Cinemas of Isolation, Histories of Collectivity: Crip Camp and Disability Coalition

Abstract

Disability and documentary have a complex, intertwined history; the cinematic apparatus itself developed in tandem with Western contemporary medicine, with medical instruments whose function was to surveil, regulate, and ultimately transform the body (Cartwright 1995; Brylla and Hughes 2017). On a representational level, as myriad scholars have argued (e.g. Norden 1994; Snyder and Mitchell 2006; Riley 2005), disability is not so much cinematically underrepresented as it is chronically and dangerously mis-represented: in narrative film, disabilities are everywhere, as markers of irrevocable difference, as grotesque externalizations of characters’ personal failings, as strategies to invoke pathos, terror or grief. Martin Norden’s description of disability media as “the cinema of isolation” reveals accurately the extent to which disability on screen has been depicted as a solitary and somehow “extreme” identity, a kind of permanent outside against which the normative affirms itself. In documentary cinema, while the burden of metaphor placed on disabled people is perhaps not as immediately visible, there are nevertheless a number of tropes that continue to extend a dehumanizing and ableist gaze. In part this phenomenon results from a number of institutional, financial and cultural barriers to access (in terms of production and distribution) for disabled filmmakers; it is also the heir to a long tradition, one that predates the cinema, that posits physical anomaly as a semiotic problem, one to be solved, always, from without. As Rosemarie Garland Thomson writes, “the exceptional body seems to compel explanation, inspire representation, and incite regulation ... it is always an interpretive occasion” (Garland Thomson 1996, 1). Jeffrey A. Weinstock, in the influential anthology Freakery, suggests that the ableist cultural trope of the “freak,” one of the most pervasive cultural signifiers of physical disability, can best be understood as “a locus defined by the convergence of nineteenth-century scientific and anthropological discourse” (Weinstock 1996, 329). The visual language around disability remains inherently marginalizing, at the same time that it is capable of shielding itself behind the “objectivity” of medical knowledge. For scholars and teachers of documentary,