An Introduction to
Representations of Disability in Australian Film
Since the UN adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Disabled Persons in 1975, proclaimed 1981 as the International Year of the Disabled and the subsequent years to be the Decade of Disabled Persons, the Disability Movement has emerged with increased social, cultural and political visibility and viability.
Arising principally out of 1960s liberalism, the Disability Movement, originating mainly in the USA and the UK, was during these UN recognitions embarked on what would be described as an initial, formative period of “consciousness-raising” (1). It saw at its heart the empowerment of disabled people through collective activism, founded on the need to challenge not only the definition of disability that had originated in part with the Medical Establishment’s agenda towards disabled people but the ways in which the dominant culture re-enforced it.
Part of their agenda thus became the essential re-definition of the term “disability” from implying a personal, tragic affliction to connoting the social oppression of an increasingly vocal minority group (later seeking to encompass physical, psychological and intellectual disabilities).
The definition of disability that came under their scrutiny was the so-called “medical” or “individual” model, a model that to the founders of the Disability Movement was a reprehensible denial of the true nature and causes of the obstacles faced by disabled people as individuals within a given social order. This re-definition in turn would become a platform for the development of assessment criteria to accompany the political agenda of the Disability Movement in order to address the construct of “disability”.
The loathed “individual” model held that disability was a matter of personal tragedy, that the obstacles a disabled person has to their re-integration, self-determination and even socialization were their own fault, inherent in their disability. Disabled people were “different” both physically and, correspondingly, intellectually and even psychologically. The root cause of their difference was their physical (or intellectual / psychological) condition, seen as inherently limiting. Responses to disability were predominantly governed thus by the so-called “tragedy principle” (2). The Disability Movement’s counter to this long-ingrained belief was the development of what would be called the “social model” of disability.
Under this alternative view, developed by disabled people themselves as a result of their increased collectivism, disability was not a matter of one’s personal impairment at all.
Rather, “disability” referred to the social forces and barriers imposed upon disabled people as a deliberate, systematic means of marginalization. It was a redefinition of limitation away from individual ability towards a disabling social structure which had failed to recognize the rights and needs of its disabled citizens and in reaction had moved to isolate and re-define them as “other” to the dominant perception of able-bodied (behaviourist or even rational) normality. Disabled people’s limitations were not inherent in their physical or mental impairment but evident as restrictions and impositions at social, political and even cultural levels. Disability was hence removed from the medical sphere alone.
After this politicization of “disability” by the Disability Movement there emerged in turn a growing Disability Culture component, which is at time of writing still in its relative infancy, especially in Australia (3).
This sought to provide a means for disabled people to achieve artistic self-expression to complement the political activism of the Movement (4). Increasingly under scrutiny were representations of disabled people in the media, including print and television, but perhaps especially film. For this Disability Culture to assert itself it had to contend with the entire historical legacy of cinematic representations of disabled people, representations often governed by the tragedy-principle that had now been rejected as a viable definition of disabled people’s lives.
The academic component inherent in Disability Culture hence sought to study, record, evaluate and define that legacy – to expose the underlying bias concerning representations of disability on screen. The intent was by doing so to include disabled people in discussions of diversity (and by extension to Australia, multi-culturalism); discussions that did not often include disabled people as a group. Empowerment demanded that by striving to define and locate the experience of disabled people from their own point-of-view, the legacy of screen depictions of disability as engineered and constructed by non-disabled people needed first to be chronicled and re-examined from this newly informed Disability consciousness. Cultural re-appraisal was thus a political imperative.
Paul K. Longmore,
Professor of History
and Director of the Institute on Disability
San Francisco State University
By the mid-1980s, Disability Studies was increasingly recognized as an Academic discipline in the USA, as it would later be in Australia.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s there thus emerged academic moves towards the intersection of Film Study and Disability Study. The result was the burgeoning exploration of the history of cinematic representations of disabled people, though centred almost exclusively on American film and with a decidedly anti-Hollywood bias. Essayist Paul K. Longmore first signalled this intersection of disciplines with his 1985 work “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People” (5), concentrating on physical disability. This initializing historical record was undertaken in part to document and critique the legacy of representing disabled people on screen from a social activist’s view-point. It was overwhelmingly condemnatory towards what it uncovered.
