Five Reviews of The Cinema of Isolation by Martin F Norden - written in 1994
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Review 1:
Dam, Winter Issue 1994, Vol. 4, No. 4
The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Disability in the Movies
Martin F. Norden
Rutgers University Press
ISBN Paperback 0-8135-2104-1 (Hardback 0-8135-2103-3)
370 pp. $16.95 ($48.00)
The Cinema of Isolation is exactly what its subtitle states: a history of disability in the movies. And it is a masterful history: executed with a high degree of awareness, sophistication and eclecticism. The vast range of reading that has gone into the book makes it a joy to read from beginning to end. That it is not short on humour helps it become, what I would consider, the best piece of in-depth work, on the image of people with disabilities in the movies, around; it is far superior to both Colin Barnes' booklet (Disabling Imagery and the Media, Ryburn/BCODP) and Cumberbatch & Negrine's book (Images Of Disability on Television, Routledge) whilst covering a lot of the same ground.
The author's eclecticism has enabled him to relate the various stages of disability representation - as he sees it - to not only the social and political situation of the disabled in any given era but also to the prevailing national political climate and the film industry's technological abilities. One of the book's most appealing characteristics is its ability to appeal to the film buff as much as the critic or expert. Norden manages to educate the reader not only about disability imagery but also cinematic and American political history, all at the same time, without every preaching or seeming to state the obvious.
The best moments in the book are when all these factors come together (in reality and in the book), in chapters five and six for example, where Norden deals with how disability is represented in post-World War II cinema and after. For Norden disability imagery improves immediately after WWII due to the returning war veterans (filmmakers and public alike) and their call for better rehabilitation services combined with the fact that it was at the peak of American liberalism (epitomised by the Presidency of Roosevelt - himself a wheelchair user). But, Norden tells us, disability imagery deteriorated rapidly, soon after, with the rise of the communist witch-hunts of Senator McCarthy in the early 1950s. A deterioration caused, for Norden, by the fact that many of the victims of the witch-hunts were those actors, writers, producers and directors, who had been responsible for the better images of disability at the end of WWII. Norden, quite conclusively, backs up his argument by quoting from the (auto)biographical material of the stars and filmmakers, and the more critical material of cultural critics and historical documents (both contemporary and current). A thoroughness that makes the book seem lengthy, on rare occasions, but persuasive and coherent in all its arguments.
Early on Norden writes that "the general thesis of this book is simple: most movies have tended to isolate disabled characters from their able-bodied peers as well as from each other" (p.3), and the comprehensiveness with which Norden details this, and explains his overall title, is staggering: the detailing of numerous thirty second quickies from 1900 to epics of 1993, and the skill with which connections are made (i.e. the writer on this film, edited that and directed those, many of them thirty or forty years apart) makes the book unusually coherent in its analysis and stunning in its research. Although, the degree with which various individual are singled out, for praise and blame, does seem a little reductive on occasion. That Tod Browning (creator of the 1931 film Freaks) gets most of the blame for the film industry's obsession with 'freaks', during the inter war years, seems a little harsh; after all the audience must take its fair share of criticism for enjoying it so much. Also, it is slightly irrational to extract an individual or group from what was a general cultural norm at the time (any time!).
This is an excellent book but, sadly, its last five pages are deeply suspect - where psychoanalytical theory is let out to run riot - and unnecessarily dense, and those pages conclusions (very valid and largely true) could have been reached by sound, and clearer, cultural analysis without the aid of the deeply normative (and as such anti-disabled) discipline of psychoanalysis. Surprising, considering that psychoanalytical theory is almost completely absent during the first 315 pages. The book presumes no prior knowledge of its subject (film and disability) without the drawback of ever being shallow or condescending. It's only apparent problem, for us, is that it is about American (Hollywood) films in the main - though its later chapters deal with other English language films (My Left Foot and The Elephant Man most notably) in some depth. Every film you can think of - and many you haven't - is detailed and carefully dealt with.
