Gifts Along The Whole Spectrum: The Portrayal of Disability Through Film (Part 1)

“The quest for understanding requires that we give up the search for certainty and go on a voyage of discovery.” – John Dunne

Despite a few exceptions over the centuries, disability has found itself largely elided in the portrayal of the human condition. Works of literature (drama, poetry, and story) seem to have focused primarily on the intelligent, the crafty, the brave, or the beautiful. Civilizations have found inspiration by telling and hearing stories of the best and the brightest, of the hero. Certainly in the early days of the 20th Century this trend seemed to continue within the new and ever expanding film industry. However, in more recent years, a wider spectrum of the human condition has been portrayed and numbers of stunning examples have been produced.

While conventional thinking may only see light as white, through the use of a prism we have come to acknowledge that light is not simply white, but has a broad spectrum of colors and shades and frequencies. The portrayal of the diversity of the human community across the years and across many cultures has in recent years through film and related media enjoyed an everbroadening awareness of the existence as well as the unique gifts of persons with disabilities. By being enabled to see more, we ourselves have been able to be more.

Quite a number of films have even received the industry’s highest artistic awards, but many equally notable films have hovered beneath the radar screen of general public attention. I will seek in this essay to cast a light along the entire spectrum and invite readers to begin their own voyage of discovery. There they may well become overwhelmed by the intensity of the intelligence, the creativity, the sensitivity, and the depth of the human community in all its representations as portrayed by film.

Various film festivals have played an important role during the past thirty years in expanding the public’s awareness of persons with disabilities. In the 1970’s and 1980’s The International Rehabilitation Film Festival was held in New York City and joined other festivals throughout the country by offering “in an exhibition the best films and video tapes on disability.” Often the films starred people with disabilities and presented their stories from their points of view. Likewise, The National Council on Family Relations in Minneapolis showed films on topics of disability within the larger cultural dynamics of family and society. In the 1990’s companies like Fan Light Production in Boston distributed films such as the Academy Award winning documentary “Breathing Lessons: The Work & Life of Mark O’Brien, 1997.” MarkO’Brien (1949-1999) was a published poet, a journalist, and a contributor to National Public Radio. He was a strong advocate for independent living. He spent over forty years living most of his life in an iron lung as a result of childhood polio. He says in the film, “The truth is we’re just human.” In addition to the Academy Award, the film received awards at the Sundance Film Festival, the Golden Gate Awards, and the San Francisco International Film Festival. (Learn more about his remarkable life on his web page on the Internet.) In the 21st Century the Sprout Film Festival in New York City has taken the lead in presenting “films by, for, and about people with developmental disabilities.”

My own journey into film began in 1969 when I answered my senior English class at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Austin, Texas, in a way that no one in that prestigious, college preparatory school had ever answered them before. My students had said, “Mr. Becker, we’ve studied poetry every year we’ve been here, can’t we do something else?” My surprising answer was, “Why not? What do you want to do?”

They were bewildered; they didn’t know that they wanted to do because no one had ever asked them. They only knew what they didn’t want to do. When they recovered from their initial astonishment, they decided to make a film. There was only one problem: none of them had ever made a film and neither had I. The learning curve of all of us was enormous, but it was tremendously exciting and rewarding to be on the forward edge of film study and filmmaking in schools in the early 1970’s. Some of the results were amazing: 1) a rather complex film titled “How to Try in School Without Really Succeeding” examined their education and brought about profound changes in the lives of some of the students; 2) I attended a total immersion course in film study at Fordham University that next summer. (It was the most intense learning experience of my life, and I produced a slide tape program, “Ripples of a Dialogue,” to embody the experience); 3) a full credit senior elective “Introduction to the Film” was offered the next year which I taught for six years; 4) each of six years these high school students planned and directed more than 350 students and adults from throughout the country each year (the final year saw 165 student produced films entered into the competition); 5) a number of students who took “Introduction to the Film” made film part of their careers; and 6) I was being prepared in my career toward directing and producing an international award-winning documentary in 1983. This was my own personal introduction to film.

My involvement with disability in film took a bit longer and did not begin until 1976. Our family had taken a one-year leave of absence from teaching English and film at St. Stephen’s, and we journeyed to the wilderness of Downeast Maine. During that year I drove over 2000 miles to San Antonio, Texas, to attend a three-day international film festival on psychiatry and culture directed by Dr. Harry A. Wilmer. Before that time I had openly stated, “I have no interest in working with the handicapped or the retarded. I want to work with the gifted. Not that someone shouldn’t work with them, it just wasn’t me.” That self-perception began to change when I saw a ten-minute film produced by the BBC about Richard Wawro, a “severely and profoundly mentally retarded young artist” from Edinburgh, Scotland. “He has an IQ of 30 and the mind of a six year old child,” said the expert, the Head of the Department of Psychiatry of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital n Scotland, as he introduced the film to the festival audience. He said that he had worked with Richard for seven years. Little did I know then that my introduction through this ten-minute film to the life and art of Richard Wawro would provide a course correction for my entire life that would bring about a totally new direction and focus. I could not in my wildest imagination have envisioned what lay ahead of me in my life journey these past thirty years.

