Hold Off topic
If you want to see holding therapy at its worst, you have got to watch the 1967 film Warrendale . I saw it again last December, after more than forty years (when I first saw it in a high school drama class). I have provided some info on it below. It is available on DVD.
Roger Ebert wrote in 1969:
Quote:
Alan King's "Warrendale" is a very special sort of film, and it probably requires a special audience. It is not "entertaining," but not everyone goes to the movies to be entertained: Sometimes it is enough to see life as it is.
Warrendale was a center in Canada where emotionally disturbed children were brought to live in groups of 12, each with a trained staff of eight. A note at the beginning of the film emphasizes that these are not brain-damaged or ret*d children. They are of normal intelligence, but gravely disturbed.
The treatment at Warrendale was experimental, involving a maximum amount of physical contact as a direct way to express love and reassurance. The children were encouraged to release all their anger and aggression while being tightly held by two or three adult staff members. During these "holding sessions," they were told they were not responsible for anything they might do. They were being given a safe way to drain off the latent violence that seemed to be associated with their problems.
I am not competent to say whether this treatment was wise or effective, and the film does not make a special argument for it. Instead, King and his crew have acted entirely as observers, using portable, unobtrusive equipment to record some six weeks in the life on Warrendale. Like the best of cinema verite, "Warrendale" would rather show life than judge it.
A structure was given to the film almost accidentally when Warrendale's cook died unexpectedly. The news is broken to the children in a group meeting. Some of them appear indifferent ("She wasn't any relative of mine.") Others react hysterically, and the staff members hold one young girl while she sobs and cries at the top of her voice: "It's a lie! It's a lie!" Another of the young patients blames herself, and a staff worker calmly repeats over and over: "It's not your fault. You didn't cause Dorothy's death. It's not your fault."
In these scenes of sustained and heartbreaking emotion, we begin to understand the Warrendale experience. The children are victims of the same isolation and loneliness that plagues all men, and their early environments apparently did not provide them with socially approved ways of coping with these feelings. So they began to act strangely in order to call attention to themselves, and perhaps to attract help. Some became delinquents, others self-destructive (one young girl combs her hair violently and painfully, and a staff member says, "You don't have to hurt yourself. Your hair is beautiful").
Still other children developed enormous feelings of guilt, blaming themselves for almost anything. These are perhaps the most pathetic, and the Warrendale treatment encouraged them to release their fear and grief. In these scenes we see a human closeness that is often lacking from life, and almost always from the screen. This depth of emotion may embarrass some audiences, but it is the only way to deal honestly with material, of this importance.
("Warrendale" shared the 1967 Cannes Festival award with "Blow-Up," and was named the best documentary of the year by the National Society of Film Critics and the British Film Critics Society.)
As explosive today as when it was released thirty years ago, Warrendale is a masterpiece of cinéma vérité. Considered one the world's great modern documentaries, this internationally renowned film chronicles seven weeks in the lives of twelve emotionally disturbed children in the treatment centre of the same name.
"The most appalling and effecting film I have seen...If "Warrendale' is a film we can't bear to be with, who is at fault?"
New Statesman
Warrendale was both an experiment and a frontier in pioneering the now common practise of treating children in a family-like setting where they could feel safe to express their feelings. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, who commissioned the film in 1966, refused to air it. Although it was released theatrically to huge international acclaim, it was banned from television for thirty years until TVOntario screened it in early 1997. It attracted a deeply appreciative audience of record size.
"I count the sight of the desperate, screaming child, held so firmly but so peaceable by the grown-up, to be one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. The utter acceptingness of the arms that do the holding, this tangible assurance that in the throes of self-abandon the child is not abandoned, moved me as I have seldom been moved in the cinema. I felt very deeply that I was witnessing the act of love."
The Sunday Telegraph
As well as being a staple in film schools, Warrendale is enormously valuable to such professionals as social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists and anyone interested in human behaviour.
"The negative reactions this film has stirred up in some quarters demonstrated the adult world's dread of the open expression of childhood distress and the anguish that lies behind delinquency and emotional illness. It goes some way towards explaining why so many of our approved schools and schools for maladjusted children frame themselves around a system of control and suppression which hides from the adult, and from the child himself, the shattering impact of inward confusion and panic and feelings in the raw. 'Warrendale' does not spare the adult. It shows what it feels like to hate and be hated."
The Observer
"...as an insight into the dark reaches of fear and resentment in the human spirit the film is profound. I cannot imagine anyone coming away from this work unimpressed and unenlightened"
The Sunday Times
"Mr. King presents the children not as deranged case-histories, but as people of sensitivity, personality and often a remarkable degree of charm. They are recognisable, and they show us graphically that the naughty child is often a very worried and frightened child. The most unexpected quality of this document on emotional disturbance however is the manner in which the children's catharsis communicates itself. The film reveals to us, more in the way of art than of a text-book, something of ourselves."
The Financial Times
"It is harrowing and horrifying - but compulsive. Blending into the community house like a fly on the wall, King and his cameraman capture startling emotional crises in the lives of the children."
Evening Standard
"They (the children) are not deranged, or horrifying to watch. Their attacks of grief, fear, rage and clamour for some impossible immortal intimacy seem only more naked and more terrible in degree than the ones that everyone knows...Allan King's perception of their hellish journeys is like the psychiatric workers' way of dealing with them: the film, which is without commentary, burns into their spirits and makes no judgements. It is a wonderful movie, extending a charity to aberration and distress like no other of its sort that I have ever seen."
Penelope Gilliatt, The New Yorker
Directed by
Allan King
Credited cast:
Martin Fischer .... Himself (Dr. Fischer)
Runtime: 100 min
Country: Canada
Language: English
Color: Black and White
Sound Mix: Mono
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Radiant Aspergian
Awe-Tistic Whirlwind
Phuture Phounder of the Philosophy Phactory
NOT a believer of Mystic Woo-Woo
14 Jun 2010, 1:22 am
now all i need is some names to get paypack though net even company name because u can order various stuff from net to their bill
