Fourth Period: since the late 1960s

• Since the late 1960s
• Euthanasia
• More enlightened portrayals
• Mental health
• Bad habits continue
• Science fiction
• Disabled people as ordinary
• The Dogma group
• Where we are today

Fourth period: since the late 1960s

During this time period, there is a swing to a more enlightened, tolerant stance, linked in the USA to the returning Vietnam War veterans and, in Britain, to a left-wing liberalism in the film industry. Audiences for films featuring aspects of disability were large enough to encourage filmmakers to produce a stream of such films over the next forty years. They mainly feature civilian disabled characters who sometimes go beyond the earlier stereotypes, while reinforcing others. Some examples are:

• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (USA 1968 Dir Robert Ellis Miller), features several deaf characters, including Singer (Alan Arkin), the main character. He is still portrayed as isolated, a saintly, deaf sage, but he does help out a whole range of other characters. The film is based on a novel by Carson McCullers, whose books tend to have a pre-occupation with the grotesque.
• Midnight Cowboy (USA 1969 Dir John Schlesinger) features John Voight as the Texan cowboy in New York and Dustin Hoffman as the physically impaired and tubercular Ratso Rizzo. Ratso has lived on the streets for years and he befriends and mentors the cowboy before dying.
• Tell Me That You Love Me Junie Moon (USA 1970 Dir Otto Preminger) tells the story of three disabled people coming out of an institution and setting up home together, and their adventures in relationships involving race and sexuality.
• The Ballad of the Sad Café (UK-USA 1991 Dir Simon Callow), another Carson McCullers adaptation, features a powerful matriarch (Vanessa Redgrave) who, through her general store and café, holds her hometown in the palm of her hand. Her life is disrupted by her returning ex-con husband, with whom she fights. Cousin Lyman, a short hunchback, also visits. In a totally unrealistic scene, Cousin Lyman swoops down on the feisty Redgrave as if flying, and thereby breaks her spirit.

However, negative representations of disabled characters echoed past portrayals. There are several examples in films adapted from comic books:

• Batman (USA 1989 Dir Tim Burton), eg the Penguin; or Batman Forever (USA 1995 Dir Joel Schumacher), eg the Riddler or Harvey Two Face - one side bad, one side good.
• Dick Tracy (USA 1990 Dir Warren Beatty), in which all the baddies sport impairments: Al Pacino as Big Boy has a hunchback, Dustin Hoffman mumbles with a speech impairment, and many others have facial disfigurements: Pruneface, Shoulders, Stooge, The Rodent, The Brow, Little Face and No Face (this last being Breathless Mahoney - Madonna - disguised to take control of the city).

Euthanasia

The ongoing pre-occupation with euthanasia, or 'the life unworthy of life' featured in a number of films in this period, such as:

• Johnny Got his Gun (USA 1971 Dir Dalton Trumbo), based on his 1939 anti-war novel and shot almost entirely from the character, Joe's, viewpoint. Only slowly do the audience realise that Joe has no limbs or face, nor can he hear, see or speak, having been hit by a shell on the last day of the First World War. Eventually, by banging his head in Morse code, Joe gets one of the nurses to convince the doctors he is not a 'vegetable', but they will not concede to his request for death.
• A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (UK 1971 Dir Peter Medak), in which a young English couple struggling to raise a disabled child contemplate 'mercy killing'. It is given a darkly humorous treatment.
• In Whose Life is it Anyway? (USA 1981 Dir John Badham), a paralysed sculptor wants to die after he learns that the injuries he sustained in a car accident are permanent. The judge decides he can grant his request.

• The Bone Collector (USA 1999 Dir Phillip Noyce). At the beginning of the film, Rhyme (Denzel Washington), a top New York detective who sustained a major spinal injury four years earlier, wants 'a final adjustment', enlisting a doctor friend to help. When he gets involved in solving a series of ingenious murders with a young detective (Angelina Jolie) and the killer tries to kill him, he fights back with all his ingenuity. The film ends with a hint that he and Jolie are starting a relationship, and all thoughts of euthanasia gone.

More enlightened portrayals

A number of films stand out as memorable for the sympathetic approach taken by the filmmakers to their disabled subjects. The films below are all examples of more enlightened moving image portrayals.

• A very powerful film evoking feelings of pity, The Elephant Man (UK 1980 Dir David Lynch) was shot in black and white. It tells the true story of David Merrick, who had a very rare condition that led to huge growths on his skull and face, and scoliosis (curvature of the spine). He is exhibited as a side-show freak in Victorian London. He's rescued by Dr Treves (Anthony Hopkins) of the London Hospital, who offers Merrick a home and exploits him in a different way, as a medical curiosity. John Hurt, who plays Merrick, brings out the humanity of the character by singing, reciting psalms and by his perfect manners. This gives him the air of a saintly sage. (See a still from this film in Stills analysis).

