Benjamin Fraser
A discussion is brewing about disability in world contexts that might best be summed up through a series of questions. Is Disability Studies limited by an association with Anglophone origins and contexts? Should the theoretical tools and perspectives associated with the political project of Disability Studies in such contexts transfer to the analysis of other spaces and struggles across the globe? Does this political project necessarily reaffirm paradigms of the globalized West or the Global North? To what degree do state practices and national imaginaries construct disability? Or inversely, to what degree does disability inflect the construction of nationhood? Should we be wary of a tendency to compartmentalize disability as definable only within the boundaries of certain national, cultural and/or linguistic contexts? Or should we be suspicious of approaches to disability that take cross-cultural similarities for granted and tend to ignore the specificities of embodied space/place? Are there, in fact, commonalities in how disabilities are conceived, perceived and lived cross-culturally? Is there evidence of a universal disability culture? Or does any such evidence serve to naturalize a suspect disciplinary formation and uncritically accept existing dynamics of able-bodied geopolitical power?
Although the selections published here may encourage readers to think through such questions,
Cultures of Representation: Disability in World Cinema Contexts provides no definitive answers. This volume is not devoted to advocating a single position on the state of this progressively globalising field of inquiry. Nor, even, is it envisioned as a direct commentary on the disciplinary questioning I have tried to approximate in the above paragraph. Moreover, because it is my conviction that such questions have not been systematically asked, I do not believe they can be answered at this time. And, of course, I am not sure that any future answer would be or should be definitive. My own inclination is to affirm that
in the end, it may be best to conceive of Disability Studies as a disciplinary formation whose sustained political force requires constant methodological innovation and political commitment if it is to respond to struggles that appear, morph and reappear in specific places and at specific times – always with specific human consequences.
This book’s central proposition is simple enough: the time has come to think more globally about both disability in general and Disability Studies in particular. Film is one point of entry into this global discussion – one toward which many gravitate because of a deceptive accessibility, the potential that moving images hold to capture the imagination of the widest possible public. One cannot sidestep an important issue of spectatorship in this regard. Analysis of moving images implies the requisite risks and rewards associated with what has been called ‘mass’ or ‘popular culture’, as previous scholarship on disability has made clear. That is, the most brute reduction would have it that cinematic representations may reinforce ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ images of disability. They advance characterisations that are certainly not always as welcome or as simple as they may seem. In the end, what is important is to acknowledge the power of filmic images as representations. As such, they are a visible counterpart to the less-often visible social representations that mediate the way disability is conceived, perceived and lived.
For the viewing public that approaches disability and film within the context of teaching and learning, within the context of scholarship, within the political project of Disability Studies, I believe the rewards of attending to filmic representations of disability will always outweigh the risks. And because films are increasingly screened globally, the greater risk is that of ignoring such representations. If we do so, we thus also ignore the questions that surface with their production and reception. Anglophone publications, in my estimation, have shown far too little documented scholarly interest in disability in non-Anglophone contexts – and it is quite simply to this reality that this book responds in conception and design. While elsewhere one can find a significant number of article-length publications that touch on disability contexts throughout the world – with more or less success depending on the place and time sought – we might take the pulse of existing interest in the topic of disability in non-Anglophone contexts by assessing the relative quantity of book-length products alone. Despite the growing, and perhaps vast, number of book publications on disability in general, there are only a small handful of these each year that relate to non-Anglophone contexts.
1 And when one asks how many of these books systematically deal with artistic representations or humanities cultural products – films or otherwise – the total number of relevant publications is greatly lessened indeed.
Humanities-trained scholars interested in film, literature and cultural production continue to believe that artistic and cultural representations are inextricable from political struggles. The history and significance of previous work on this theoretical or methodological question is far too vast to rehearse here, but one can start by saying this: at the largest scale – the one most pertinent to introductory discussions – it matters not whether one considers art forms to be reflections of society, mediations of the social, or products indistinguishable in any meaningful sense from the larger society in which they are produced and consumed. Similarly to all manner of extra-artistic practices and products, artistic works teach, inspire, model, habituate, norm, entertain, distract, anesthetise, engage, challenge, contest, subvert, critique and even potentially re-norm. Moreover, they are constructed, viewed, circulated, appropriated and re-appropriated from divergent perspectives and according to diverse interests that all merit scrutiny. Although this summary of the significance of art obscures important nuances that distinguish different approaches to cultural production, my hope is that general readers will find its basic assertion to be glaringly self-evident: representations matter.
