Cinema: Corridors of Darkness

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For years Hollywood has exploited mental illness as a grim dramatic device. In Other Voices, a cinema-verite documentary that contains almost too much verite to be endured, mental illness is not a part but the whole.

Filmed by David Sawyer over a period of 18 months at the Delaware Valley Mental Health Foundation, Voices traces the painful progress—and sometimes the even more painful regression —of five supposedly hopeless mental patients. It opens on a staff-patient touch-football game in which a doctor pokes one of the patients and says: "You'll get out of here when you're well and not before."

This sounds like barbaric, inmates-of-Charenton therapy, but it is the key to the clinic's theory of "reality confrontation." The psychiatrists actually live with the patients in ordinary family dwellings. They assault the patients psychically—and sometimes physically—in order to penetrate their penumbra of fear. A doctor wrestles violently with a suicidal 14-year-old boy to try to make him accept the reality of contact. When a psychotic young woman refuses to respond, the same doctor sits on her stomach and shouts: "You're making the least progress of anyone here!" Then he soothes her in decidedly un-Freudian fashion. "When those voices tell you to do away with yourself, give them this." And he shows her the arm-and-finger gesture of contempt.

Voices is hardly entertainment, and certainly not a technician's delight. The camera work is slipshod, the editing choppy. But its bruising immediacy requires no cinematic ploys or emotional gambits. The patients' private odysseys through corridors of inner chaos are bleakly self-sustaining.

That one of the patients finally succeeds in committing suicide is stark tragedy. That another has reached the point where he is able to mourn death sounds a call of hope. Who has never heard an inner voice beckoning him to acts of madness? David Sawyer's film pierces the darkness that results when other voices overwhelm the rational mind.