Merrick continues as a freak today - he is still preserved in formaldehyde in the London Hospital for viewing by medical students.

• Rain Man (USA 1988 Dir Barry Levinson) won many Hollywood accolades. It features the selfish, avaricious Charlie Babbit (Tom Cruise) and his autistic elder brother, Raymond (Dustin Hoffman), whom Charlie did not know existed until his father died and left $3 million in trust for Raymond. Raymond lives in an institution and Charlie takes him out on a cross-country odyssey, hoping to persuade Raymond to give him half the money. Raymond's many autistic tendencies (unlikely, realistically, to be found in one autistic person) include rigid and unchangeable habits, which Charlie is forced to accommodate. As a result of his new relationship with his brother, Charlie is forced to reassess his own life.

• My Left Foot (UK 1989 Dir Jim Sheridan) is based on the life-story of Christy Brown, who had cerebral palsy and wrote his story with his left foot. The film is set in working-class 1950s and 1960s Dublin and shows Christy learning to write and paint with his left foot. He is shown as witty, wrathful, drunk and frustrated. The film also shows the powerful impact of parents, particularly mothers (Brenda Fricker), when they believe in and support the potential of their disabled children against a negative world.

In My Left Foot, Christy was played by Daniel Day Lewis. A method actor, Day Lewis spent months with disabled people in a wheelchair, contorting his body and learning to paint with his foot, before filming began. The paintings in the film were all done by Day Lewis using this method. When the film came out, disabled people raised the issue of casting, saying that Christy should have been played by an actor with cerebral palsy. However, it is likely that without a 'name' like Day Lewis, this film would never have been made. It certainly raised consciousness of disability amongst the general public.

All these, plus others, such as Gaby - A True Story (USA-Mexico 1987 Dir Luis Mandoki), about the struggles for inclusion of a girl with cerebral palsy; The Waterdance (USA 1991 Dir Neal Jimenez/Michael Steinberg), which was written as well as directed by Jimenez, a wheelchair user, and based on his experiences in a rehabilitation hospital; Passion Fish (USA 1992 Dir John Sayles), about the personal change impairment brings; and Philadelphia (USA 1993 Dir Jonathan Demme), which dealt with HIV/AIDS in a sympathetic manner, are evidence of a more enlightened attitude, though the problem of disability is still seen as an individual one (see 'Medical model' v. 'social model').

Mental health

Recently, some films have broken new ground by showing a sympathetic approach to mental health:

• Shine (Australia 1996 Dir Scott Hicks) tells the true story of David Helfgott (Geoffrey Rush). He's an Australian piano prodigy with a history of mental health issues, driven by his overbearing father, who was a concentration camp survivor. The film shows Helfgott's journey back to piano playing, supported by his love of Gillian (Lynn Redgrave).
• Similarly, A Beautiful Mind (2001, Ron Howard, USA) was about the mathematician John Nash (Russell Crowe), and shows how his mind is taken over by delusional figures. It follows his lifelong personal battle to co-exist with them and still carry on with his mathematics.

Bad habits continue

One unfortunate trend that emerged in the 1990s was for a protagonist to pretend to be disabled to elicit the stock response from other characters:

• Kevin Spacey's character in The Usual Suspects (USA 1995 Dir Bryan Singer) has cerebral palsy and is ignored by the gang he's a member of. He recounts, in flashbacks, an amazing story featuring an underworld kingpin, who turns out to be himself as he really is - not disabled. This flaws one of the cleverest, best-acted and most influential thrillers of the 1990s, relying upon the stereotyped responses of the rest of the gang and the police.
• Lee Evans in There's Something About Mary (USA 1998 Dir Peter Farrelly/Bobby Farrelly) pretends to have cerebral palsy to get Mary's sympathy. This was somewhat offset by the inclusion of Mary's brother and friends as people with learning difficulties, played by people with learning difficulties, and Danny Murphy, a wheelchair user.
• In The Score (2001, Frank Oz, USA) a young man (Edward Norton) sets up a robbery in the Custom House, by pretending to be a cleaner with cerebral palsy to make him seem innocent to the guards. He double-crosses his partner, the more experienced and older thief (Robert DeNiro), who was persuaded by his 'fence' (Marlon Brando) to work with Norton in his home town of Montreal, although both things break his 'rules'. However, experience wins out in the end.

