David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder
The topic with which we would like to begin is a contemplation of some over-arching modes and methods operational in international in(ter)dependent disability films – particularly within the genre of disability documentary; although it’s important to point out that we believe one cannot fully understand the form of disability documentary alone without a necessary juxtaposition alongside disability fiction films. Thus, we will move back and forth between two genres throughout this analysis.
Independent disability films when contextualised and screened in a meaningful way within international disability film festivals allow for a crucial alternative approach to imagining disability: namely, these visual works provide opportunities for not only raising public awareness about inclusion (i.e. the sharing of public space) but, even more importantly, global disability cinema now provides viewers with an alternative ethical map of living interdependently with each other. This key shift in representational approaches to disability has the potential to exponentially escalate audience understanding of disability as a productive social identity in its own right – one that complicates previous social model efforts to merely argue disabled people should be able to live as non-disabled people do (see Mitchell and Snyder 2015: 4).
The Founding Sexual Prohibition
For instance, one fiction film by Stephen Lance, Yolk (2008), explores the narrative of a post-adolescent girl with Down syndrome moving toward maturity and exploring her own sexuality. One of the ways we introduce this film to students and general audiences is to explain that the film is about the sexual prohibition of pursuing active experiences of pleasure – particularly for cognitively disabled women. A primary point to understand about the social management of people with disabilities in post-industrialised western cultures revolves around sexual prohibition as a foundational cultural exclusion. As Tobin Siebers argues, reproductive withdrawal of sexual opportunities serves as a key impetus for most socially perpetuated violence against disabled people: why disabled people are institutionalised, why marriage laws develop at the end of the nineteenth century and why disabled people are coercively sterilised by nations practicing eugenic beliefs (2012: 38). The argument of eugenics, in the most straightforward gloss of its structure as a discriminatory belief system, was for states to remove forcibly disabled people from the reproductive pool of the country (Snyder and Mitchell 2006: 98).
During an audience Q&A at the 2015 DisArts Film Festival in Grand Rapids, Michigan (19–22 April 2015), an individual made the earnest observation that he didn’t see Yolk as about the sexual oppression of disabled people. Instead he only saw a film about a mother naturally concerned about her daughter’s naïve interest in becoming sexually active. This comment seemed completely right except for the fact that the film only shows up at disability film festivals and is informed by the historical sexual prohibition of disabled women as the cultural backdrop against which its narrative unfolds. We also pointed out that the comment distorted the fact that we framed the film with respect to explorations of ‘sexual prohibition’ and not ‘sexual oppression’. Those are different magnitudes of order for us and we needed to make that correction. We said that ‘this could be a film about sexual oppression, there’s plenty of sexual oppression experienced by disabled people (disabled women in particular), but this film is not the vehicle for that topic’. Yolk is more in the family melodrama genre of film that requires one to bring the content of sexual prohibition to its story.
But, nonetheless, this exchange reminded the audience that the stakes are very high in these films. One key to understanding in(ter)dependent disability film is to recognise that these works understand serious social dangers and attempt to imagine more habitable worlds for members of multiple marginalised communities (racial, queer, female, cognitive, sensory, psychiatrically and physically disabled people). A pressing need to diminish feelings of audience alienation with embodied differences serves as their foundational political platform. There’s an urgent social background against which all of these films develop. That, we believe, is incredibly important to acknowledge in part because it’s easy to miss this facet of their politicised objectives beneath the surface of their aestheticised presentations.
So, for instance, in the United States we’re in the middle of racial antagonisms where largely able-bodied, white, working-class police officers shoot with impunity non-normatively embodied, African American youth (particularly young men). The killing in Ferguson, Missouri of Michael Brown (a large man), for instance, or Eric Garner in New York City (also a large man who had asthma), represent the destruction of racialised young men with anomalous bodies. They’re also about people who live within great proximity to poverty. Disability cinema allows us one important forum to contemplate the incredibly serious repercussions of these extreme able-bodied reactions in the midst of encounters of anomalous bodies. Thus, their film messages help to bring home the representational stakes of what we’re after.