In all likelihood, to approach disability and film from a global perspective brings new considerations to light while also confirming old suppositions. I leave it for readers of this volume to sift the former from the latter as may suit them. What is most important to note is that, to date, there has been no volume published dedicated expressly to a global perspective on disability and film.
2 The first edition of Lennard J. Davis’s
The Disability Studies Reader (1997) – a touchstone for the field that has been re-edited three times since its original publication – included no essays on film and spoke more to Anglophone contexts than to a global engagement of disability studies.
3 Of course, disability and film has been addressed directly in a number of book publications, all of them laudable, but also, all too often, insufficiently global.
4What I have found particularly interesting as I seek to connect my disciplinary Hispanic Studies work on disability with the wider field of Disability Studies is that sources originally published in Spanish themselves have viewed Anglophone disability cinema as a touchstone, eschewing a more direct exploration of disability in Spanish-language films themselves.
5 This was in essence, a recapitulation of a discovery I had made a decade earlier while researching deaf culture in Spain, where I had found similar evidence of the continuing cultural capital enjoyed by Anglophone work on deafness.
6 To my eyes, such evidence – which remains to be explored and confirmed across this and other linguistic contexts as well as Area Studies disciplines and Language and Literature fields – would corroborate the assertions of those who associate global Disability Studies with an Anglophone project. This association, as I see it, presents both advantages and challenges that must be acknowledged if the field is to acquire a more global resonance.
7 Leaving aside, for the time being, the important matter of Disability Studies work as published in languages other than English, the motivation behind this edited volume is to underscore that Anglophone scholarship on disability itself should – and, in fact, must – seek to globalise itself more extensively than it has up until now.
A strong note toward globalising Anglophone Disability Studies was sounded in 2010 with Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell’s special issue of the
Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies titled ‘The Geo-Politics of Ablenationalism’ (2010a) and Clare Barker and Stuart Murray’s special issue of that same journal titled ‘Disability Postcolonialism: Global Disability Cultures and Democratic Criticism’ (2010).
8 Attentive to the nuances of studying disability in concrete contexts of ablenationalism, Snyder and Mitchell’s issue offered ‘an opportunity for scholars to pursue a new paradigm for theorizing disability among other cross-cultural experiences of bodies identified as deviant’ (2010a: 119). In their introduction, Barker and Murray wrote that ‘as a whole, contemporary Disability Studies is not especially perceptive in its articulation of global dynamics’ and cautioned that ‘Disability Studies problematically transports theories and methodologies developed within the Western academy to other global locations, paying only nominal attention to local formations and understandings of disability’ (2010: 219).
9 These approaches did not delve sufficiently into the question of artistic representation, but in their global orientation and large-scale thinking they did pave the way for the contents of the present volume.
Cinematic Representation: Indexical, Iconic and Symbolic Signification
It is worth asking: why film? Although he did not discuss film in
Disability Aesthetics (2010), it is important to remember Tobin Siebers’ more general proposition. Disability, he wrote, was present even if ‘rarely recognized as such’ throughout the history of modern art, where the presence of disability – of ‘strangeness’ and the ‘convulsive’; of ‘misshapen and twisted bodies’ – allowed ‘the beauty of an artwork to endure over time’ (2010: 4, 5). Though there may be nuances that distinguish disability in aesthetics in general and disability in film in particular, there should be no reason to consider the story of film to stand wholly outside of this analysis of modern art. As a visual medium, cinema – like painting and sculpture for example – has been focused on the representation of bodies: bodies in specific locations, real and/or imagined. While I do not want to overemphasise the importance of this assertion or to present it unproblematically, I do believe it is important to understand film’s unique representational significance as it relates to ableism, disability and the interdependence of all human lives. It is this: film inherits from photography an ontological assertion that should not be ignored – and from which it draws its potential and its risks; in sum, its representational force.