Finally, I would say that although I often disagree violently with Norden's analysis of specific films - the analysis of individual films is done both thematically and by the careful (and brilliant) dissection of specific scenes - it is done with great skill and clarity and, unusually, a desire to be positive where others are only ever negative (including myself, which explains our differing of opinions). Anybody who has an interest in film, or disability, as just a spectator, or as a critic or filmmakers, must buy this book. It is a major step forward in the analysis and combatting of the cinema of isolation; a cinema that portrays us so bad that it deserves a thousand of these onslaught against its representation of us, the disabled.
898 words
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Review 2:
LINK, Dec 1994/Jan 1995 Issue No. 155
The Cinema of Isoalation: A Review
There are not many books in circulation that deal with disability and the cinema, so it is especially rewarding to come across a new publication that not only breaks new ground in the area but one that also excites and stimulates the reader (and has plenty of pictures to keep plebs like me happy). I unreservedly recommend that all people with disabilities go out and buy (or at least order it, as will most probably have to be the case) Martin F. Norden's The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability In The Movies today. Its analysis, and discussions, of all Hollywood films - plus many non-american movies - that have a physical disabled character in is bewildering on its scope. No movie is missed and the analysis of each of them is eclectic, academic and anecdotal, which, in turn, makes it highly informative, educational and readable.
Norden, with considerable skill and entertainment, clearly shows the derogatory road that images of disability have gone down; whilst highlighting different eras specific concerns and pressures. For example, Norden conclusively shows that in the immediate aftermath of World War II disability imagery improved (i.e. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) directed by William Wyler) due to the involvement of that war's veterans and the subsequent liberal political climate. Norden then, equally persuasively, reveals how the 'cold war' climate - and the Communist Witch-hunts - left many of the progressive filmmakers out in the cold in a repressive and conservative political climate. Consequently these combined events heralded the return of the one dimensional disabled character as either a "sweet innocent" or "obsessive avenger".
The book covers not only 'talkies' but silent as well; including the very earliest one reelers (with glorious titles such as: The Cripples Wedding, The Deaf-Mutes' Ball, The Legless Runner, The Little Cripple and, my favourite title, from a 1908 short titled The Paralytic's Vengeance). The fact that it is such a new book also means it covers very new films as well, such as Passion Fish, The Waterdance and The Fugitive.
Not only should disabled people buy this book, but it should be compulsory for all film makers, critics and scholars; those people who are most responsible for perpetuating and ignoring the treatment of people with disabilities in movies. I can do nothing but applaud Rutgers University Press for publishing this book as, sadly, it is as needed now as it ever has been. Though the £16.95 for the paperback (£48 for hardback!) is a little on the high side its a must.
425 words
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Review 3:
Chariot Magazine,
The Cinema of Isolation: A History of
Physical Disability In the Movies
(Rutgers University Press, £16.95)
So what do the films Coming Home, The Best Years Of Our Lives and Dr. Strangelove have in common? No, not war, but the acting out of the Oedipal Scenario for for their disabled characters. In Norden's view the complete history of the representation of physical disability in cinema is the constant enactment of such a scenario. Me thinks not!
Thankfully though, Norden manages to control his psychoanalytical bent right up until the last five pages of this otherwise informative, intelligent and highly readable book. Prior to the escape of Freud upon this study Norden expertly reveals the true extent of the ignorance, stupidity and intolerance of filmmakers towards the physically disabled in a style that is both academic and anecdotal; commensurately detailed yet readable, and educational without being self-righteous.
The scope of films discussed and viewed by Norden in The Cinema of Isolation is bewildering, whilst never being executed superficially: the earliest silent one reelers (A Deaf Mute Recitation released in 1902) to the latest blockbusters (the 1993 films The Waterdance and Passion Fish for example) are detailed and analysed for their hidden agenda and normalising - and thus anti-disabled - messages.