A ‘Lack’ of Cinematic Urgency
When viewing independent disability film one does not necessarily get a sense of that urgency. In general, the degree of desperation they conjure up within their plots exists on a relatively small scale. One can critique and/or feel dissatisfied with this absence of urgency given the violence of current circumstances, but disability film tries to ease audiences into a comfort with non-normative functionality and the appearance of non-normative bodies. Each film brings audiences into the lives of their disabled characters and helps us negotiate these difficult social questions brought on by the historical exclusion of disabled people from social participation in a fairly gentle way. This is what independent disability film offers us at this historical moment of which we write (i.e. largely films made between 2000 and 2014). Expressing the desperate circumstances of many disabled peoples’ lives is not the terrain that disability film inhabits. But, perhaps paradoxically, this desperation forms the complete background of the film narrative they generate.
So, for instance, in a film such as the Russian documentary
O Lubvi (
About Love, 2003) we are introduced to a cast of cute disabled kids going to school in a segregated special education environment. The subjects talk about the relationships between boys and girls (both heterosexual and ‘agnostic’), define their understanding of ‘love’ and sexuality, etc. But like many in(ter)dependent disability films,
O Lubvi is a celebration of Russian culture because the film features a celebration of their special education programmes; in fact, one could easily argue
O Lubvi is, in fact, about the love of devoted teachers and extended family caregivers. It captures scenes of teachers carrying kids who can’t walk to the chalkboard where they have to write their letters like everybody else. In portraying these scenes the film offers a truly beautiful vision of a supportive educational system focused, appropriately, on academics and socialisation for disabled children.
Yet, as the film unfolds, one might suddenly say to oneself: ‘Oh, I understand, the content here is actually about the abandonment of disabled children and how common that neglectful situation has become.’ Also, there’s the fact that nations – this happens in the US as well as Russia – have to create these massive support systems in order to take up care for disabled children rejected by their families. Such children are commonly left at hospitals or in orphanages by their parents, or the parents just can’t provide the level of care needed given lack of social supports and the economic demands on their lives: abandonment can now be recognised as part of contemporary austerity measures under neoliberalism. Likewise, O Lubvi also helps audiences take into account the commonality of men who leave relationships as a result of the birth of a disabled child.
On 28 December 2012 Russia’s President Putin passed a law stating the country would no longer allow people in countries such as the United States to adopt Russian children…with the exception of disabled kids. Disabled children could continue to be adopted but all other Russian children were off the international adoption market. So everywhere in these films one finds an incredibly urgent, desperate situation informing their materials. And yet despite this hazardous social terrain, these films ease us into their materials with little fanfare; you could watch them without ever taking note of the desperate circumstances to which they give voice. In many ways these works encourage viewers to feel free to watch their narratives without attending to the alarm of social neglect and violence residing in the background. But, at bottom, independent disability cinema wants the seriousness of materials to slowly emerge and make an impression on audiences without throttling them, so to speak: this is their deal with the social devil of ableism in many ways. The urgency of the issues are downplayed in order to secure a wider general audience and/or to depend upon the knowledge nature of their audiences across in(ter)dependent disability film networks.
Since these films are often financed by nationally sponsored arts funding organisations, they are, to a certain extent, expressions of the state’s desirability. When we speak of in(ter)dependent disability films, we refer to predominantly video-based works created on low budgets (less than USD$100,000 but in many cases below USD$10,000) and without the backing of multi-national corporations that often promote other minority film festivals. Independent disability films derive largely from local community contexts but speak globally to people with disabilities living around the world. To some degree, one could extrapolate their collective message as a voicing of paternalistic states; they seem to say: ‘We even take care of our disabled populations no matter how little they have to contribute to the robust life of the citizenry.’
The tenuous line that must be navigated between personal story and public critique is exemplified most powerfully in documentary films such as goodnight, liberation (2003) by the African American filmmaker Oriana Bolden, which serves as an example of what we refer to as ‘Introduction to My Disability’ films. Many films screened at disability film festivals are about introducing audiences to disability conditions through discussions of symptom clusters and the negotiation of stigmatising public responses. Collectively these work offer an entry into the unique experiences of living within non-normative bodies by saying, ‘here’s what it’s like to exist in my particular kind of body’. Consequently, these works have an unabashedly diagnostic impulse behind them. Effectively they argue that if we understand a particular disability from the point of view of the bearer audiences will have an easier time relating with and accepting other disabled people who share a particular medical label.