Cure, death, vengeance, mirth and tragedy have continued as themes right up until the present day, often in entertaining and otherwise well-made films:

• See No Evil, Hear No Evil (USA 1989 Dir Arthur Hiller) encourages the audience to laugh at a blind and a deaf man (Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor) and their misadventures.

• Scent of a Woman (USA 1992 Dir Martin Brest) features blind ex-Colonel, Frank Harris (Al Pacino) driving across New York at speed and wanting to kill himself. His friendship with a young man (Chris O'Donnell) shakes him out of his self-indulgence. (See an analysis of this still in Stills analysis.)
• Unbreakable (2000, M. Night Shyamalan, USA). At 1m 85cm (6 feet 2 inches), Sam Jackson unbelievably plays a man with brittle bones, called Mr. Glass (people with brittle bones do not grow to anywhere near this height). Mr Glass is obsessed with comics and their indestructible super-heroes and evil anti-heroes. He transfers this obsession to his own life, seeking out his antithesis in the 'unbreakable' Bruce Willis character. Mr Glass contrives all sorts of murderous mass accidents to try to find him and break him. Apart from Mr Glass being improbable, the filmmaker also fails to convince you that the Willis character is actually 'unbreakable'.
• Red Dragon (2002, Brett Ratner, USA/Germany), in which the hare-lipped, isolated protagonist with a chip on his shoulder, Francis Dolarhyde (Ralph Fiennes), is a multiple murderer of whole families. Throwing in a blind woman who unknowingly has a relationship with the killer, this formulaic thriller reinforces these old stereotypes in a new millennium.
• Daredevil (2003, Mark Steven Johnson, USA) is a sci-fi action thriller, based on a Marvel Comics character. Mathew Murdock (Ben Affleck) is the blind lawyer devoting himself to bringing wrongdoers to justice, since his father was killed by gangsters. Murdock is blind after being struck by a truck, but what no-one knows is that he was also doused in unusual radioactive chemicals, raising his other senses to such a keen pitch that they act like radar. This reinforces the wrongly-held idea that blind people have developed some sixth sense, but does at least show a disabled person as a super-hero. This compensatory 'super-crip' stereotype is not unusual in films based on comic books, such as Hulk (2003, Ang Lee, USA); or X-men (2000, Bryan Singer, USA).

Another disturbing film was:

• In the Company of Men (USA 1997 Dir Neil LaBute). Passed over for promotion and dumped by their girlfriends, Chad and Howard want revenge. Out of town for six weeks on a business trip, they fix on beautiful, deaf Christine, who works in the typing pool, as their victim. They get her to fall in love with one of them by trickery and then drop her, destroying her fragile self-confidence. Though much praised by the critics, it is worth considering the negative impact this film must have had on people's view of disabled people as victims.

The Disney organisation has continued its long tradition of reinforcing negative stereotypes of disability, eg in Peter Pan (USA 1953 Dir Hamilton Luske/Clyde Geronimi/Wilfred Jackson) with vengeful Captain Hook; and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the dwarfs being figures of fun isolated in the forest. Disney then took Victor Hugo's classic, Notre Dame de Paris and produced:

• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (USA 1998 Dir Walt Disney). In this cartoon, Disney chose to have Esmeralda go off with the non-disabled Phoebus rather than the hunchback, Quasimodo, who loves her. Quasimodo has to go off with a little girl. In Victor Hugo's classic, Esmeralda falls in love with Quasimodo, but is hung by the good people of Paris for frequenting the 'spawn of the devil'.

Mr Magoo, the visually-impaired man who is a figure of fun, was made into a full-length cartoon feature film by Disney in 1997, but this flopped. The Hunchback of Notre Dame II (2002, Walt Disney, USA) was recently released as a video only. Perhaps these recent failures and straight-to-video films may suggest that the popularity of this kind of film is waning.

Science fiction

This genre allows filmmakers to play around with 'normality' and what is meant by it. Recent examples include:

• Extreme Measures (USA 1996 Dir Michael Apted) is a thriller with science fiction elements about an unscrupulous Doctor Myrick who is seeking a cure for spinal injury by experimenting on live homeless people. Various wheelchair users go along with his plan. A young Trauma Room doctor, Luthan (Hugh Grant), becomes suspicious and, bit by bit, uncovers the plot, putting his own life in danger.
• Gattaca (USA 1997 Dir Andrew Niccol), which is set at some point in the future when everyone is genetically designed, and Vincent (Ethan Hawke) is an outsider of natural birth, called an 'In-valid'. Determined to break free of his genetic destiny, Vincent meets Jerome (Jude Law), a 'Valid' who has sustained a spinal injury and uses a wheelchair, and is prepared to sell his genetic material for cash. Vincent uses Jerome's hair, blood and urine samples to forge a new identity. This film is a reminder that even in a genetically 'cleansed' future, with all the impacts on human life and freedom shown in the film, impairment is part of the human condition.
• X-Men (2000, Bryan Singer, USA) is based on the Marvel Comics characters, featuring Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), who is a wheelchair user and genius telepath, and runs the 'good' mutants. Magneto (Ian McKellen) is his enemy, and a mutant who wants to eliminate humans. All the mutants are able to manipulate aspects of the environment or people with their supernatural powers. In X2 (2003, Bryan Singer, USA), an attempt is made to eliminate all mutants by Stryker (Brian Cox). While Stryker is trying to destabilise Xavier's mind through a medium, he makes him hallucinate that he can walk to further erode his identity as a disabled person. But the good Doctor Xavier prevails and co-existence is assured between mutants and humans.

Disabled people as ordinary

There are now many more moving image media which just include characters who are disabled people in an incidental way (without stereotypes). Some coming from Hollywood are:

• Fried Green Tomatoes (USA 1991 Dir Jon Avne), which features an old woman in a wheelchair who takes the audience back with her recollections. Also, a young boy in the flashbacks loses his arm in a train accident without this having any real plot significance, other than acknowledging that accidents which cause impairment can occur at any time.
• The Fisher King (USA 1991 Dir Terry Gilliam), which deals with mental illness and depression in a matter-of-fact manner.
• ER - The Emergency Room, a TV series that has for a number of years featured a disabled senior doctor who uses a crutch. Apart from an episode early on, this has not been remarked upon or used for dramatic effect. She's just there, along with a number of disabled users of the hospital.
• Clear and Present Danger (USA 1994 Dir Phillip Noyce), in which Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford), CIA Assistant Director, is supported by a minor character in the office who is a wheelchair user. Hardly worth a comment, if it wasn't so uncommon for a wheelchair user to be included without any other plot reason.

However, more films featuring non-stereotyped disabled characters have tended to be made away from Hollywood, such as Shine (already mentioned above). Some others are:

• City of Joy, (USA-UK-France 1992 Dir Roland Joffé), set in a Calcutta slum, where disabled actor, Nabil Shaman, gives an excellent supporting performance.
• The Piano (NZ-UK-USA 1993 Dir Jane Campion), which features a Scottish woman (Holly Hunter) with a speech impairment, who travels to New Zealand for an arranged marriage with a landowner (Sam Shepherd). She is subjected to cruel sexism and disabilism by him and finds solace in a bizarre erotic relationship with a character played by Harvey Keitel.
• Langer Gang (Corridor) (Germany 1993 Dir Yilmaz Arisan). In spite of being set in an institution, the inhabitants (disabled people with physical impairments) conduct their lives with passion and commitment at night in the corridors. The film features all disabled actors. They not only have to cope with their physical limitations, but with their rage about the constraints these impose, and their difficulties in dealing with the relatively clueless 'whole' people who administer the Centre. At the same time, they manage skilfully to wrest every ounce of enjoyment out of life, in quite surprising ways. This movie has many disturbing scenes, some of them of an explicitly sexual nature, but it tells the tales of the individuals in it with a humour and honesty which is free from the sentimentality usually associated with such stories. Perhaps this is because the director himself once resided at such a Centre and is a disabled filmmaker.
• Four Weddings and a Funeral (UK 1994 Dir Mike Newell), in which the Hugh Grant character's brother is deaf and played by a deaf actor (David Bowyer).
• Scallagrigg (1994, BBC TV), telling the story of a boy with cerebral palsy put in a mental handicap hospital, and some young disabled people's search for him 60 years on.