But this book is not just the creation of a disablist taxonomy, nor a list of politically incorrect films; Norden never simply says "this is bad", he strips down the images to their bare essentials to support his argument with the degree of eclecticism that one would expect from a Professor of Film at a New England University. For example, the way in which Norden proposes that images of disability improved immediately after World War II (due to the involvement of that war's veterans) and that the subsequent rejection by Hollywood of those progressive filmmakers, due to the Communist Witch-hunts, lead to a rapid re-degeneration of disability imagery into one-dimensional stereotypes, is so convincing as to be virtually indisputable. The use of contemporary, and retrospective, biography and autobiography, and current leading academic theory and practice, make the arguments - and the book in general - a must for both filmmakers and critics.
That there is not one current mainstream critic who has any idea about the politics or realities of physical disability (as they do about Gay or Black issues) shows the importance, and need, for this publication. There have been other publications about disability imagery but they have tended to be either statistical or simplistic in the extreme, and always prescriptive; unlike Norden.
One of the bonus's of Norden's examination of disability imagery is that he tries to be positive, and constructive, where all others have been negative; Norden feels that, for example, My Left Foot shows a new found sensitivity (despite my ardent disagreement with him: as, for me, all images of disability can be seen negatively because we live in a culture that sees disability as intrinsically negative) and one cannot help but welcome the move to take control of the image positively; even if it is only the interpretation.
Images matter as they are the way in which most of us gain our knowledge of 'Others'. And, as such, Norden's study of the images that have helped create what is seen as the true lives of people with disabilities is as necessary now as it ever has been. Norden's first 318 pages (but not the last five) should be compulsory reading for all who are interested in film and disability, and society, in general. Professor Norden explodes the myths about the disability experience, myths that have for so long be used to keep us marginalised, by detonating the fallacies that have for a century resided peacefully in our cinemas.
605 words (or 475 words if cut)
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Review 4:
Disability and Society, Vol. 10, No 1, 1995 (March)
The Cinema Of Isolation: A History of Disability in the Movies
Professor Martin F. Norden, 1994
New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press
370 pp, $48.00 (hardback), $16.95 (paperback)
This is, by far, the best investigation in to how cinema represents disabled people; its superiority to both the recent (1993) Colin Barnes/BCODP publication (Disabling Imagery and the Media, Ryburn) and Cumberbatch & Negrine's book (Images of Disability On Television, Routledge) is immediately apparent. To be fair to those two books their remit is slightly narrower, but they never rise above the superficial, at best, and are deeply reductive, at worst. Norden's book, on the other hand, shows a grasp of the complexity of disability imagery that is both sophisticated and intelligent, and it is firmly rooted in an astutely academic ability that has combined analysis with clarity.
Norden classifies disability representations in Hollywood films - the book is the history of disability in American cinema predominantly, with a slight nod to other English speaking cinema from the 1970s onwards - as being in three distinct eras: 1900 - 1940 is characterised as portraying the disabled in an "exploitative [and] freakish" manner, whilst portraying the disabled as "stick figures...freakish beasts [and] pitiable objects"; from 1940 -1970 it changes to being more "explority" with disabled characters "overcoming" great odds whilst taking "centre stage; and finally, from 1970 to present day, when the disabled are portrayed as "fighting for social justice [whilst] sexually expressing one's self, and simply getting on with day-to-day life" (all p.314). The supportive documentation that Norden uses to reach such a conclusion is both wide and considerable, using a wide range of both academic and populist sources.
Although Norden acknowledges that an all inclusive theory of disability imagery is highly reductive and easily disproved by exceptions (exceptions which he himself provides and acknowledges) he, never the less, provides considerable source material, and analytical dissection, to be highly persuasive in his argument. For example: when he argues that McCarthyism - and its subsequent witch-hunts - was a key reason for the deterioration in disability imagery, after the comparatively positive imagery in the immediate post-WWII era, one cannot help but question it. But once Norden details the complexity of the who, what and when, of the positive imagery (say of The Best Years Of Our Lives 1946) with who was blacklisted (with its concomitant self censorship of any remaining liberalist philosophy) one is quickly persuaded.