In lieu of such findings, to “expose, critique and reconsider” (6) the history of representing and isolating disabled people as “other” than “normal” became the new buzz-phrase for this form of cultural analysis.
Martin Norden’s book The Cinema of Isolation followed in 1994, the first book-length record of 20th Century American cinema’s representations of disability (again predominantly physical disability) and chronicled the isolationist non-disabled socio-political consciousness that guided them. It too brought the activism of the Disability Movement to Film Study. Such politicized historical records still sought to delineate the prejudices evident towards disabled people in such representations as an inherent cultural bias and were thus effectively the first stage in the merging of two Academic disciplines.
From these studies there emerged a history of the isolation of disabled people in terms of the imposition of a non-disabled definition of what “disability” means to disabled people as well as non-disabled people.
Fear or pity were the extreme conditions of non-disabled response / reaction to such an awful fate, thus determining disability as a grotesque voyeuristic spectacle (both denied and desired) and connoting the disabled person as inherently “Other” than the dominant order of the day.
The perspective, or cinematic point-of-view, of this Disabled Other was thus denied in favour of the able-bodied people on whose lives they impacted. In the view of the activist-theorists, the denial of the disabled person’s point of view meant the loss of any subsequent control of the camera’s gaze and was a form of imposed powerlessness, in much the same way that feminist critics spearheaded by Laura Mulvey had analysed traditional Hollywood cinema as manipulated through a presumed male gaze (7).
Reaction to disability (vocal chord) caused by surgical procedure
Disabled people were in turn easily depicted in stereotypes (8). These types drew their impetus from the over-riding concept of the “tragic victim”. To briefly summarize, often physically disabled people, women especially, were asexual innocents, sweet natured objects of sympathy and presumed worthy of pity. Femininity and passivity were traditionally linked, although the idea of a disabled masculinity would prove much more problematic. Sometimes, disability could focus one’s energies on a personal cause, perhaps a morally decent one, although such “noble warriors” revealed the underlying belief in the notion of disability as a transforming quality. Thus, equally telling was the other side of the equation, the embittered “avenger” types whose mental state was transformed by their disability into vile grades of malevolent bitterness, the presumed inherent reaction to a disabled body or abnormal mind. Those who strove to perfect some compensatory achievement could in turn “overcome” their disability as if they were somehow “supercrips”.
Likewise, a mental illness meant either helpless confusion or was something to be feared and dreaded: psychologically disabled characters faced delineation in terms of behavioural abnormality, again warranting social exclusion in the increasing imposition of a socially constructed definition of “sanity” in terms of behavioural socialization.
In all cases, disability if not innocent or dependent was considered a threat to the safety of the non-disabled majority. Isolation and the imposition of otherness, re-enforced through popular culture, was hence the easiest way to negotiate difference and the connotations of threat associated with it. As social change wore on, these stereotypes began to be further questioned and even eroded as the search for more informed means of qualifying and depicting the experiences of disabled people emerged. Negotiating disability took on an increased self-consciousness, although perhaps not yet a fully post-modern meta-filmic awareness.
The second stage in the evolution of Film and Disability Study took its impetus in 1999, at the University of Iowa in the USA, where there was held the first official conference on cinema and disability, with academics from both disciplines invited to attend. They sought in part to determine a possible agenda for the union of their disciplines. Following this historic meeting, the prevailing negativism surrounding portrayals of disabled people as outlined in previous politicized studies began to be questioned. In particular, the assumption that the viewer was a passive recipient of the imposed ideologies behind said representations was dismissed. The direction of such theories of cinema and disability now was towards de-politicization, to explore the ambiguities and complexities inherent even in politically incorrect images – to apply film scholarship above all.
Film was to these analysts an art form, to be responded to on its own unique terms, whether or not what resulted served the political agenda of the surrounding Disability Movement: invariably much of it would, although there were increasing points of contention.
These scholars felt that assessing screen representations of disability from a politically activist agenda alone in fact denied the richness and ambiguity in many of these films and further denied how the “challenge” of disability engages both a disabled and non-disabled viewer on a variety of levels. There were thus those who felt that Disability Culture assumed and almost risked imposing a “common culture of oppression” (9) onto what was proving to be an extra-ordinary diversity of responses to the so-called Disabled Other.