This journey into a certain level of medical complexity represents a significant impulse in in(ter)dependent disability documentary films. Except that in the case of goodnight, liberation, Bolden’s film gives you a taste of the ‘Introduction to My Disability’ genre only to turn the tables on the scenario completely. The documentary uses a search for the diagnosis of what is troubling the narrator physically (bleeding gums, unexplained bruises on her abdomen, chronic stomach upset) in order to expose a lack of systemic access to public healthcare in the United States. So once again a film such as goodnight, liberation reverses its more individualistic trajectory while having a serious message couched in minoritarian terms.
Alternative Disability Universes
A significant alternative to the ‘Introduction to My Disability’ genre (nearly always an expression of documentary form) are disability films that use all-disabled ensembles of actors. The employment of disabled actors proves highly uncommon in the US but, for instance, in the UK there is now a stipulation that companies may not hire a non-disabled actor to play a disability part. Among all of the things that such an employment practice allows is the creation of film worlds wherein the exclusionary isolation most people with disabilities experience is inverted. One may think this practice leads to the portrayal of significant stories about collective action (and this does happen to an extent such as in the first film discussed below). However, the works about alternative disability universes tend to narrate the tensions and fissures that exist across and between disability groupings.
For instance, in the ensemble cast of the short French fiction film Sang Froid (Cold Blood, 2002), one views deaf people cast as animalistic predators chasing a hysterical able-bodied human prey across a snowy landscape. The prey and predators arrive at a church near the end of the chase, the person being pursued hides behind a life-sized Jesus crucified on the cross, and much mayhem ensues. The deaf vampires are stopped at the sight of the cross as if the overwhelming Christianity of the symbol halts them from their pursuits (this is also a law of vampire films). After realising this protection, the once-pursued hearing character begins to laugh hysterically at the deaf vampires’ inability to continue their attack. In the middle of a 360-degree shot things change and the vampires begin pointing and laughing at the Christ-like figure on the cross who comes to life with fanged teeth and devours the figure of their pursuit from above.
So no sanctuary within the religious setting is allowed and the church – which has been historically presumed as a social sanctuary for disabled people – turns out otherwise in this reversal of fortunes (and able-bodied to disabled bodies performance ratios). In fact, the film goes on to show other people asleep in their beds in a nearby rural village also being attacked in a similar way by smaller bronze-and-silver Jesuses jumping in commando-like fashion from their stations on tiny wooden crucifixes nailed above their beds for protection. The horrified shrieks of unsuspecting villagers fill the night air. There is nothing made of the fact that the vampires are deaf in the film but they survive while the hearing world continues to experience the assault of their own imprisoning religious tradition.
In general what one comes to understand about disability films is their primary emphasis on the removal of stigma from disabled bodies and the transfer of that social debasement onto those who would perpetuate it. They are, in other words, about depathologisation at their most basic level. Within such an effort to gather up those on the margins of the margins, the alternative disability universes on display in in(ter)dependent disability films expose cultural norms for what they really are: inelastic standards of homogeneity incapable of accommodating a wide array of human diversity. In contrast, international in(ter)dependent disability film festivals have become new spaces of social collectivity-making: as people with disabilities find themselves denied ways to narrate viable futures for themselves, in(ter)dependent disability cinema allows an exploration of alternative modes of transmission and the creative exploration of non-normative modes of being (see Kafer 2013: 2).
In a UK short such as Martin Taylor’s Berocca (2005), the main story is told through interactions of an all-disabled cast. This genre of film (almost always fiction but usually drawing upon disabled actors who share congregate settings) often shows up at disability film festivals in the form of a plot puzzle. It’s hard to say what many of these films are about as they thrive on experimental, allegorical and the mysteries of unfamiliar, non-normative life forms. Berocca, for instance, forwards a plot about a disabled guy with cerebral palsy who is illegally selling after-market Viagra to a pharmacist who also happens to be parenting a young boy. The young boy – who turns out to be the son of Kohl, the film’s disabled protagonist – has been removed by the state to live with a foster family due to a charge of negligence on the part of Kohl who has no legal, gainful employment to support him. In undertaking this plot the film also points out that parenting a disabled child provides the basis for state removal of children from the home.