After the film festival, the next step in my direction came as a result of a “chance” encounter and conversation in a parking lot late one evening with Jane Weil, the Director of a home based early intervention program for handicapped children. Thus, I became the film and video consultant for the Washington County Handicapped Children’s Program in Maine for the next two years. The pieces were beginning to produce a pattern in my life story.

The power of film to transform lives has been demonstrated over and over in my experience as I, like the Ancient Mariner in Samuel Taylor Cooleridge’s poem, began to tell countless stories and show numerous films of the gifted/handicapped to individuals and gatherings throughout the world.

Recently I organized a film course featuring a great many powerful films, art, music, poetry, and books to explore, with eyes wide open, the outer reaches of human possibility and the multiple environments that have nurtured the creative human spirit in some very unlikely people and places. The course is based upon the assumption that the mind and spirit are ultimately subject only to their own limitations, not those imposed by society or science. True stories of people from all circumstances of life provide us, who take the opportunity to see, a fitting embodiment of the quality and persistence of the essential spirit of humanity. This beginning point is perhaps most emphatically made in the TNT production of Door to Door, (2002), the story of Bill Porter, the most unlikely top, door-to-door salesman of Watkins Products. His character, his imagination, his indomitable spirit of patience and persistence are delivered consistently throughout his career despite almost overwhelming obstacles. Bill has cerebral palsy and has the use of only one hand.

Two unlikely “think links” occur to me as I consider Bill Porter’s characteristics of patience, persistence and imagination. First, in Darmok, an episode from Star Trek, The Next Generation, Captain Picard makes the observation about trying to communicate with an unknown civilization, “I believe that communication is possible with persistence and imagination.” Second, the story of Raun Kaufman shown in Son Rise also comes to mind. When Raun was just a very young child diagnosed as autistic, his parents were told by the doctors that he was hopelessly autistic and would never be able to communicate. We, not they, must be willing to learn their ways of communication; we must establish contact with them by being totally with them in their world. Raun Kaufman did not fulfill the doctors’ prediction but instead received his undergraduate degree in bio-medical ethics and lectures throughout the world on the Son Rise Method of treatment.

As means of experiencing the film course I had created, I decided to re-view each of the many films in the course. Part of my morning’s routine each day is to exercise on a mini-trampoline for 20-30 minutes. My decision to review each of these films during my morning workout has proved to have a significant impact on my life. The power of each film was magnified by the physical exercise. As my body was engaged and my blood flow increased, my mind was set free to see much more than I had seen in previous viewings of the films. Connections were made among many of the films and between the films and my own life. This approach to viewing the films resulted for me in a heightened and lasting experience. A word of caution is in order, however: viewing films such as Beyond Silence (1997) or Life is Beautiful (1998) (both of which have subtitles) may be a somewhat daunting, but none the less worthwhile, task while jogging on a mini-trampoline.

For me, one of the most powerful re-viewing experiences I had was with The Elephant Man, the 1980 film whose cast includes the star studded lineup of John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft, and Sir John Gielgud. This film explores in depth the complicated relationship between a “grotesquely deformed Victorian sideshow freak,” John Merrick, The Elephant Man, and Dr. Frederick Treves, the respected medical lecturer and physician to the Queen’s court. Research into the film (also a successful Broadway play) led me to Thomas Gibbons’ “The Elephant Man” (also called “The Exhibition”) one-act play which reveals new dimensions of the relationship between these two apparently very different (yet strikingly similar) human beings. In this play Dr. Treves raises the provocative question for himself and all of us, “Have I merely exchanged places with the sideshow handler?” To what extent did the doctor’s efforts to introduce John Merrick into Victorian society simply mirror what had already been done to Merrick in the world of the sideshow? This short play version of the story holds up a mirror for Dr. Treves for him to see his own life and to reflect upon the nature and quality of his relationship with one he sought “to save.”

This article attempts to set a broad outline and give directions for individuals to search out the everexpanding areas of their own interest. The Internet has made it possible to locate an almost infinite number of resources and read multiple reviews of almost any film. Then, if you find yourself captivated by any of these extraordinary portrayals, it is quite possible for you to purchase the film for your own use and further enlightenment.

