Disability and Film: When Your Body Wants to Kill Your Dreams

A boy talks enthusiastically about his dream job. He wants to become a veterinarian. Then he looks at his overgrown hands and before our eyes his dream erupts. With these hands, he says, he wouldn’t be able to operate on a mouse’s appendix, because the mouse would be dead. The film was shown on Swiss television in 1981 and the teenagers who starred in it were like the first movie stars of my life. The film was shot at the same school for people with disabilities as my brother, but he was too young to play any role in the film.

So it was about dreams. And the frustrating realization that they would never materialize because life had imposed too many restrictions. Because you were forever confined to a wheelchair, blind, or had end-stage muscle wasting, and death was closer than ever when you were growing up. You could still dream your dreams. With pain, with irony, full of melancholy, but still.

Inclusion was then still a word lived only by the bereaved and the responsible institutions. Not from society. Not in art. The HORA Theater in Zurich was only founded in 1993 and in Hollywood it rained Oscars for actors who played people with a wide variety of physical and mental disabilities, just as it snowed Oscars for gay actors. In the bodies of established stars, fringe groups gained ground. At least temporarily. As a spectacle.

In 1989 Dustin Hoffman won an Oscar for “Rain Man”, in 1990 Daniel Day-Lewis for “My Left Foot”, in 1994 Leonardo DiCaprio was nominated for “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape”, in 1995 Tom Hanks won with “Forrest Gump” , in 2015 Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything. And also the two French films “Le scaphandre et le papillon” and “Intouchables” were big hits with us.

“Cripping up” is the technical term for it, “crip” is a short form of “crippled”. This often leads to stereotypes about disability, and if they are as successful as these examples, these stereotypes become stubbornly entrenched in the public consciousness. “Cripping up” is a counterpart to “Blackface” – when white actors wear makeup on black people. Blackface is over. It will take longer to get into trouble, the disabled have a bad lobby, and that shows up again and again in everyday life.

During a panel discussion on the participation of disabled actors and the representation of disabled people in the film world, Greek Stavros Zafeiris says that sometimes he thinks it’s cool to see how world-famous colleagues try to usurp. To him it has to come across as comical at times, but often he just has professional admiration for it.

Zafeiris is in a wheelchair, his body seems designed by a surrealist, but his posture is still relaxed, he is an actor and dancer, that was his dream, he worked a lot for it, it takes a certain acrobatic daring and imagination from the directors. Now he is in Locarno with a big movie, “Touched”, the love story between a disabled person and his carer, who also has an unusual body because of his overweight.

Working with him is not easy, he says. In a wheelchair, his body is always under extreme tension and he must be able to lie down and relax regularly. But if this is observed, he can easily complete a fourteen-hour day. Sex scenes were difficult, there was always a risk that he would get hurt, nothing happened, everything was extremely careful. He did not participate in the development of “Touched”, the script was fixed, he just played his part, but minor changes were inevitable “because my body is just my body”. An entity that occasionally obeys its own laws. But it would be a travesty if the great illusion machine movie couldn’t work with someone like Zafeiris.

British activist Clare Baines is blind. She does not work in front of or behind the camera, but takes care of the rest. From cinema architecture to film financing. A huge portfolio. At the London Film Festival, she ensures that people with a motor disability can go to the cinema at all. Suggested that screenplays should be written differently for actors with learning disabilities. And she writes brochures about how to deal with the language of people with disabilities. She sees the brochures as an offer, not as law books.

“Language is constantly evolving,” says Baines, and able-bodied people’s fear of offending someone or failing to communicate is often so great that there is far too much silence between the two worlds. And everything – the lack of access to a movie theater or the lack of communication – leads even more to the fact that disabled people consider themselves disabled. “They are hindered by their environment.”

Like Zafeiris, Baines is an extremely positive and relaxed person; both have a poignant optimism that has taken them and many others further than more unrestricted people thought possible. There is nothing good unless you do it, Erich Kästner once wrote. Baines is queer, she lives the intersectional idea with heart and soul, fights against every discrimination that society imposes on you, but first of course against the most fundamental, against the idea that there are valid and invalid, ie valuable and worthless bodies.

Locarno spared no expense in making the stage itself an inclusive event: a man and a woman perform a sign language performance in mirror image. She, a sign language teacher who can speak and hear, faces the stage and translates what she hears. Deaf since birth and sign language the only language he ‘hears’ and ‘speaks’, he now relays the teacher’s translation to the audience with a millisecond delay. It is fascinating and very virtuosic and a somewhat cumbersome, but functional way of communicating, which is received with enthusiasm by those involved in the audience.

There is another ‘expert’, the French documentary maker Pascal Plisson, who is showing his film ‘We Have a Dream’ in Locarno. Like the old Swiss documentary, it’s about kids who don’t want their dreams banned. And because society, medicine and technology are more advanced today than they were then, they are largely succeeding.

For example, the blind African albino boy who finally succeeds in being integrated outside his school for the blind. Or the twin sisters, who are both missing a leg and can still dance. Or the girl who dances ballet with a prosthesis. Plisson tells how he and his cameraman searched for “la beauté” and “la poésie”, for example the beauty of a prosthesis, the French always have to look for la beauté and la poésie in everything, Zafeiris and Baines smile quietly to themselves.

Could Zafeiris also imagine playing an able-bodied person? Just like world famous colleagues do the other way around? Certainly, he says, just imagine that neither his feelings nor his intellect would differ from those of a non-disabled person. A nice thought. But in the end, becoming a vet is probably as much of a dream as the boy’s.