Early films captured everyday moments and their peculiar form of artistic representation was governed, I would say, by an expressly ontological quality that has never left cinema. The events famously captured by the Lumière brothers on their cinematograph and by others on comparable machines – the arrival of a train, workers leaving a factory, for example – in a simple sense re-presented daily routines or activities for consideration in a new light. Such relatively simple representations asserted the brute reality of an extra-cinematic (social and political) existence for the cinematic sign whose theorisation was to grow in complexity throughout the twentieth century.
The noted director and cinema theorist Pier Paolo Pasolini once made an astute observation I consider imperative for discussions of representations of disability in film: ‘if we see in the sublime
Man of Aran [Robert J. Flaherty, 1934] a woman and a boy on the rocks, we recognize them because the cognitive code of reality as such comes into play’ (1988: 250). This was no passing anecdote for Pasolini, but a comment encapsulating his entire approach to cinema. Paraphrasing his perspective, we can say that the semiotic code of cinema is the semiotic code of reality. One can find echoes of Pasolini’s ‘cognitive code of reality’ in other samples of canonical film theory – for example, in Siegfried Kracauer’s theory of film as the redemption of physical reality (1968), or, for that matter, in the value given to the indexical and iconic qualities of the filmic sign as signaled by Peter Wollen: ‘The cinema contains all three modes of the sign: indexical, iconic and symbolic. What has always happened is that theorists of the cinema have seized on one or more of these dimensions and used it as the ground for an aesthetic firman’ (1972: 125).
10 The indexical and iconic qualities of film signs – in the interests of brevity we might say that these result from the direct impression of light onto a receptive surface (in celluloid film), and from a correspondence in form or shape between the representation and the original – together point to the extra-filmic (socially and politically inflected) existence of a thing, an object, a person. These forms of signification co-exist with the symbolic and arbitrary, conventional forms of signification that arguably drove film theory throughout the twentieth century.
11 It is, then, the complex interplay between index, icon and symbol – between motivated and arbitrary/conventional representation – that makes film so important to disability studies today.
As illustration, we might take Belgian filmmaker Jaco van Dormael’s intriguing short film
The Kiss (1995). Made to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the first Lumière screening,
The Kiss was included in the collection
Lumière et compagnie (
Lumière and Company, 1995), a project where forty directors from around the world were asked to shoot a short film using a model of the original cinematograph machine employed by the Lumière brothers.
12 Van Dormael’s 52-second black and white film opens with actors Pascal Duquenne and Michele Maes looking directly at the camera in a mid-close-up. Although not much of the background can be seen, the presence of a building and the movement of passers-by clearly demonstrate the public-ness of the space in which they are captured. From a perspective that acknowledges the relevance of the same ‘cognitive code of reality’ to both film and life, it is significant that viewers will note both actors have the physical traits associated with Down syndrome. After eight seconds, they turn toward each other, smile and kiss. Their kissing becomes more passionate and, in between caresses, they once again smile and look at the camera.
There are many ways to view this short film. Two jump immediately to mind. One may see it, for example, as part of a tradition of ‘objectifying ethnography’,
13 or else as a subversion of the way disabled bodies more routinely serve as a ‘vehicle of sensation’ (Snyder and Mitchell 2006: 163) related to trauma and threats to able-bodiedness. We should not overlook the way disability has been harnessed for exploitation by narratives – filmic, literary or otherwise – that reaffirm the denigrating discourse of disability as lack from the perspective of a medical model or as a product of an ableist imaginary. Nor should we ignore that disability has been systematically differentiated from a socially and politically constructed able-bodied or neurotypical norm. It may be relevant to keep in mind, too, that narratives of disability – filmed or otherwise – rarely incorporate sexuality, preferring a sanitised image of platonic or amorous love instead. Many of the contributions to this volume in fact deal with these very points, issues that have shaped important strata of Disability Studies criticism. Neither should we forget, more generally, the problematic on-screen portrayal of disability by ablebodied actors, a topic that has also rightly received much attention in Disability Studies scholarship, a continuing historical tendency that is seemingly counteracted here. Nor still, however, should we ignore the risks of even categorising van Dormael’s production as a ‘disability film’, given advances in intersectionality theory that warn of the dangers of adhering too closely to identity politics, narrowly defined (see Siebers 2008: 27–30).