The detailed knowledge of individual actors, directors and studio, filmographies is expertly used to reveal not only the history of disabling imagery but also its genealogy. The way in which individuals are shown to have had significant input in to films thirty or forty years apart is as starling as it is revealing. The comprehensive nature of the book, it examines all the films one could think of (and many one couldn't), gives the book a depth that leaves one in awe. Norden informs us of, and then uses, film history itself to enable a greater understanding of the specificity of filmic representations of people with disabilities (and never in a patronising manner). The books use of film history, combined with a clear sociological perspective - which pulls in details of both contemporary social and legislative realities for disabled people in the United States - makes this book's analysis irresistible and compelling.
One of the most refreshing aspects of the book is its desire to be positive where all others (including myself) have been negative and highly prescriptive (Barnes' booklet is a prime example) which makes Norden's a perspective that perceives, and deals with, the fact that there is no point in constantly arguing that any given film is not as should be, because it is as it is. Norden's perspective identifies problem areas whilst trying to be constructive at the same time. Though, from my point of view, this does lead Norden to praise films that I consider deeply suspect (i.e. My Left Foot); interestingly enough it also leads him to condemn films that I consider to be highly commendable (i.e. The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter).
On many occasions Norden's analysis is highly detailed (the dissection of specific scenes in various movies is expertly done, and something that should be done by all of us much more often) and combined with careful generalisations to give an insight into disabling imagery that has so far not been achieved anywhere else. One of the recurring devices that Norden examines, across the whole history of cinema, is the Point of View (POV) shot - an image that appear to be the perspective of a particular character - and it is examined in order to see how it is used to empower or dis-empower that (disabled) character; and although, again, I do not always agree with him, it is a timely (and needy) development in the analysis of how we are represented.
Norden's awareness of gender - the ingenue/sweet innocent as female and the obsessive avenger and disabled superstar as male - and class - characters' portrayed as wealthy in order to de-politicise questions of access and isolation - is also something that is quite unusual in such a works as this. Despite the fact that the book is deeply involving and highly accessible Norden does, occasionally, slip into an essentialist psychoanalytical reductionism; which is a shame as his psychoanalytic conclusions - the last five pages alone - are very relevant and could so easily have been arrived at by sound, and clearer, cultural analysis (any of Richard Dyer's work on Gay representations is a good example) without resorting to the highly normative (and as such anti-disability) discipline of Freud's suspect scribblings.
I am not particularly enamoured, or convinced, of the relevance of the title either. Norden tries to explain it early on when he writes: "[T]he general thesis guiding this book is simple: most movies have tended to isolate disabled characters from their able-bodied peers as well as each other" (p. 3). A claim I would no dispute, but it is the very fact that we are portrayed with the able-bodied - though usually in comparison - that makes the title seem more clever than accurate. The only other real criticism I have - apart from minor ones based on our undoubted differences of opinion - of the book, and Norden for that matter, is his unqualified acceptance of normalisation (in its many more cultural guises). If Norden had been more critical of normalisation (a philosophy that is at the root of what is considered positive representations by almost all disability imagery writers) then he would have been more able to be critical of what are apparently good images but which are, in fact, negative as they negate those disabled people unable, or unwilling, to fulfil such roles even more than the obviously negative.
I un-reservedly recommend - insist - that all scholars of disability and film, both student and tutor, order this book now. It's eclecticism, scholarship, sophistication and sheer hard work, far outweighs any reservations that I, or any other critic, could possibly have.
1150 words
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Review 5:
Screen
Martin F. Norden, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Disability in the Movies, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, $48.00 ($16.95), xiii + 377pp.
Histories often end up as merely lists or, if we are really un-lucky, as insight in to the authors own preferences within a list. Norden's history of people with physical disabilities in the movies - predominantly Hollywood movies, until its later stages - is, thankfully, much more. It has an insight into its subject that goes far beyond any personal preferences and, as a list of movies that have a character with a disability in them, it is so comprehensive that it makes one wonder at the extend (and endurance) of the negativity that people with disabilities have had to endure.
