Documentary and Disability, edited by Catalin Brylla and Helen Hughes, consists of 18 chapters which are broadly divided into three parts: Part 1, ‘Film Practice’; Part 2, ‘Representation’; and Part 3, ‘Identity, Perception and Exhibition’. The book gathers well-informed, well-written texts on current developments as well as historical background, with each chapter focusing on a particular aspect and, thus, adding to the bigger picture: the role media, especially documentary film, can or will play in the future regarding inclusion.
In my opinion, the diverse perspectives of practitioners, academics and activists have one thing in common: (almost) all texts discuss how to either prevent or handle stereotypical portrayals of disability and disabled individuals. Samuel Avery discusses how important a trustful relationship between filmmaker and participants is, Annie Tucker and Robert Lamelson demonstrate how ethnographic filmmaking can turn away from othering, Veronica Wain discusses her autobiographical approach and its problems, Catalin Brylla seeks alternative images of blindness and Phoebe Hart understands documentary as means of agency. Then, Anna Drum and Martin Brady explore the line between disability documentary and music documentary if the protagonist is both disabled and a star performer, Hing Tsang discusses Johan van der Keuken’s ways to humanise the representation of disabled participants and Slava Greenberg seeks to demonstrate the potential of animated documentaries regarding the spectator’s empathy. Anne-Marie Callus analyses a filmic portrayal of a deafblind Korean artist, while Andrea García-Santesmases Fernández analyses a Spanish documentary on sexuality and disability which stresses that queer and disabled people are allies. Finally, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder offer a classification of documentaries that focus on disability. Tony Steyger and Jamie Clarke focus on ‘Interface Productions and Disability Programming for Channel 4: 1984–1986’. Anita Biressi discusses ‘Disability and the Para-TV Communities of Reality Television’ and Robert Stock’s contribution, ‘Singing Altogether Now: Unsettling Images of Disability and Experimental Filmic Practices’, explores reality TV as an experiment. Magdalena Zdrodowska demonstrates how the earliest films of American Sign Language where meant to preserve the language for future generations as an alternative and equally rich way to communicate like spoken language, while Beate Ochsner focuses on ‘Documenting Neuropolitics: Cochlear Implant Activation Video’. Last but not least, Helen Hughes examines another autobiographical approach, this time by the filmmaker Andrew Kötting.
In their chapter ‘Accessing Alternative Ethical Maps of In(ter)depenent Living in Global Disability Documentary’, Mitchell and Snyder argue that, due to a lack of funding and accessibility (e.g. at festivals), documentaries which focus on disability do not (yet?) get the attention they deserve. Yet Mitchell and Snyder would not disagree with Michael Schillmeier, who highlights the ‘truly powerful relation’ (v) between documentary and disability in the book’s foreword. I would even argue that although the editors focus on ‘independent documentary filmmaking that sees itself as counter-cinema, forming an inherent critique of past and present representations in mainstream films, news and entertainment media’ (2), some of the strategies which filmmakers or academics and activists with and without disabilities describe or discuss in this book could also be transferred into/applied to (mainstream) feature filmmaking and, thus, get more attention and help create less stereotypical film characters.
Documentary and Disability is a very important contribution to disability studies and research as it is a vibrant plea to unlock all that the potential documentary holds with regard to disability and inclusion.
Institute for Empirical Sociology at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universita¨t Erlangen-Nu¨rnberg, Germany
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