À la folie

Documentarist Wang Bing filmed life in a psychiatric hospital in SW China over the course of a year. It's much more like a prison. Some of the men are mentally ill; others have been confined there because they've committed criminal acts, or are disabled, or practice religion with zeal, or otherwise don't fit into family or society. The hospital, its crowded rooms around a courtyard corridor, is unutterably filthy and mostly unattended by any staff. This is real-life theater of the absurd. Watching it demands patience (almost 4 hours), which is richly rewarded as your normal senses of time and self ebb away. The camera leaves this floor only twice (there's one brief trip down a flight, and one key sequence where an inmate gets a few days' leave with his parents in a desolate village), and it cuts very rarely: there's as little as possible to obstruct your sense of being confined in this space of radical misery. Glimpses of kindness and human dignity among the inmates shine through all the more poignantly: a spark of love, a bit of fresh food from outside. Through this one corridor, "Madness" indicts the abuses of the bureaucratic Chinese state--but/and its biggest power lies in its cinematic originality.

Three times the length of Titicut Follies, I can't say it's three times as impactful, though for sure the endless shots of men shuffling along the open corridors between cells and guard rails does sear itself into your senses. And if one person's 'immersive' is another person's 'boring', amidst the quieter observational material Wang Bing has filmed some extraordinary scenes, sometimes painful, sometimes moving. You may find yourself becoming unreasonably anxious about the fate of a bag of tangerines brought in by one spouse: a sign that the film's sheer length has its effect. If documentary exists on a spectrum between observational and explanatory, this is very much at the extreme end of the first type; although final captions answer some of the questions - why are these men here? What would they have to do to get out? - that will have nagged you for three to four hours.