On Friday March 13, 2020, CounterPunch published my review of the Socially Relevant Film Festival 2020. Before the day was up, I learned that the festival was being postponed because the COVID-19 pandemic had forced the closure of the festival theater venues.
From that day onward, my film reviews have dried up to a trickle. Five very promising films were cancelled, including one on Thomas Piketty’s new book and another on the radium girls who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials. As might be obvious from my interest in such films, I see covering them as a political obligation.
On the same day I learned that the Socially Relevant Film Festival was postponed, I received an invitation to cover the ReelAbilities Film Festival that takes place between March 31 and April 6. The festival will still be taking place but “virtually” as the N.Y. Times noted in a March 25th article:
ReelAbilities Film Festival: New York
This annual festival shows movies that raise awareness of the perspectives of the disabled, like “Code of the Freaks,” a documentary examining representation in Hollywood movies, and “25 Prospect Street,” about a Ridgefield, Conn., theater that hires people with disabilities. The festival will take place on its original dates, March 31 to April 6, but it has moved online at reelabilities.org. Screenings can be watched at their scheduled times or for 24 hours afterward, and Q. and A.s will be available as well.
Yesterday, I watched three of the films online and found all to be first-rate. Tickets to the films appear to be entirely voluntary and generally in the interest of raising consciousness about disability rights that are under threat right now. ProPublica just reported that “Advocates for people with intellectual disabilities are concerned that those with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, autism and other such conditions will be denied access to lifesaving medical treatment as the COVID-19 outbreak spreads across the country.”
Code of the Freaks
This is the opening night feature and a great one at that. Like “The Celluloid Closet” that documented the homophobia in Hollywood films, this documentary does the same thing for the objectification of disabled people going back to the silent film era. It was written by Susan Nussbaum who is also interviewed throughout the film. After an automobile accident made her wheelchair-bound, Nussbaum became a disability rights activist. In helping to make this film, she will help anybody who sees it to take a fresh look at any film with a major character who is either blind, deaf, wheelchair-bound, intellectually challenged or deformed. “Code of the Freaks” is a survey of some of the best-known films in this genre, including the Helen Keller biopic “The Miracle Worker”, with mordant and penetrating commentary by disabled people.
Among the most interesting observations made by the interviewees had to do with the differences between how blind people were represented. For blind women who have to deal with a home invasion by a rapist or killer, there’s an obligatory scene of the heroine taking a bath while being stalked by the intruder. Needless to say, the female is played by a beauty queen like Audrey Hepburn but never a real blind woman. Generally, except for Marlee Beth Matlin, the actresses are fully abled. By representing these women as both vulnerable and sexually attractive, it is a way to tantalize the audience through a combination of horror and desire.
On the other hand, blind men are often portrayed as assertive and risk-taking. No better example of that is Al Pacino behind the wheel in “Scent of a Woman” refusing to slow down by his front-seat companion. This is not to speak of all the action films featuring a blind man who has mastered some martial art or swordsmanship. In either case, male or female, there is little interest in making a naturalistic film that depicts disabled people dealing with the same sorts of issues that abled people face.
As a genre, films about the disabled often show women serving disabled men sexually as a kind of charity. In “The Sessions”, Helen Hunt plays a professional sex surrogate helping a man in an iron lung lose his virginity. One of the film’s highly capable commentators wonders why can’t a film be made about a disabled couple getting it on?
One of the more unsettling moments of the film comes with its analysis of “Gattaca”, a film that concludes with its disabled main character committing suicide in order to become “one with the universe”. You get the same sort of send-off in “The Elephant Man”, when after the main character kills himself, you get an “inspiring” panorama shot of distant stars in the heavens as if his soul has joined them.
You get a feel for the snarling intensity of this film from an article Susan Nussbaum wrote for the Huffington Post:
When I became a wheelchair-user in the late ‘70s, all I knew about being disabled I learned from reading books and watching movies, and that scared the shit out of me. Tiny Tim was long-suffering and angelic and was cured at the end. Quasimodo was a monster who loved in vain and was killed at the end, but it was for the best. Lenny was a child who killed anything soft, and George had to shoot him.[A reference to “Of Mice and Men.] It was a mercy killing. Ahab was a bitter amputee and didn’t care how many died in his mad pursuit to avenge himself on a whale. Laura Wingeld [in Tennessee Williams’s “Glass Menagerie”] had a limp so no man would ever love her.
Our Time Machine
With a 100 percent Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and deservedly so, this 2019 documentary is about the efforts of Chinese artist Maleonn to connect with his father, an elderly former director of the Shanghai opera company suffering from Alzheimer’s.
Maleonn works in various media, but his most ambitious medium is making extremely life-like puppets. He decides to create a puppet show depicting the relationship between a father and a son that mirrors his own relationship. In the play, the father is a pilot rather than an opera director. To help his ailing father, the puppet son constructs a time machine that allows the man to go back into the past to regain lost memories. The puppets made for father and son are phenomenal but the most breathtaking realizations are the time-machine and airplane that are a combination of Rube Goldberg and Jean Tinguely.
Toward the end of the film, Maleonn is barely recognized by his father. Each time he shows his newborn granddaughter to the old man, he is asked who she is. When he replies that this is his granddaughter, his father beams in pleasure. Maleonn quips that this is maybe one saving grace of Alzheimer’s that the victim continues to enjoy each moment as if for the first time.
Kinetics – Where Parkinson’s Meets Parkour
Written and directed by Sue Wylie, this narrative film casts her in the leading role as a drama professor learning that she has early onset of Parkinson’s. Wylie’s script is based on her own experience dealing with the trauma of dealing with a loss of balance and motion.
In this two-character film, she meets a student who has his own issues with mind and body. Lukas almost falls on top of her as he has jumped from a wall alongside the sidewalk she is navigating with some difficulty. Lukas suffers from ADHD and used parkour as a way of feeling more control over his life and emotions. Wikipedia describes parkour as a “training discipline using movement that developed from military obstacle course training”. Its practitioners seek to get from one point to another in a complex environment, without specialized gear.
As someone who lost a best friend to Parkinson’s in 2018, Sue Wylie’s travails were familiar to me. Her ability to extract some hope out of her experience is in line with the other two films discussed above. All three are first-rate films and worthy of your support at a time when filmmaking, like most other group experiences, is under siege.