Near the conclusion Kohl and his mute companion (one is tempted to read the child as a symbolic fragment of the adult protagonist’s psyche) arrive at the beach. The differences between the two characters prove intense: the father’s neurological differences contrasting with the son’s intensity of introspection and muteness (some reviews of the film identify the boy as autistic). Ultimately the film becomes about the struggle to identify, communicate and establish some meaningful connection between these two very different disabled bodies. The two characters inhabit distinct, and certainly not automatically overlapping, neuroatypical worlds and the challenge is to see if the film can create a bridge between them. This connection fails in some significant ways and one is left contemplating the degree to which disability film is about incomplete, imperfect and missed opportunities for connection between non-normative human actors.
The matter of minority group solidarity is at stake with respect to disabled people, disability communities and everyone who cares and works on these issues. The issue now plaguing various social movements is – and we want to argue this must be recognised as an alternative strength within crip/queer collectivities – the degree to which we can search for unity across differences without jettisoning their content-specific cargo. For instance, in the Scottish autism film
I’m in Away From Here (2007)
, the audience awakens with Archie, suddenly and without warning along a Scottish beach. Signaled by distortions on the audio and video tracks, the world crashes in upon viewers as well as the protagonist; we cannot interpret the story amidst these sensorial intrusions coming from every direction. Disability films employ experimental narrative techniques such as these as ways to
simulate interior subjectivities that offer access to disabled people’s ways of experiencing the world directly.
The alternative disability universe of I’m in Away From Here helps to underscore a key element in the earlier film Berocca, in that they both attempt to situate audiences within the perspectives of their disabled characters. So, for instance, in the latter film we sensorily experience events through the autistic protagonist, Archie, in order to understand his life through a series of interruptions he experiences throughout his daily travels. Thus, the best way to describe the plot of this film might be through our exposure to the discomfort of the myriad intrusions that enter into his personal space. His inability to control these unwanted interruptions of his personal space become part of our own annoyance and hindrance to pleasure but they also provide an alternative simulation of embodiment as an opportunity to widen audience perspectives on this corner of the disability experience.
Early on in the film Archie takes up with a friend named Bruno, who also has a disability (likely CP and he uses a wheelchair) and they spend most of their days together within the limited options offered by life in a Day Centre. The two grow frustrated with the adherence to arbitrary rules, incomprehensible social cure and the deadening pursuits prescribed by the Day Centre staff. Rejecting these limited options they go off to pursue more adventurous worlds on their own – such as life at a nearby pub that includes Archie gambling on a brightly colored Lotto machine and sex with a prostitute for Bruno. As in the earlier films mentioned above, the two characters struggle to make a connection and at the conclusion they roll off toward the harbour with the sun glinting in the background and tell each other in a simple, yet reassuring manner something that the outside able-bodied world refuses to say: ‘You’re all right.’ This sentiment is echoed by Archie’s mother awaiting anxiously at the Day Centre when they return worried that her autistic son has walked off and the staff has no idea regarding his whereabouts. When his mother sees him return safely, her relief is spoken by words that echo Bruno’s words: ‘It’s all right, Archie.’
In other words, the film asks us to contemplate whether a strictly regulated form of institutionalised care is necessary to protect disabled participants. Like the other characters in the film, audiences are also reassured that Archie has his own strategies for navigating a turbulent life as others must negotiate them. Rather a socially paternalistic protectionism seems more on behalf of protection for the able-bodied world rather than the other way around.
Who Owns Disability Representations?
Even in mainstream media it’s very uncommon to find stories about the relationship between mothers and daughters. As an example of the immersion and exposure to atypical lives that in(ter)dependent disability films offer, the short fiction film What It Is Like To Be My Mother (2007) uses a family drama to stage a now common political conflict about the necessity of policing the borders of disability representation between disabled people and non-disabled image-makers. In the film, a non-disabled daughter makes a film about the life of her newly disabled mother who is a double amputee. The film gets selected for screening at ‘the last minute’ by a disability arts festival in Warsaw and the story unfolds based on the mother’s ensuing reluctance to allow her to screen her double amputee body for a public audience. A debate erupts about who owns the disability image and whether or not even an intimacy such as mother and daughter is enough to allow respectful entry into the disabled character’s life.
During the festival screening of the film, the mother hastily rolls out of the theatre and decides to manually propel herself home (miles away from the theatre) in a torrential rainstorm. Whereas the mother’s character appears relatively unlikable to this point of the film (both a bit tyrannical and exhibitionistic), she tells the daughter that she became upset while watching the film. The reason for this emotionality is that she realises how mature the daughter is becoming (certainly capable of telling her story in a moving way) and that she inevitably will have to leave her someday to pursue her own life.
