Asylum (1972)

Read more

In 1971, filmaker Peter Robinson and a small crew entered a world of anarchic madness and healing compassion unlike any other. The resulting film, ASYLUM, records their seven week stay in radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing's controversial Archway Community - a London row-house where the inmates literally run the asylum. Laing's conviction that schizophrenics can only heal their shattered 'self' where they're free and yet are held reponsible for their actions, ahallenged patients, doctors and, in ASYLUM's incredible document, the filmmakers, to live communally and peacefully.
'I think it's possible to get lost here,' offers one of the uneasy medical volunteers plunged into Archway's tribal society. Fiercely intellectual David demands attention by engaging anyone and everyone in an unending and increasingly menacing illogical disourse. Consumed by the emotional need that has claimed her sanity, beautiful, los Julia regresses to infancy. In one astonishing scene, a patient's father blithely explains that he has hired a girl to date his nearly catatonic son. As Archway's residents are 'explored but not exploited by this enterprising but humanly decent film.'

Show description in a different language