More than four decades ago, a disillusioned 30-year-old law professor got a handheld camera and set its lens on the Massachusetts Correctional Institution, a prison hospital for the criminally insane, located in Bridgewater. The resulting film, Titicut Follies—the title taken from a talent show by the hospital inmates—inspired a fury of controversy and catapulted its director, Frederick Wiseman, into the annals of documentary-film history and a new career direction.

The 84-minute black-and-white masterpiece of cinéma vérité, released in 1967, so irked the establishment with its exposition of mistreatment—patients were force-fed, held in unlit cells, and bullied by staff—that the Massachusetts Superior Court ordered it banned. The film didn’t break completely free of its legal morass until another court ruling in 1991. It was the first of 37 films (and counting) by Wiseman, who has spent the ensuing 41 years documenting the inner workings of American institutions, from the Miami MetroZoo (Zoo, 1993) to the Idaho legislature (State Legislature, 2007). On Friday (June 13), Wiseman will attend a screening of the groundbreaking Titicut Follies at the Pacific Cinémathí¨que, which will pair it with Juvenile Court, his 1973 exploration of the juvenile-court system in Memphis. The films are airing as part of Madness, Citizenship and Social Justice, a public conference about the human rights of the psychiatrically ill running June 12 to 15 at SFU’s Vancouver campus, where Wiseman will also deliver a lecture Saturday evening (June 14).

“You always hope the films will endure, will last,” Wiseman says in conversation from an editing suite in Paris, France, where he is piecing together a film on the Paris Opera Ballet. Modest and unpretentious, he audibly shrugs when asked what he makes of his film debut having such a strong foothold in the documentary canon. “To tell you the truth, I don’t really think much about that,” he says dismissively. “I’m pleased that other people like the film.”¦But, you know, I’ve gone on to make a lot of other films.”

Invariably, those films have been studies of people, of their interactions and their negotiations. “Picking institutions is just an excuse,” he explains. “It provides a framework to have a look at the way people behave and the way society is ordered.” Any comparisons to anthropology are flatly rejected, however. “I don’t consider myself an anthropologist, because there’s so many anthropologists who make boring movies,” he deadpans, only half joking. “You know, they’ll show you a 40-minute film on how to light a fire in New Guinea.” His movies, he insists, “are dramatic narrative films that are based on real events”.

Wiseman, a pioneer of the observational documentary film, admits that he’s nonetheless never out of the frame. “I keep myself out in the sense that my picture isn’t in the movie, but I’m not out of it, because I’m making all the choices,” he says. “But I hope I’m not hitting you over the head with my presence.” (Michael Moore, take note.)

The voiceless narrator is a style that has been adopted—or corrupted, depending on your view—by the reality-TV genre. Not that Wiseman is taking any notice. “I watched it once for about 20 seconds and turned it off,” he remarks. “What little I watched was garbage.” He pauses, then adds, aghast: “Somebody once wrote that I was responsible for reality TV. That’s enough to depress me for the rest of my life.”

For info and tickets to Friday’s film screening, visit www.cinematheque.bc.ca/. For info and tickets to Saturday’s An Evening With Frederick Wiseman, visit www.sfu.ca/madcitizenship-conference/.