Disability and American Documentary Cinema: Media Ethnography Towards the Movement of Embodied Difference Restricted; Files Only

Abstract

This dissertation challenges stigmatizing representations of people with disabilities in mainstream American visual culture and offers a practice-based intervention comprised of four short films. It brings together film studies, critical disability studies, and visual and media anthropology to analyze current trends in documentary film in order to emphasize the urgency of new practice-based alternatives. Part I is comprised of three case studies of films about people with disabilities made between 1985-2014 (Multi-handicapped (1986), Murderball (2005) and Invitation to Dance (2014)). Techniques used by filmmakers in each case study, like talkinghead interviews, intertitles, and voyeuristic camera placements, reify social and cultural perspectives on disability by highlighting modes of production that tell about disability at the expense of showing multisensory disability experience. Part I argues that mainstream American disability documentary cinema relies on cinematographic techniques descended from medical and humanitarian discourse established in the rhetoric of disease, rehabilitation and cure, and underscores how documentary strategies in film production continue to generate stories about sensational medical or social transformation. Through six months of field research with the integrated dance company Full Radius Dance, and four films generated therein, Part II offers an alternative to these long-standing trends in the visualization of people with disability. Full Radius Dance is a professional dance company in Atlanta, Georgia comprised of both able-bodied and disabled dancers. Using techniques from visual anthropology, the concluding part of the dissertation explores alternate ways to depict people with disabilities that show the dynamic and everydayness of life rather than illness or exceptionalism. As a disabled filmmaker, my methods are anchored in inclusive, reflexive, and collaborative multimedia design and shared authorship. Ultimately this dissertation combines cultural critique of longstanding filmmaking practices surrounding disability, with a practicebased intervention that propels ethnographic film as a way around flattened narratives of disability

Table of Contents

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………......1

Part I Documenting Disability in American Non-Fiction Cinema Post-WWII: Three Case Studies

Chapter One…………………………………………………………………………………….32

The Observational Palimpsest: Frederick Wiseman’s Multisensory Approach to Documentary Filmmaking in Multihandicapped

Chapter Two……………………………………………………………………………………71

Transcendent Individualism in Popular Disability Documentary: Filmic Technique in Murderball

Chapter Three…………………………………………………………………………………114

Activism in Simi Linton’s Invitation to Dance: The Political Legibility of Disability in Documentary Film

Part II Media Ethnography, Integrated Dance, and Fluctuations of Embodiment

Chapter Four…………………………………………………………………………………..145

Bodily Perspectives: Ethnographic Practice from Feminist and Visual Anthropology

Chapter Five…………………………………………………………………………………...183

The Films: Process as Research Alongside Full Radius Dance

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………..194

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………...204

Non-Text Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..216

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Anthropology, Cultural Cinema
Keyword	Dance Media Ethnography Disability Documentary Cinema
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Grimshaw, Anna, Emory University
Committee Members	Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, Emory University Gilman, Sander, Emory University

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