Don't Cry Yet

By Jos

"Anybody can screw, see. It doesn't take any intelligence, it doesn't take anything." So says the social worker as she counsels a pretty, black-skinned prostitute, who is barely 14.

"Did you do anything to him?" an official asks a young boy whose face is framed in heavy bandages. The boy, burned when an uncle poured hot grease over him, shows mute incomprehension.

"Don't cry yet," the probation officer gently urges a sobbing girl. "You haven't even been to court."

Such is the stuff of the 17,000 cases that annually pass through the juvenile court of Memphis. And such examples are among the vivid images caught by Frederick Wiseman's cameras for a riveting 144-minute documentary on that court, to be shown this week on the Public Broadcasting Service network.

Already, the stinging scenes of Juvenile Court have caused considerable controversy. The film was shown in July at the annual conference of the National Council of Juvenile Court Judges, and the judges who have seen it have all but unanimously held it in contempt. One of their basic objections is to the fact that Judge Kenneth Turner permitted Wiseman to film actual cases and poke his camera almost everywhere, including the judge's chambers. "It's a very unfair portrayal," says Ohio Judge Holland Gary, president of the council.

The reaction will hardly surprise Wiseman. Ever since the former Brandeis University law lecturer went with mike and camera into a Massachusetts state hospital for the criminally insane, he has been unquestionably the nation's most provocative film documentarian. That first film, Titicut Follies (1967), was banned by a state court after then-Massachusetts Attorney General Elliot Richardson argued that the film violated the privacy of inmates. Since then, Wiseman has gone from High School to Hospital to Basic Training. "Shooting these films about institutions," he has said, "is like being on the track of the Abominable Snowman. You're looking for cultural spoor wherever you go. A hospital or a high school is as much a ghetto as central Harlem, because most of us don't have the damnedest idea what goes on in them."

Interestingly, he finds that most of his subjects, such as Judge Turner, like the final product. Criticism generally comes from others. Wiseman rarely has trouble getting permission to film. At the Memphis juvenile court, as with most of his six earlier documentaries, he began shooting scarcely a day after he arrived. He handles the sound himself and uses only one cameraman. "The filming is the research," he says. "If you look around without a camera, you just see things you wish you had got."

The resulting film has the complex, penetrating reality of all Wiseman's work. As always, he uses no narrator or reporter to "tell" the story. Wiseman's art is in his selection of scenes (125,000 ft. were shot over a month-long period, 5,200 used). What emerges is less a condemnation of the court than a despairing sense of self-delusion--the delusion that enables both officials and the public to avoid facing the hopelessness of assigning institutions to mend broken lives. In the film's final minutes, Judge Turner addresses a boy he has just sentenced to the state training school. "In time, Robert," says the judge, "you'll realize that what is being done here today is in your best interest." Robert does not believe it for a moment. But the not-unsympathetic judge, lawyers and probation officers all believe it. They have no choice.

-- Jose M. Ferrer III

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