scene that stands out is the discussion between the doctor and a patient/prisoner. The prisoner is complaining that the medication is making him worse. The circular discussion between him and the doctor led me to believe the doctor was so wrong about this patient. Yet later at a staff meeting, when the same prisoner becomes agitated we discover that he indeed has experienced paranoid delusions that someone was poisoning his coffee. The camera has fooled us all along.