Frederick Wiseman, the Oscar and Emmy-winning documentarian who exposed the failings of American institutions, died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the age of 96, his distribution company Zipporah Films announced Monday.
From 1967 to 2023, Wiseman made a documentary nearly every year about a wide range of topics in American culture, politics and daily life. His 1967 debut was a bombshell: “Titticut Follies,” a film that exposed the mistreatment and abuse of patient-inmates at the Bridgewater State Hopsital for the Criminally Insane.
The Massachusetts state government attempted to have every copy of the documentary destroyed, claiming it violated patient privacy laws despite having permission from the hospital superintendent to film in the facility. While the film was not destroyed, the state supreme court ruled that only medical professionals, lawyers, judges, social workers and students in those fields could see the film, keeping it from public viewing until a federal judge reversed that ruling in 1991.
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