Corporeal and sonic diagrams for cinematic ethics in Rolf De Heer's Dance Me to My Song

Abstract

Rolf De Heer's 1997 Australian feature film Dance Me to My Song was devised with the late Heather Rose, a person with Cerebral Palsy. The film also features a central performance by Heather (as the character of Julia) and is clearly about ‘her world’. The ethic of engagement exemplified by this film resonates with what Gerard Goggin has termed an ‘ethics of listening’ that entails ‘listening-as-if-disability-mattered’. This article takes up Deleuze's concepts of the diagram in order to argue that Dance Me to My Song is a valuable, although at times problematic, cinematic framing of disability. Deleuze's two concepts of the diagram offer a useful frame through which to consider the film, because respectively they map the potentiality of social relations and act as a means of erasing cliché. The film is a raw, visceral text, rich in diegetic sound intended to ‘fold’ the experiences of the protagonist into the subjectivity of the spectator/aurator. This folding blurs and re-aligns relationships between disabled and non-disabled bodies and can be seen as a step towards erasing clichés attached to the disabled body. The disabled/able boundary is further blurred through ambiguous representation of Julia's carer, Madeline, as potentially disabled. The characters in the film perform a diagrammatic function of shaping possible relations between bodies and erasing cliché. Building on the platform provided by Dance Me to My Song, I contend that when cinema engages with the disabled body and soundscapes associated with the disabled body through an ‘ethics of listening’, new sonic and filmic bodies can be – and are – created.

Keywords:

• disability
• film
• listening
• ethics

Acknowledgements

Thanks very much to my blind peer reviewers and to Vertigo Productions for allowing reproduction of both images included in the text. Thanks also to Bridget Garnham for editorial assistance and Christian McCrea, Glen Fuller and Cassandra Loeser for their responses to earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. Specifically, Deleuze states: ‘every diagram is intersocial and constantly evolving. It never functions in order to represent a persisting world but produces a new kind of reality, a new model of truth’ (1986/2006, p. 35).

2. As the name suggests, Family Planning is a sexual health organization based in South Australia.

3. In considering Dance Me to My Song as a public pedagogy, I draw on the work of Henri Giroux (1999), who argues that pedagogy can't be confined to sites of schooling. Rather, pedagogy needs to be understood as applying to everyday political sites in ‘which identities are shaped, desires mobilized, and experiences take on form and meaning’ (Giroux, 2004a, p. 79). For Giroux, culture, including film, is pedagogical. People learn about themselves and understand relations to others through their position in lived cultures. An explicit consideration of how culture influences identity production and relations of power is, for Giroux, one of the intended outcomes of considering culture and cultural products as pedagogical. This is an important task because such knowledge of the role of culture is intrinsic to acquiring agency and ‘imagining … social change’ (2004a, p. 79). For example, in his essay, ‘Education after Abu Ghraib’, Giroux (2004b) draws attention to how the nature of photographs and the technologies that produce them enable particular meanings; how these meanings connect with broader discourses and relations of power; how these sites allow or disallow resistance and challenge.