Asylum: A Film By Peter Robinson

Starring:R.D. Laing, Leon Redler, David Bell (XVI), Julia (XV)
Director: Peter Robinson (XVIII)
Studio: Kino Video
Product Type: DVD

Average customer rating:

The stars have taken over the plot.
BRILLIANT! A MUST-OWN DOCUMENTARY!

Asylum: A Film By Peter Robinson
Starring: R.D. Laing , Leon Redler , David Bell (XVI) , and Julia (XV)
Director: Peter Robinson (XVIII)
Manufacturer: Kino Video
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Documentary | Genres | DVD | Video

( A ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video

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Suddenly, Last Summer

ASIN: B00028G6LW
Release Date: 2004-07-06

Customer Reviews:

The stars have taken over the plot........2006-03-09

This film is a very good exposition of the Archway Community, with some analysis by R. D. Laing. The Philadelphia Association put several mentally ill people into a community, along with the psychiatrists. They aimed to lead normal lives: they paid the rent, etc etc. They argued and shouted. This is their film. The story is told as "bare bones", cinema very veritee.

BRILLIANT! A MUST-OWN DOCUMENTARY!.......2005-08-31

"Asylum" (1972) follows some who sought refuge from a world where cellblocks, crude tranquilizers, even electroshock and lobotomies were still considered normal by too many mental health institutions.

Though these terrible practices inside the clinics and the violence outside (the war in Vietnam, etc.) is never specifically shown, one can certainly sense that many in the film felt that the Establishment they left behind inside and outside the clinics had become an asylum run by lunatics.

So these patients and workers took refuge in a pioneering commune where "peace" was not just a slogan but a daily practice that was certainly tested to its limit. "Asylum" records filmmaker Peter Robinson and his small crew's stay in radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing's controversial Archway Community. Laing's conviction that schizophrenics can only heal their shattered "self" where they're free, responsible for their actions, and dialogue with therapists who have no key that any inmate does not also have. "I think it's possible to get lost here," offers one uneasy medical volunteer who feels the commune spiraling into a tribal cult.

The inmate David rises to power, spouting unending and increasingly menacing discourse; illogical/logic that would perhaps be perfectly sane "Through the Looking Glass".

"What is sane?" is often thrown into question as we meet the therapists who have interned themselves there to escape a "society of terror", and the oppressive yet successful parents of an young resident they have tried to "cure" by hiring a prostitute lest he eventually turn "you know, [...]".

Hailed as "beautifully done" by The Village Voice at the time of its 1972 release, Asylum has since become "a model of cinema verité." (The New York Times). It makes a wonderful companion to "One Flew Over a Cuckoos Nest", and (small independents like) Lars Von Trier's "The Idiots" and Ingmar Bergman's "Through a Glass Darkly". For a sense of the world and war swirling outside the asylum, I also recommend the documentary "Hearts and Minds" and "The Weather Underground" to re-visit a time (not unlike the one we live in now) where violence and insanity in the Established Order ruled the madhouse.

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