Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
And on Sunday at the Portage Theater, 4050 N. Milwaukee, at 5 PM, two films from very different points in Wiseman’s career will be screening in 16-millimeter: Titicut Follies (1967, 84 min.), his first film as director, and the masterful Public Housing (1997, 195 min.), which looked at life inside the Ida B. Wells complex.
The movie established Wiseman’s rigorous documentary aesthetic—no narration, no voice-over, no graphic illustration, and certainly none of the personal song and dance we’ve come to expect from entertainers like Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock. But Titicut Follies wouldn’t be seen by the general public for years after it was made. After it premiered at the New York Film Festival in October 1967, a Massachusetts superior court judge prohibited the film’s distribution, questioning the legality of the permissions Wiseman had obtained from patients. For years Titicut Follies was restricted to students and professionals in the fields of medicine, law, and social work; finally, in 1991, a different judge ruled that enough time had passed that the movie constituted no invasion of privacy, and the movie debuted on PBS the next year.
