Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability

by Christopher R. Smit, Anthony W. Enns

Overview

Depictions and portrayals of persons who live with disability in motion pictures have changed over time, sometimes reflecting, at other times influencing, societal attitudes and beliefs. Yet disability itself has no easily recognizable form. When isolated from the mainstream of human existence by artistic representations, the disabled individual is effectively transformed into an object of cultural fascination, a fragment of humanity, the Other. The disabled experience, defined only in relation to a perceived lack of human potentiality, becomes significant as a distorted mirror image of what we take to be "human" and thereby reveals our culture's preconceived notions of normalcy. Screening Disability was conceived to provide both an overview of the traditional methods of analyzing portrayals of disability in cinema as well as suggesting new directions for cinema and disability scholars to take. This book not only shows where the study of cinema and disability began, but it also marks a potentially new phase in the study of cinema and disability by incorporating elements of Film Studies that emphasize the priority of reception and the complexity of texts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761820161
Publisher:	University Press of America
Publication date:	09/12/2001
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.76(w) x 8.86(h) x 0.78(d)

About the Author

Christopher R. Smit is Graduate Instructor in the Rhetoric Department at University of Iowa.
Anthony W. Enns is completing his Doctorate at the University of Iowa.

Table of Contents

1 Acknowledgments 2 Introduction: The State of Cinema and Disability Studies 3 Theorizing Cinema and Disability 4 Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People 5 The Hollywood Discourse on Disability: Some Personal Reflections 6 The Fusion of Film Studies and Disability Studies 7 Disability as Monstrosity in Classical Hollywood Cinema: Tod Browning and The Hunchback of Notre Dame 8 None of Us: Ambiguity as Moral Discourse in Tod Browning's Freaks 9 The Horror of Becoming "One of Us:" Tod Browning's Freaks and Disability 10 Disabling the Viewer: Perceptions of Disability in Tod Browning's Freaks 11 Tod Browning and the Monstrosity of Hollywood Style 12 Lost and Found in Translation: The Changing Faces of Disability in the Film Adaptations of Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris: 1842 13 Disability as Trauma, Mental Illness, and Dysfunction in Post-Vietnam Cinema 14 Trapped in the Affection-Image: American Cinema's Post-Traumatic Cycle (1970-1976) 15 The Inner Life of Ordinary People 16 Disability and the Dysfunctional Family in Wayne Wang's Smoke 17 Disability as Spectacle in Contemporary Cinema 18 The Noble Ruined Body: Blindness and Visual Prosthetics in Three Science Fiction Films 19 The Spectacle of Disabled Masculinity in John Woo's "Heroic Bloodshed" Films 20 Sexy Cyborgs: Disability and Erotic Politics in Cronenberg's Crash 21 Index 22 About the Contributors