• Antonia's Line (NL-Belgium-UK 1995 Dir Marleen Gorris), about three generations of women and the community Antonia builds around her, including two people with learning difficulties who have a relationship, have sex and get married.
• Go Now (UK 1995 Dir Michael Winterbottom) is a vibrant, unsentimental comedy drama of a young man who discovers he has multiple sclerosis, and of the woman who loves and supports him. As his impairment gradually develops, Nick (Robert Carlyle) is unable to engage in male bravado and sport. He gets depressed, but comes through it to find a new way of relating to Karen (Juliet Aubery).
• The Eighth Day (Belgium-France-UK 1996 Dir Jaco van Dormael), about a man with Down's Syndrome and a stressed businessman. The disabled man, who has a relationship with another person with learning difficulty, dies in the end by eating chocolates, to which he is allergic. The businessman sorts his life out through knowing the disabled man.
• Live Flesh (Spain/France 1997 Dir Pedro Almodòvar) has a wheelchair-using detective whose adaptations are shown well, but whose wife has sex with the criminal who previously shot him and made him a paraplegic.
• Orphans (UK 1997 Dir Peter Mullan), in which one of the three siblings is a wheelchair user, which is incidental to her role in this dark comedy.
• The Theory of Flight (UK 1998 Dir Paul Greengrass) tells an unlikely tale of a reprobate artist (Kenneth Branagh) on community service with Jane, who is a wheelchair user with a progressive neuro-muscular condition. Jane wants to lose her virginity 'before it's too late'. Although mawkish at times, at least it recognises that disabled women have sexual yearnings.
• Notting Hill (UK-USA 1999 Dir Roger Michell) included a wheelchair-using character.
• Iris (2001, Richard Eyre, UK/USA) is a sympathetic film about the writer, Iris Murdoch, and her degenerative impairment of Alzheimer's disease. It is not sentimental, just a realistic recognition of the impact the disease has.

• Frida (2002, Julie Taymor, USA/Canada) tells the story of artist Frida Kahlo from before her accident, which leaves her permanently impaired, to her death 30 years later. Throughout, Kahlo's art, which reflects her feelings as a Mexican, a woman, a socialist and a disabled person, is shown in the context of its creation. (See an analysis of this still in Stills analysis.)
• The Lost Prince (2002, Steven Poliakoff, for the BBC) featured the Queen's uncle, John. It was a sympathetic view of John, who had epilepsy and was shut away on a farm in Norfolk until his death at thirteen, because of prevailing prejudices and fears that the public might view the Windsor blood line as tainted.

The Dogma group

The Dogma Group were four Danish filmmakers who disliked the increasingly superficial and false reality being shown by commercial films. Their manifesto, adopted in 1995, was predominantly technical:

• Shooting must be done on location;
• The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa;
• The camera must be hand-held;
• Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted;
• The film must be in colour; special lighting is not acceptable;
• Optical work and filters are forbidden;
• The film must not contain superficial action;
• Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden;
• Genre movies are not acceptable;
• The film format must be Academy 35mm.
• The filmmaker must refrain from considerations of 'personal taste', 'good taste and aesthetic considerations'.

Perhaps because of misunderstanding considerations of 'good taste' with respect to disabled people and the oppression they experience, the Dogma filmmakers have sometimes used disability negatively and so reinforced the stereotyped view of disabled people on screen, particularly director Lars von Trier in:

• Breaking the Waves (Denmark 1996 Dir Lars von Trier). In this film, a permanently paralysed oil-rig worker (Stellan Skarsgârd), is married to the naïve Bess (Emily Watson), who is recovering from mental illness and comes from a deeply religious community. Prior to his injury, Jan had introduced Bess to the mysteries of sex in their marriage bed. Jan persuades Bess to have sex with other men and tell him about it. Bess, for her part, thinks this will make God cure her husband, and becomes a prostitute, with disastrous consequences and a phony ending: Bess is killed and her husband walks.

• In The Idiots (Denmark-France-Italy-NL 1998 Dir Lars von Trier), von Trier has a group of young people living in a free-love commune who set out to disrupt bourgeois order by going into shops and restaurants and 'spazzing' (mimicking people with physical and mental impairments) - supposedly to find their inner selves. Two characters, Jeppe and Christina, do develop a more adult relationship through all this, but it is insulting to disabled people.

Another film by a member of the Dogma group which features a negative portrayal of a disabled person is:

• Mifune's Last Song (Denmark/Sweden 1999 Dir Søren Kragh-Jacobsen) features Rud, a character with learning difficulties, as a foil for his city-slicker brother. The brother is forced to return to his farm home and to reassess his life by the death of their father. The brother gets together with another urban refugee - a prostitute - but Rud does not have a relationship.

These films were widely acclaimed, but are viewed as offensive by many disabled people, as their issues and impairments are just being used to make a filmic point. The lesson to draw from this, perhaps, is that to portray a more real cinema, you need to develop a better understanding of your subject matter. It is a political not a technical issue.

Where we are today

After 105 years, moving image media are more powerful than ever. Images are continually recycled and can reach far into our lives, yet filmmakers are still happily using disabled people as plot devices. It is still rare for disabled characters to be well developed and be shown as part of all aspects of life, as they are in reality. It is even rarer for disability to be seen as socially constructed by the barriers of attitude, organisation and environment that prevent disabled people.