Cinematic representation, as noted above, is not just about the indexical or iconic meaning of images, but also about its symbolic signification. Thus another perspective on this particular film might tie The Kiss to cinema’s oft-cited ability to turn images into metaphors; this is cinema as a form of thinking, and specifically as a form of thinking through, via, by way of, representations. This is a visual form that stages for us the way we think through, via, by way of, concepts – keep in mind Pasolini’s notion of the ‘cognitive code of reality’. From this perspective, cinema becomes a reflective mirror, a productive expression or a theoretical ground for the integration of perception and concepts that informs our socially negotiated understanding of disability. Because of the way indexical, iconic and symbolic/arbitrary signification blend together in the cinematic sign, film becomes, like reality, a cognitive code that actively requires questioning, understanding, and perhaps decipherment. This might be said of all art, or of all artistic representation and engaged spectatorship, of course. But in this case and in this volume we deal in cinematic representation. To deal with film’s symbolic signification is always to deal with social convention/social history one one hand, and individual consciousness/individual interpretation on the other. Viewers are perhaps encouraged to assess where van Dormael’s film – considered as represented thought, images as socially mediated concepts – coincides with their own thinking. For some viewers, the significance of The Kiss thus may seem to come from the way it reconciles two times as well as the perceived distance between the real and the ‘reel’.
Restaging the equipment, limitations and stylistic conventions of 1895 for modern audiences, the film boasts an organic simplicity – a black and white image, length of approximately one minute, static camera, no editing or postproduction, unity of time and place, everyday topic, situated in public space, natural lighting, no sound. With the knowledge of when it was filmed assured, however, the moment captured speaks to a more contemporary moment. Van Dormael’s film seems to take on greater meaning in light of the growing awareness of disability in Europe toward the end of the twentieth century. Given the metaphorical value of cinema stemming from the symbolic signification of the filmic image, one might see the film as a vehicle for abstraction. From the stark reality of the couple’s moment viewers can easily move toward consideration of the abstract and embattled concepts through which they make sense of this image: public-ness? emotions? relationships? love? nationhood? progress? rights? humanity? But such abstraction is always held in tension with the indexical and iconic aspects of film, which assure that such a moment is not abstract but embodied. From this perspective, one might suggest that the question posed by van Dormael’s film is precisely how far the socially mediated concept of disability – perceived through the ontological assertion of bodies captured in cinematic representation – intertwines with other concepts such as community, nation and human-ness.
To ask this question is to consider the imbrication of indexical, iconic and symbolic modes of signification in the filmic image. But it is also to fuse together notions of existence and interpretation – which of course can never fully be pulled apart from one another. The application of Pasolini’s notion of the ‘cognitive code of reality’ to film should not be seen in limited terms as an essentialisation of disability, but rather as a call to recognise that viewers call upon the same socially mediated concepts, categories and representations in analysing van Dormael’s screen images as they do in making sense of extra-filmic perceptions. It is to recognise that, whether in art or in ‘real life’, thought influences perception and vision affects knowledge. Through film, viewers may confront their own socially mediated perceptions of disability in other cultures, and they may potentially form knowledge of how concepts of disability are embedded in social environments. The vehicle for this engagement with disability on film is the notion of representations as a presence. The individual and social forces that construct and shape the presence of disability on film draw their power – whether seen as pernicious, progressive or neutral – from those forces that construct and shape the presence of disability off of film. In dismissing this on-screen presence – however problematic it may be – we risk dismissing the presence of disability in arguably less-artistic, but similarly socio-political, contexts off-screen.
