Titicut Follies is a very important film because its impact touches areas of law regarding private rights and public rights, and the final legal fate of the film will be of extreme importance, as a step forward or backward, to the future of documentary film-making. (p. 30)

The film is not as exciting or lurid as I had been led to believe, nor is it especially dramatic. Its main force must lie in the viewer's awareness that he is watching real people in an institution that exists as fact. This is not Marat/Sade. This is the reality of the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater—at least as much of that reality as Wiseman chooses to let us see…. Wiseman is not guilty of "comment without correction," and if the institutions are the "real villains" of his films, that villainy and any resultant institutional guilt must be shared by real people at some point. In Hospital we watch a drug-taking young man fill the screen with vomit. We seem to watch vomit for a long time and can easily conclude that Wiseman is critical of the social conditions (people) that lead to this young man's misfortune. The scene is certainly not a negative comment about the hospital as an institution. Perhaps Wiseman overextends his effect—and it is an effect since it comes to us via his own editing of the film—because as Andrew Sarris remarked in a recent lecture, he confuses the cathartic with the emetic. But the point is that Wiseman is not merely "the fly on the wall," but has an opinion to share with his audience. No viewer is totally free to devise his own opinion. (pp. 30-1)

I do not think [Titicut Follies] is as exploitative as has been charged by many. Wiseman's intensification of Bridgewater's reality is not at all heavy handed when one considers the innate shock value of the subject matter, which includes happily sadistic hospital personnel; infirm, naked, and virtually mindless alcoholics; mild-mannered men who rape their own daughters, and so on…. Many of the conversations we hear in the film center on the Viet Nam war, politics, religion—whatever men anywhere talk about. These discussions are bizarrely contrasted by the surrealistic haranguing of one inmate who can say no more than three or four coherent words in a row before his speech degenerates into gibberish. In a fiction film this man would almost necessarily have to "represent" something. In Titicut Follies he is mostly a question mark. We wonder what makes him that way. (p. 31)