Back and forth, back and forth: Franco Basaglia could not stand still in front of Sergio Zavoli's camera in the 1968 documentary The Gardens of Abel. Two cameramen were needed to follow him, cutting abruptly whenever they risked losing sight of him. The psychiatrist was explaining his view of mental illness—or rather, of the mentally ill person, what truly concerned him: "I could never propose anything psychiatric within a traditional asylum… no therapy can help people trapped in an atmosphere of subjection and captivity by those meant to care for them." The revolution had begun: no man or woman would be chained and treated like animals (worse, if we're honest) in the name of treatment. Not under his watch at the psychiatric hospital in Gorizia.
This archival footage is one of many treasures in Unbind Him (2024), Maurizio Sciarra's documentary, available on Rai Play. Fifty minutes woven together from present-day voices of psychiatric patients and former colleagues (Basaglia once asked a couple of them if they were "psychiatric tourists" when they came to meet him, before they joined his work), archival images both stark and raw, and fragments from the Rai archives. The material is diverse, telling not only the story of Italy's psychiatrist from his arrival at the Gorizia facility but also what mental health care looked like in Italy: something that offered no real treatment, as Franca Ongaro Basaglia noted in one segment, "because you didn't need to be a psychiatrist to work in an asylum… Gorizia had a dermatologist and an internist but no psychiatrist. He was the first. A docent in psychiatry could have gone his entire career without ever setting foot in one."
A vital documentary. The stories and images serve those who never lived through that revolution in how we see the human being—a revolution each era must discover anew, in its own way.