As with all of the independent disability films discussed above, a real-life urgency at the bottom of the film emerges in that many disabled people – like the mother – need caregivers to navigate their lives and that care is often most effectively and comfortably provided by family members. The mother’s prospects at developing her own romantic relationship appear slim. For instance, she tells her daughter a story about a disabled female friend of hers who is rejected by a male partner because ‘he cannot trust himself to not leave her in ten years’. If she were not disabled, he explains, he would never have had this thought. Thus, the mother becomes suddenly more sympathetic in revealing these personal details and making herself vulnerable to the daughter.
In turn, the daughter – through whose eyes we have watched the action unfold – uses the opportunity of this private revelation to reject the mother’s efforts at renewed intimacy between them. She calls her a ‘stupid cow’ and tells her taxi-cab driver, Yurek, that he should refuse to drive her around Poland in the future. In the culminating scene in the mother’s bedroom after the emotion-filled night, the mother removes her prosthetic legs with great delicacy for the audience and asks the daughter to hug her. The daughter grows stiff and refuses to return the show of affection. A stalemate develops and the film ends in discomforting irresolution.
One of the things that disability film allows audiences to do is to comprehend the degree to which they allow us to sit with non-normative bodies in public spaces. Such an opportunity remains relatively rare in that we usually don’t get to share public space with those with severe impairments. The fact that film is very much the kind of imaginative site where one can gain intimacy with people who inhabit different bodies and that opportunity, in-and-of-itself, is a very powerful political emphasis within disability film. If you go to disability film festivals you quickly realise that these works are global vehicles; they do not simply originate in the US or the UK or Australia, the usual triumvirate of disability ‘savvy’ western post-industrial nations. Instead, in(ter)dependent disability cinema represents a global phenomenon where disabled people think about what people within one national boundary have done to make their lives more manageable and then attempt to export some of those strategies to their home towns in order to affect transformations in their own local arenas.
We want to think about this wider principle of disability access and the creation of multiple accessible spaces as the advent of more habitable forms of living and environments for disabled people. Consequently, we’ve been arguing that we need to understand disability as a baseline model of interdependency rather than a tangential or exceptional situation. The kinds of inclusion on display in in(ter)dependent disability films are much more than outside efforts to include four or five more people in a culture; rather they help us think about disability as a foundational cultural model for re-imagining how human beings might inhabit the Earth together. In April 2015, during a presentation to a Chinese disability delegation at George Washington University (where we teach) we remarked: ‘We’re not particularly good at getting along with each other in the world, inhabiting the world with other human beings is not particularly our forte, and we think disability culture has something to teach us about that because of the degree to which interdependency is an in-built, very consciously created, intergenerational necessity.’
That value of in(ter)dependency is what disability culture has to teach us in a much wider sense about better inhabiting the Earth with each other. Thus, this unveiling of alternative possibilities within disability universes turns disability into not only a target of oppression, attitudinal prejudice and exclusions through social barriers, but rather a productive value of non-normative embodiment. Audiences discover alternative ethical maps by which to live their lives in contrast to the majority of others pursuing normative habitudes.
Afficionados of Human Variation
This innovative, alternative cultural value of interdependency also plays a key role in films about disability dance. We call the primary thematic of these films, ‘disability in motion’. The works within this category prove significant in the sense that one often hears, ‘Well, disabled people, they don’t move and they certainly don’t dance! We all know that.’ In other words this is a foundational paradox at the heart of much independent disability film. One of the best examples of films sharing this central concern about disability movement is the British film The Cost of Living (2004), a work made by the UK mixed disabilities theatre and dance company DV8. All of the primary dancers and performers in DV8 have significant disabilities and that fact in and of itself makes DV8 an incredible originator. This film is one of the most powerful and interesting to come out of the independent disability cinema movement since 2000.