When I started to explore images of the abnormal, the deformed and impaired, body most people seemed to think that there was so few in the movies that it was a very limited area of research; Norden carefully, and in explicit detail, puts that naive idea finally to rest. Images of the crippled, the maimed, the disfigured and the handicapped abound. Norden details their arrival in the era of early cinema - the era of Vitagraph, Biograph and Pathe fifty second movies - right up to the latest mainstream and independent productions, for example Sommersby and The Waterdance. Such stereotypes as the 'sweet innocent' (almost always female), the 'obsessive avenger' and 'saintly sage', (both almost always male) are detailed and analysed to reveal a history of oppressive imagery that has for so long been either denied or justified as being realistic.
D,W. Griffith, Tod Browning and Rex Ingram come in for special attention when considering the genesis of so much defamatory imagery and Norden's use of archive material and movie personnel recollections (auto/biography and contemporary star interviews etc.), to make his argument is not only stunning, and highly rewarding, but convincing. And amongst this skilful use of the personal the genealogy of disability imagery is placed in both its specific and general socio-political/economic domain to reveal the complex nature of how disability is seen and re-presented to (and by) society. Rex Ingram, for example, utilised many disabled people in his films - eventually being sacked by his studio for having "put every hunchback and dwarf in Hollywood on Universal's pay-role" (p.71) - not only because they brought in the audiences (and profit) but also because he felt they acted as his lucky charms! (The initial chapters are a must for any Chaplin fan for the light, sociologically speaking, that they throw - inadvertently - upon the popularity and social specificities of his "tramp" character.)
Norden's strong point is in letting the details of a film's plot speak for itself (as so often their ignorance and stupidity is self-evidently derogatory) but also he regularly comes up trumps with a much more detailed analysis of filmic specificities; the deconstruction of individual scenes, in The Big Parade or Coming Home for example, is not only an advance in Disability Studies - however common they may be in Gay or Black cinema - but also an improvement upon all the other recent publications on the representation of people with disabilities.
The transition from the obsession with freaks (i.e. Browning's 1932 production of Freaks) to a more liberal atmosphere in the 1940s (The Best Years Of Our Lives in 1946) is examined closely to reveal the way in which the returning veterans (into Hollywood and the United States in general) of World War II (won by a wheelchair using president: Roosevelt) managed to change the overtly ableist (anti-disabled) images to ones that were both more realistic and humanitarian. The sociological bent that informs this book is most evident when the author tries to explain, and validate, various eras' perceptions of disability on film by recourse to their contemporary social and legislative discourse. Norden's best chapter follows on from here when he examines how the images reverted to the stereotypical with the rise of the House Committee on Un-American Activities under Senator McCarthy; Norden details the filmographies of those people largely responsible for the improved images to show that they were the same writers, actors, directors (etc.) jailed and blacklisted by that witch-hunt.
The Cinema of Isolation is a must for all movie critics and academics if they wish to do their research with any degree of eclecticism, and compulsory for any one interested in the elevation of people with disabilities to full human rights. But it will also be of great interest to the movie buff due to its revelation of the personal disabilities of individual stars and movie creators: Herbert Marshall (an amputee), Lon Chaney (fluent in sign-language), Lionel Barrymore (arthritis forced him to make the entire Dr. Kildare series of films, as Dr. Gillespie, using a wheelchair) and Harold Lloyd (who used a rubber hand glove to disguise the fact that he had missing fingers), to name but a few. But one of the most startling aspects of the book is its desire to be positive where so many disabled writers (including myself) have been derogatory (Norden's praise of My Left Foot is a good example); and as much as I disagree with his readings of individual films I cannot doubt his conviction.
The only real criticism I have of this book is its bent towards psychoanalytical theory - which is tightly kept under control until the last five pages - and, as such, Norden's assertion that all representations of people with disabilities are in some sense variations on the "Oedipal scenario". The only thing that can be safely said is that they are based upon a normalising ideology that despises non-conformity as much in body as in spirit, and that psychoanalysis is indicative of that ideology and is, as such, anti-disabled. The book's title - based upon the idea that disabled characters are always isolated from their peers and fellow travellers - I find a little irksome, as we are not so much portrayed in isolation (the book proves this) as in comparison and, ethnocentrically speaking, consequently as inferior due to some apparent lack: a lack of normality. Despite these minor criticism this is a timely and rewarding book which deserves a much wider readership than it will probably get.
1019 words