The filmic presence of disability, its on-screen representation, is – it seems to me – always significant, but until now it has never been approached in a range of global contexts. Interrogating this range of contexts may prompt us to think further about the connections between ontology and epistemology as they relate to disability as a product of social relationships. In doing so, we must understand that there are always risks, just as there are also opportunities.
14 As scholarship on disability in film testifies, and as the contributions to this volume themselves suggest, cinematic representation can be reductively violent and normative, on one hand, or potentially transformative on the other. Moreover, it may be conflicted and contradictory. As with other forms of artistic representation, the representation of disability on film may push viewers to advocate integration, full inclusion and the dismantling of ableist concepts or it may play into discourses of ablenationalism, locational exceptionality or a cleansed global universality. I hope that readers will agree with me on one point: no matter what the textures of cinematic representation discussed, and no matter where they unfold across the globe, it is in discussing, critiquing and understanding the concepts through which film is produced and viewed – it is via the interrogation of social formations of visual knowledge – that viewers may move toward other ways of seeing. In this way global film becomes the start of a conversation concerning representation – and representation is, of course, a process that unfolds also outside of the discourse of art in our everyday social worlds (consider Siebers’ remark that ‘representation is the difference that makes a difference’ [2008: 17]). The cognitive codes we use to discern (said a different way, construct) reality are necessarily mediated by social representations – and as such they are also potentially impacted, shaped, grounded, re-calibrated by artistic representations. Put quite simply, without a global approach to these dynamics, Disability Studies as a discipline will have contented itself with a mere reflection of its Anglophone origins.
Toward World Cinema Contexts
As David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder suggest toward the end of their contribution to this volume, ‘film’s most significant, potential innovation’ may be that it provides a partial answer to an important question: ‘how do we affect peoples’ belief systems, the attitudes, their ideas and their conceptualisation of people with disabilities?’ The staging of disability for global audiences and readerships thus begins an important conversation on attitudinal change. At the same time, my hope is that this collection on disability in world cinema contexts will further push scholars, students and general readers to think more globally about the limitations and the potential of Anglophone Disability Studies. If ‘disability enlarges our vision of human variation and difference’ (Siebers 2010: 3), then consideration of disability across world cinema contexts will have enlarged our world a great deal more indeed.
In composing this volume I first struggled to find global ‘coverage’ only to content myself with the understanding that this is not the end but the mere beginning of a more global discussion of disability. Nevertheless, the inclusion here of films from Belgium, France, Germany, India, Italy, Iran, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, Russia, Senegal, Spain, and of a pair of Anglophone films with global resonance, assures me that this discussion is off to a good start. The contributors – primarily drawn from institutions in the United States but also from Australia, Austria, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Malawi and the Netherlands – have had the autonomy to approach their chosen subject in whatever way they feel is best. Fearing that structuring the volume along national or regional lines would encourage essentialising conclusions, I had hoped to organise the films into mutually exclusive categories – such as Physical Disability, Cognitive Disability, Illness and Psychiatric Disability, Gender and Sexuality, Marxism and Politics/Social Reform, Cultural Construction of Disability, Documentary Film, Fiction Film, Auteur Approaches, Overviews and so on…Such a principle was impossible, however, since so many of the contributions gathered here speak to multiple, overlapping considerations. In the end, the contents of this volume have themselves suggested a more organic organisation based on the readerly flow from each contribution to the next. Rather than map out those considerations here, my hope is that a brief statement on each chapter will direct readers toward specific cultural locations and/or themes.
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s ‘Global In(ter)dependent Disability Cinema: Targeting Ephemeral Domains of Belief and Cultivating Aficionados of the Body’ both asserts the value of film festivals as embodied events and covers a range of films from diverse contexts (Australia, France, Poland, Russia, UK, US) released over the span of more than a decade (2002–14). In the end they assert that ‘art gives us access and tries to transform public consciousness’.