When we originally viewed this film we had the good fortune of watching it in the company of disability performance studies professor Carrie Sandahl from the University of Illinois at Chicago. As we were watching the film we were asking ourselves, ‘Why is this film so amazing?’ Carrie made this insightful comment: ‘Watch the way the film uses the alternative bodily movements, rhythms, and flows of the disabled performance artists rather than the other way around [i.e. disabled peoples’ bodies mimicking the movements of the more graceful able-bodied performers around them]. The plane of disabled existences and the movement of very disabled bodies sets the rhythm, the score, the shape, the texture of the film itself.’ And that’s one of the truly powerful things about the film.
The other thing we want to argue is that we began this chapter with an observation about the rare instance of inhabiting public space with disabled bodies. This observation is at the basis of most independent disability film. These events are now held all over the world in nearly every major urban cosmopolitan urban centre: Helsinki, Milan, London, Paris, Brazil, New Zealand, and there are several in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Japan. In other words independent disability film is a serious global phenomenon. And when you go to other disability film festivals, just like other events, they’re like marathon events – events that no disabled person can quite do successfully! Three days of film programming, running disability film after disability film, they run for eight, nine, ten hours at a time, and by the end of the day one has to try to rest in order to struggle and endure the following day of programming.
But we think there’s a powerful effect of spending that much time with disabled bodies in a theatre for that long. By the end of this continual exposure to non-normative bodies at the disability film festival one becomes a connoisseur of the body different. One starts to think of oneself as a kind of aficionado of human variation in much of its dissimulated richness in the outside world. One comes away from the disability film festival thinking: ‘One of the values I took away from this experience was getting incredibly comfortable with the massive variation that human bodies show up in.’
Consider, for instance, Christian von Tippelskirch, who was the primary creator of the disability film Invitation to Dance (2014), which is a documentary about the life and times of disability scholar, activist and dance advocate Simi Linton. One of the most important things about a film such as Invitation to Dance is that filmmakers allow us to consider the fact that in many ways we don’t know how to do this awkward, world-fragmenting dance of disability. Linton’s film allows us to admit that and yet keep going with this invention as a guiding value. There are so few things in the world of able-bodiedness that can help disabled people more effectively manage their own lives. As Alison Kafer says in the film: ‘We’re all uncomfortable with the way our bodies move.’
At the 2010 Society of Disability Studies conference a flash dance erupted out in the main intersection of the campus. The impromptu event stopped traffic in order to allow disabled people to celebrate their bodies. The day after the conference ended the conference programme director was called to the Dean’s office and asked why participants had been allowed to block a major intersection in order to perform outrageous displays of their bodies? This was one university administrator’s response to one of the most successful disability studies conferences in the sense that the conference brought around five hundred disabled people, scholars, activists, advocates and allies to a major US university campus. The Dean made it clear during the meeting that he was livid about the whole ‘spectacle’, as he called it.
What struck us about this unexpected expression of outrage about the conference participants is that the world of disabled people continues to be experienced as the violation of powerful taboos about displaying the disabled body in public on disability terms. It’s not an artifact of the past – this was the year 2010. And the event led to an incredibly complex, uncomfortable, harassing situation. This response accompanied, at the same time, an organisation of disabled people trying to create an alternative public space, a way of life that might prove more sustaining, creative and enjoyable than anything that non-disabled culture would provide for them. The flash dance offered nothing less than a glimpse at an alternative way to be disabled in the world.
Invitation to Dance takes up this very project in a serious, unfinished, imperfect pursuit of crip/queer bodies, almost like a Cubist experiment. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson says on screen: ‘This is broadest invitation to dance that has ever been issued in the history of the world!’ Yet it turns out to be an incredibly fraught subject in so many ways.
Disability movements (including the independent international film festivals they help spawn) have to re-imagine exclusionary public spaces including alternative theatre seating layouts, presentation formats and projection techniques. Yet, ultimately, what independent disability film seeks to target is the domain of public consciousness. It’s one thing to be able to get on the bus and enter into public space – this is a huge innovation of global disability rights movements – but it’s another to change the attitudinal reception of disabled peoples’ entry into the world. Film, ultimately, tries to transform the realm of public consciousness. The medium tries to change our perspective by giving us access to disabled peoples’ subjectivities. It’s this targeting of the attitudinal domain that’s so difficult to get at from anywhere other than art. Getting disabled people into the public is definitely part of this transformation; just the fact of getting us to share public space in a way that has rarely happened in history is part of the change of our moment. It’s the reason why the disability rights movement is so significant to the way we live now (to borrow the theme of Germany’s 2007 disability short film festival). However, in and of itself, that’s not enough. There’s an entire other domain that’s often off limits to us: how do we affect peoples’ belief systems, the attitudes, their ideas and their conceptualisation of people with disabilities? That’s where we see film’s most significant, potential innovation.
