Directed by Mario Ruspoli • Documentary • With Dr. François Tosquelles • 1962 • 53 minutes
Ruspoli had a standing interest in isolated and marginal communities, very much on display in films he shot in Lozère, in France’s rugged, unforgiving south. In A LOOK AT MADNESS and CAPTIVE FEAST, it’s patients and doctors, including the hugely influential director, François Tosquelles, seen going about their daily rounds at the psychiatric hospital of St. Alban, formerly a monastery and prison. Though complementary and shot together, these are standalone works, with Captive Feast documenting the annual village festival that allows inmates a rare chance to mingle with the rest of the population.
Jean-Paul Sartre once said that A LOOK AT MADNESS “is not a documentary; it invites us with impressive images to experience mental illness for the first time; everything that it contains that is so close and so far away helps us understand at the same time that the men are not insane but that all the insane are men”.
Up Next in World Mental Health Day
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12 Days
Directed by Raymond Depardon • Documentary • 2017 • 87 minutes
Every year in France, 92,000 people are placed under psychiatric care without their consent. 12 DAYS focuses on those who have been involuntarily remanded to a mental hospital, and more specifically documents the hearings that, accor...
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Dream Deceivers
Directed by David Van Taylor • Documentary • With James Vance, Ray Belknap, Phyllis Vance, Rob Halford, K.K. Downing, Ian Hill, Glenm Tipton, Scott Travis • 1991 • 58 minutes
Two young men shoot themselves in a churchyard. Ray Belknap dies; James Vance - severely disfigured - survives. Their par...
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The Yellow Wallpaper
Directed by Marie Ashton • Drama • With Sigrid Wurschmidt, Tom Dahlgren, Susan Lynch • 1989 • 14 minutes
This short dramatic film brings to life the classic Charlotte Perkins Gilman story of the same name, which has become an important addition to American literature course curricula. Set in the...