Paul Petrovic’s ‘“Beyond Forgiveness”?: Lee Chang-dong’s Oasis (2002) and the Mobilisation of Disability Discourses in the Korean New Wave’ asserts that the fiction film spans ‘two gendered modalities, simultaneously spotlighting a male crisis while anticipating a more expansive take on female subjectivity’. The representation of cerebral palsy is explored with particular attention to matters of identity formation and sexuality in situations shaped by familial and economic ties.
Michael Gill’s ‘Refusing Chromosomal Pairing: Inclusion, Disabled Masculinity, Sexuality and Intimacy in Yo, también (2009)’ looks at a Spanish film that stages a meditation on the consequences of ableist assumptions that limit the sexual rights of those with intellectual disabilities. In particular, the representation of the relationship between the characters Daniel, who has Down syndrome, and Laura, who does not, is read against others in the film (of two intellectually disabled partners, and of two able-bodied partners), suggesting that more needs to be done to secure ‘wider participation in sexual and reproductive rights’ both on- and off-screen.
Sanjukta Ghosh’s ‘Dunce! Duffer! Dimwit!: Dyslexia in Bollywood’s
Taare Zameen Par (2007)’ looks at intellectual disability in the context of contemporary India. The story of eight-year-old Ishaan Awasthi, who lives with his parents in Mumbai, prompts the author’s exploration of larger social, cultural, educational and political circumstances: ‘For disability film politics to be truly transgressive and potentially revolutionary, impairment cannot be examined in isolation from the larger social system from which it emerges’.
Susan Antebi’s ‘Landscapes of Children: Picturing Disability in Buñuel’s Los olvidados (1950)’ joins physical disability and juvenile delinquency within a wider paradigm of societal ills in Mexico. Blending a close reading of the film with the era’s discourse on abnormality – with which Buñuel was familiar – she argues that ‘the combined display of, on one hand, corporeal difference as moral cruelty, and on the other, violent action determined by conditions of socioeconomic inequality, reveals bodies at odds with their surroundings’.
Mitzi Waltz’s ‘Fearful Reflections: Representations of Disability in Post-war Dutch Cinema (1973–2011)’ turns to films in the Dutch language (Nederlands or Vlaams/Flemish) from either the Netherlands or Belgium. Contextualising more recent cinema within a broader post-war turn in filmmaking, this approach brings representations of illness, physical disability and intellectual disability together to argue that ‘with notable exceptions, disability is typically used as a dramatic and often tragic plot point, or as shorthand for a character flaw’.
José Alaniz’s ‘“People Endure”: The Function of Autism in Anton’s Right Here (2012)’ blends close analysis of documentary film form with Stuart Murray’s exploration of the idea of function. The socio-political background of Putin’s Russia informs discussion of the representation of a boy with autism as neurotypical bias is interrogated both on- and off-screen. In the end a productive ambivalence towards the film leads readers to ask whether ‘a conventionally functional cinema [is] at odds with the experience of autism?’
Katherine Lashley’s ‘Displaying Autism: The Thinking and Images of Temple Grandin (2010)’ employs such notions as disability drag and the supercrip to explore the representation of autism in a widely screened Anglophone film. She draws from Grandin’s own explanation of ‘thinking in pictures’, and prompts readers to take director Mick Jackson’s autism into account. While ‘the film breaks some boundaries in disability film’ is it not unproblematic, but still has a pedagogical value that can potentially open doors between autistic communities and neurotypical audiences.
Petra Anders’ ‘More than the “Other”?: On Four Tendencies Regarding the Representation of Disability in Contemporary German Film (2005–2010)’ explores a range of films, disabilities and perspectives. She concludes that ‘although disability is predominantly “othered” in contemporary German film in various ways, there are cases in which films have attempted to go beyond this notion’.
Candace Skibba’s ‘The Other Body: Psychiatric Disability and Pedro Almodóvar (1988–2011)’ takes on three films by the noted international director (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, Átame!, La piel que habito). Working on two levels at once, she argues that ‘by seeing Almodóvar’s films through a disability lens it is possible to dialogue with existing discourses of gender/sexuality and social marginalisation in his work from Spanish Peninsular studies while also working to correct the insufficient work on psychiatric disability in the wide interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies from Spain’.