From these meetings between the two disciplines emerged the recognition of their ability to inform one another in what was hoped would be an “Integrated Model of Film and Disability Study” (10), embracing the views of an active rather than a passive spectatorship. It was determined that an individual viewer’s reading of the realism behind representations of disability and their function within the narrative led them to dialectically engage with the film in a discussion of just what “disability” connoted. In this way, films were involved in a constant struggle to both accept and challenge the divisions drawn between “normal” people and the Disabled Other, resulting in a kind of negotiation of difference. Re-appraisals of the same representations initially dismissed by activists as negative, unrealistic or disempowering thus followed. Now for instance, sympathy was no longer a negativist response.
Activism was being superseded by informed film scholarship not, however, as mutually exclusive but as almost symbiotic partners despite the growing importance of depoliticizing the union between Film and Disability studies.
Just as there remained in the public mind a tension between the individual and the social model of disability, so in the study of disability in cinema is there a tension between the political needs of the Disability Movement and the consideration of film as art, however imposed by ideology it may be. The purpose of this book is to examine the representations of disability in Australian film, from 1970 to 2003, as a rich, complex body of work with which the emerging Disability Culture in Australia must contend. It will do so from a Film Study perspective as informed by, and interacting with, the politicization brought out through the Disability Movement.
Indeed Australian cinema has much to offer the fusion of Film and Disability Studies, both as a comment on, and departure from, existing theories and established historical accounts of the representations of disability in American film.
Contemporary Australian film in its search for an Australian identity after all developed alongside the politicization of the Disability Movement’s search for collective definition. This co-development thus uniquely positions Australian cinema as an acute reflection and incorporation of national socio-political change regarding “disability” as much as it is an examination of the supposed reality of disabled people’s lives. Thus, there is an unusual polemic in Australian cinema’s appropriation of disabled people: between the reduction to the afore-mentioned stereotypes and the elevation to almost mythic importance as a representation of the Australian character. In between is an increased awareness of the realistic details of the lives of disabled people and a surprisingly scathing basis for social criticism.
It is not that the disabled person is no longer the “Other” but that the “Other” is often examined self-consciously as a social, cultural as well as inter-personal construct.
This is true in films dealing with various kinds of disability – physical, intellectual and psychological. Indeed, Australian film often parallels these different kinds in terms of narrative structures but especially as psychodramatic vehicles, occasionally, as the Mad Max trilogy has shown, even as a process of mythification. The commonality of “disability” and the differentiation between types of disability, with the corresponding desire to find a visual locus for them, propels much Australian cinema into a personal, social and even national crisis, yet to find a fixed resolution to the “problem” of disability but metaphorically fixated on it.
It has been said that documentary and ethnographic film sustained the Australian film industry prior to its much-analysed revival in the 1970s (11).
The disabled-film was an established part of this short film tradition, usually in the form of case studies of people who “overcame” their disability with the assistance of a charity or state-welfare organization (who often also financed these short films). Such people, whether physically, intellectually or psychologically disabled were dependent on the organizations sponsoring and controlling them. Yet amidst the emphasis on Australia’s diverse multi-cultural community, with many short film subjects devoted to Australian sub-cultures, disabled people did not emerge as a collective force for social change. Nevertheless, it is this legacy of the individual portrait, or case study, which informs many treatments of disability in Australian film, although such individuals inevitably became almost allegorical figures in films made after the official UN recognition of disabled people.
Inherent in these feature film depictions is what is identified as a frequent conceit in contemporary Australian cinema, namely the fear of a loss of individuality resulting in studies of disintegration and alienation (12). With a background of bleak social realism, the themes of entrapment considered ingrained in Australian cinema find a willing partner in the traditional view of disability as a tragic condition. Within this over-riding context then, the Disabled Other has both a literal and metaphorical function, a means of reflecting, confronting and ultimately negotiating and mediating such fears. Although much in Australian film does indeed reveal the stereotypes and agendas exposed in the initial histories of disability in film, it does interact with and depart from them in intriguing ways, particularly in response to what is considered the challenge of disability on a social and interpersonal level.
Yet, there is evident an overall imperative to visualize disabled people as “different”: for physically disabled people it is in terms of their look and the limitation of their action whilst for psychologically disabled people it is frequently in terms of behavioural abnormality.