While many excellent stories never make it to the big screen or major film festivals and this do not receive prestigious awards and global recognition, television has accounted for a number of excellent films and videos (VHS and now DVD) being produced by and about persons with disabilities. Several network as well as cable productions have made significant additions to the film library. The CBS Movie of the Week, Journey of the Heart (1997) is the story of blind, autistic savant musician Tony DeBlois. The film stars Cybill Shepherd as Janice DeBlois, Tony’s mother. Despite having taken a number of liberties with this amazing story of Tony’s birth (at 1 lb and ¾ of an ounce) and life (he graduated magna cum laude from the Berklee School of Music in Boston in 1996), the film does probe the complexity of the issues facing a single mother in her determination to do what is best (regardless of the cost) for her blind, autistic, and extremely gifted and talented child. Other examples of made for TV films are: 1) First Do No Harm (1997) staring Meryl Streep as the mother of a child racked by seizures who through her persistent medical library searches discovers the ketogenic diet and insists that her child receives it; and 2) Miracle Run (2005) again featuring a single mother, this time with two recently diagnosed six year old autistic boys. This film successfully presents the highly complex personal, social, and educational situations faced by an increasing number of parents (often single mothers) today.

For me one of the most extraordinary films that was initially rejected as unsuitable by all three major networks but went on to receive the Academy Award for best long documentary in 1978 is Who Are the DeBolts? (And Why Do They Have 19 Children?) This film made its network debut when the actor Henry Winkler (aka “The Fonz”) put up his own money and staked his reputation to produce it on TV. The DeBolt family with its 19 very special children of “various ethnicities, handicaps, orphans or victims of war and catastrophe” shine to the delight of all in a portrait of what a human being can be and accomplish in an environment of love, support and high expectations of success.

The next year, 1979, Ira Wohl’s Best Boy burst onto the screen and captured our hearts and imaginations and received the Academy Award for best long documentary. This three years in the making, cinema verite depiction of his cousin, Philly, a 52 year old mentally retarded man, had a profound effect on viewers. Philly, who had lived his entire life with aging and extremely protective parents, is portrayed with a simple, direct style that enables the viewer to experience the long delayed growth of this sensitive, child-like adult. Some twenty years later Wohl revisits Philly, now living in California with his sister (both parents have long since died). Once again in Best Man (1996) Wohl enables the viewer to experience Philly’s naivete and joy as in his 70’s he completes, at long last, his bar mitzvah.

One of my favorite little books, THE ACORN PEOPLE by Ron Jones, 1976, was later filmed as a CBS special movie. Written from the true life experiences Ron had one summer at a camp for severely handicapped kids, this short seventy-five page book reveals the education and transformation of a novice summer camp counselor who was fully prepared to jump ship after only one night in the cabin and the liberation and healing of the five broken and passive children placed in his care one summer. (note: I am still waiting for a film to be made based on the Larry Niven short story, “The Handicapped” found in NEUTRON STAR, 1968. This story is a classic waiting to be found and filmed.) Ron Jones later (1998) produced B-Ball: The Team That Never Lost A Game, a Special Olympics basketball team, which opens for us a new way to play and a new definition of winning. Skillfully presented as a standup comedy routine with live shots of the action inserted in the monologue, the film cannot help but delight and enlighten the viewer.

Finally, two recent films must be added to this growing list. Autism Is A World (CNN, 2004) is written by a twenty-six year old woman who can only speak through her writing with one finger on a communication device. This short documentary (nominated for an Academy Award) portrays Sue Rubin, who until she was thirteen was believed by all to be severely mentally retarded. Now she is a junior history major at Whittier College. It is a quiet, yet powerful, view from inside the daily world of a young woman living within the autism spectrum.

The second film which was released in 2006 is titled Mozart and the Whale and is based on the true story of the life of Aspergers’ advocate Jerry Newport, a numbers savant, and his relationship with Mary Meinal, an artist and also a person living with Aspergers’. Like Rain Man, Mozart and the Whale deals with very sensitive issues of relationships between individuals and society. It, like Rain Man, has experienced significant difficulty in being brought to the big screen. An excellent description of the relationship between Jerry and Mary may be found in the Los Angeles Times, October 23, 1995, “Asperger: Love Story That Triumphs Against All Odds” by Kim Kowsky. An excellent review of Mozart and the Whale by Todd McCarthy may be found at www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=bio&peopleD=1010.

Join me next month for Part 2 of Gifts Along the Whole Spectrum: The Portrayal of Disability Through Film.