Anna Grebe’s ‘On the Road to Normalcy: European Road Movies and Disability (2002–2011)’ looks at three recent German and Belgian films through the conventions of an understudied cinematic subgenre – the ‘Behinderten-Roadmovie’ (disability road movie). In this chapter, the road movie is transformed by its specifically European context, through which it differs from its North American counterpart, and by a focus on disabled protagonists who ‘confront and potentially transgress the social boundaries of the normalcy that governs their lives’.
Jennifer Griffiths’ ‘Re-envisioning Italy’s ‘New Man’ in Bella non piangere! (1955)’ analyses the cinematic representation of physical disablilty in a narrative framing Enrico Toti as a national war hero. Folding the historical myth that coalesced around the soldier together with his on-screen representation reveals insights into how a discourse of disabled masculinity resonated with post-war Italian nationalism. Toti’s embodiment of a political martyrdom, she writes, ‘exemplifies how, in the Italian context, disabled bodies after 1916 came to symbolise the national community and its struggle toward victory’.
Susan Flynn’s ‘“Get Your Legs Back”: Avatar (2009) and the Re-booting of American Individualism’ takes on an extensively screened global Anglophone film by connecting the individualist myth and narratives of personal responsibility with a problematic portrayal of disability. Seen here from a perspective that links a Marxian critique of ideology with the film’s abelist character construction, she explores how biotechnology/genomic capital ‘facilitates American individualism; providing the opportunity to escape from the imperfect body’.
Ken Lipenga’s ‘Through the Disability Lens: Revisiting Ousmane Sembène’s
Xala (1975) and
Camp de Thiaroye (1988)’ asserts the existence of disability as an ‘embedded concept’ relative to postcolonial African contexts. Taking on two noted films, this chapter mobilises a widely social perspective on disability and explores its intersections with ableism, colonisation, racism, illness and impotence – as well as witchcraft and the role of super-natural/cosmological forces as a dominant theme characteristic of Nollywood productions.
James A. Wren’s ‘Homes Wretched and Wrecked: Disability as Social Dis-ease in Kurosawa’s Dodes’ka-den (1970)’ takes on the internationally acclaimed director’s work as both ‘an enthralling and richly textured portrait of the downtrodden’ and a film that ‘exposed the unsavory side of a “new” Japan’. Drawing from early quasi-historical accounts and contemporary discourses of family and nation, he explores the multi-faceted presence of disability in the film as a product of wider social forces.
This volume’s splendid final chapter, Rosa Holman’s ‘Leprosy and the Dialectical Body in Forugh Farrokhzad’s The House is Black (1964)’, interrogates lyrical representations of physical suffering in a black and white film read against ‘the poetic realism of contemporary Iranian cinema’. In particular, the director’s cinematic use of rhythm and sound ties images of individual bodies to the wider social environment in which they are enmeshed. The film is interpreted at once in the context of the Shah’s programme of modernisation and its consequences for women as well as the filmmaker’s style and the Iranian New Wave cinema of the 1960s.
NOTES
FILMOGRAPHY
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Biesold, Horst. 1999. Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.
Chivers, Sally (2011) The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Chivers, Sally and Nicole Markotić (eds) (2010) The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.
Cohen, Lawrence (1998) No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Davis, Lennard J. (ed.) (1997) The Disability Studies Reader. New York: Routledge.
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____ (2009) Deaf History and Culture in Spain: A Reader of Primary Documents. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press.
____ (2010a) ‘Spain, 1795: A Reconsideration of Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro (1735–1809) and the Visual Language of the Deaf’, Dieciocho, 33, 2, 259–77.
____ (2010b) ‘The Work of (Creating) Art: Judith Scott’s Fiber Art, Lola Barrera and Iñaki Peñafiel’s ¿Qué tienes debajo del sombrero? (2006) and the Challenges Faced By People With Developmental Disabilities’, Cultural Studies, 24, 4, 508–32.
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