The few treatments of intellectual disability seek differences in both look and behaviour. Indeed, the disabled person in Australian film is often the participant in a greater drama, dubbed herein (and fully explored in the next chapter) the “Crisis of Disablement”. In this drama, the disabled person transforms from being an individual into an almost mythical figure, their disability becoming a signal of change – physical, psychological and social. Disablement in this way becomes both a fear of transformation and a catalyst of same, and is thus allied to themes of despair, alienation and collapse; ironically balancing the Disability Movement’s politicized moves towards individual and collective empowerment.
Disability is often construed as a pre-figuring event and in this way is incorporated into Australian film as a major locus in cinema’s essential cause-and-effect narrative structure.
Although a Disability Studies perspective alone may condemn these films for merely following on from the over-riding association between disability, isolation and social difference, it is the very connotation of such as representative national identity “crisis” in Australian film which invites active audience interaction with what these narratives imply about both disability and disablement. This cathartic quality of disability as a condition and as a metaphor dominates Australian screen portrayals: a measure of an individual person’s response to disablement but also, importantly, of the social structure that surrounds, defines and constructs it. As will be demonstrated, this awareness of disability and construct is not inherently a simple negative, despite the apparent political reductionism.
Additional Reading
Always an Other?: Physical Disability and Dependence
(1) The formation and initial goals of the Disability Movement are recounted and assessed in Oliver, Michael; Understanding Disability; MacMillan; London; 1996; pp. 148-149.
(2) ibid; p. 15
(3) Disability Culture seeks to support the self-expression of disabled people and where possible to enable them access to the means of such self-expression. In terms of cinema, this has led to the growth of Disability Film festivals towards the end of the 1990s in the USA, Canada, England and elsewhere in Europe. Although there is much debate about the function of “disability” as it should or shouldn’t relate to disabled filmmakers, the festival movement itself has been much welcomed. At time of writing the inaugural Australian Disabled Film Festival held at the end of 2004 was poised to become a seminal event in the growth of an Australian Disability Culture. Australian Disability Culture as it relates to disabled film-makers and their films is discussed in the final chapter of this book.
(4) The presence of a thriving arts movement is seen as indicative of a healthy and viable political movement in Morrison, Elspeth and Finkelstein, Vic; “Broken Arts and Cultural Repair” in Pointon, Ann and Davies, Chris (eds); Framed: Interrogating Disability in the Media; BFI Press; London; 1997; p. 61. Disability Arts is thus increasingly considered an integral form of collective empowerment.
(5) This seminal essay is reprinted in Smit, Christopher and Enns, Anthony; Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability; University Press of America Inc.; New York; 2001; pp. 1-17.
(6) This phrase is suggested as almost a mantra of the ambitions of the Disability Movement’s emphasis on cultural representations of disability as described in Smit, Christopher and Enns, Anthony; “The State of Cinema and Disability Studies” in ibid; p. ix.
(7) Mulvey and feminist cinema theory were taken as a common ground though which to examine the place of any minority group within a dominant cinema ideology and thus provided an early frame of reference for Disability and Film Study. Norden appropriates and acknowledges these theories in Norden, Martin; The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies; Rutgers University Press; New Jersey; 1994; p. 46 to explore the imposed powerless of disabled people in cinema.
(8) The common stereotypes of disabled people on the screen are delineated in ibid, where Norden names them accordingly. Norden then goes on to follow their development throughout 20th Century American film, including changes made to them as a result of the social upheavals of the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era. Nevertheless, these types and the attitudes behind them remain benchmarks and the terminology remains in common use.
(9) Humphrey, Roland; “Thoughts on Disability Arts” in Pointon and Davies (eds); op.cit, p. 174 uses this phrase to describe the politically activist imposed foundations of a Disability Arts perspective.
(10) The origins and ambitions of this model of study are examined in Hoeksema, Thomas and Smit, Christopher; “The Fusion of Film Studies and Disability Studies” in Smit and Enns (eds); op.cit; p. 37.
(11) A point raised in Pike, Andrew and Cooper, Ros; Australian Film 1900-1977; Oxford University Press; Melbourne; 1980; p. 306 as a kind of stepping-stone for the subsequent revival of Australian cinema.
(12) The sense of bleak, bitter entrapment is often considered to underlie Australian film and is a point thus mentioned as a motivating force in Murray, Scott; Australian Film 1978-1994; Oxford University Press; Melbourne; 1995; pp. 18-19, whether in period guise or in films of more contemporary social realism.