One last point on which to end regarding the accessibility of film festivals to disabled people. Films, like other products such as books once one produces them, have a life of their own. They go out into the world without you, like children or students, and you don’t always know how they’ll turn out or how they will be received. Getting disabled people to a film festival such as the one in Grand Rapids, Michigan is very difficult. Many people can’t travel; if you travel on airlines they commonly damage power wheelchairs due to inadequate handling procedures – there’s a great deal one has to exchange in order to participate in it. One of the things about film is that it travels in a rectangular box on a round disc. So it goes really easily without the participants in an envelope. We think this is one of the key reasons why disability film festivals have become so significant – they offer a kind of tiny mobility across national borders that disabled people themselves do not enjoy. If you try to move across borders as a disabled person, as we did in March 2015 with a group of students studying the T4 Program in Germany, you could find yourself pulled out of line by a guard suggesting a BiPAP machine might have a bomb in it. You might find yourself (as we did) taken off into an interrogation room and nearly made to miss your flight. Disability film festivals serve as a key way in which disabled people might be able to communicate through the physical barriers of mass transit inaccessibility, intensive immigration restrictions and poverty.
But even all of those hassles aside, we’d rather see the world and participate in it than observe it from the sidelines where so many disabled people are sequestered. That risk of going out into the world is worth it, but it’s highly draining at the same time. So when that cannot happen film also does that for us. It gets disabled people into the space with an audience and gives us access to their lives. An intimacy with disabled persons’ perspectives becomes available even when they live in radically divergent corners of the globe.
Conclusion
While each film discussed here wrestles with its own particular struggles with ableist nationalist practices and beliefs, its own ensnarement within neoliberal orders of reproductive sameness resulting from more meagre forms of inclusion, the ensemble of films available for viewing across the space of multi-day international film festivals significantly pluralise encounters with human variations. They tend toward a diminishment of audience alienation with embodied differences while avoiding the alternative problem of flattening the field with platitudes of claims to universally shared identities in disability. We suggest, in drawing upon these multivalent media portrayals of disability in various global locations, that the exploration of subjectivities wrought within neoliberalism unveil alternative possibilities for an ethics of living interdependently with others developed within disability subcultures.
Such plumbings of experiential navigations involve the opening up of formerly prohibited interactions based on sexuality, body care, arts/cultural programming, shared access to public and private spaces, intrusions upon bodies and the ambivalences of disability inclusion projects. In each of the examples provided, disability ‘failures’ to meet ableist expectations result in inversions that challenge the assumed positivity of heteronormative practices, beliefs and capacities provisioned for able bodies.
FILMOGRAPHY
Bolden, Oriana (dir) (2003) goodnight, liberation. 7 minutes. USA.
Lance, Stephen (dir) (2008) Yolk. 14 minutes. Head Pictures. Australia.
Levacher, Pierre-Louis (dir) (2002) Sang Froid (Cold Blood). 6 minutes. France.
MacInnes, Catrona (dir) (2007) I’m in Away From Here. 16 minutes. Scotland.
McGettigan, Norah (dir) (2007) What It Is Like To Be My Mother. 30 minutes. Poland.
Murphy, Ryan (dir) (2014) American Horror Story: Freak Show: ‘Photo’s Bullseye’; Episode 5, Season 4. 52 minutes. USA.
Newsom, Lloyd (dir) (2004) The Cost of Living. DV8 Films Ltd. 35 minutes. UK.
Shakhverdiev, Tofik (dir) (2003) O Lubvi (About Love). 26 minutes. Russia.
Taylor, Martin (dir) (2005) Berocca. 13 minutes. UK.
Von Tippelskirch, Christian (dir) (2014) Invitation to Dance. 86 minutes. USA.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kafer, Alison (2013) Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press.
Mitchell, David T. with Sharon L. Snyder (2015) The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Siebers, Tobin (2012) ‘A Sexual Culture for Disabled People’, in Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow (eds) Sex and Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 37–52.
Snyder, Sharon L. and David T. Mitchell (2006) Cultural Locations of Disability. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.