Vision Portraits
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Viewing Disability
“Do disability differently,” disability activist and media critic Lawrence Carter-Long begs in his irreverent survey of the state of disability on film for the recent manifesto issue of Film Quarterly. Defending genre curios such as the 1970s exploitation thriller Mr. No Legs, about a drug ring enforcer with shotguns built into his wheelchair, as more interesting than treacle like the Andrew Garfield–starring biopic Breathe, about British independent-living activist Robin Cavendish, Carter-Long points to a common complaint within disability circles about the narrow frames of reference through which disabled people tend to be seen. Disability movies, the thinking goes, too often […]
by Angelo Muredda on Oct 28, 2020 -
“If You Really Want To Make Something You Get Creative”: Experimental Documentarians Talk About Thinking Outside The Box At IFP Week 2019
Documentaries don’t have to play by the rules of fiction films. Take a non-fiction hit like Won’t You Be My Neighbor?: It doesn’t merely tell a linear story so much as jump around subjects, with Fred Rogers’ life as a basic foundation. (Compare/contrast with the forthcoming Tom Hanks-starrer A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, which zeroes in on one slice of his career.) But some documentaries go way out there. The IFP 2019 panel “Out of Bounds” rounded up four creatives — two filmmakers, one editor, and a producer tasked with helping people like them find funding and distribution — […]
by Matt Prigge on Sep 20, 2019 -
Rodney Evans on Documenting His Own, and Others’, Loss of Sight in Vision Portraits
Rodney Evans’ Vision Portraits works his experience of gradually losing his eyesight while continuing to make films into a personal documentary that also considers the larger implications of this experience for artists and minorities. The film is structured around Evans’ own experience: he shows himself on film sets, dealing with the aftermath of falling onto an Amtrak train platform in New Jersey and traveling to Berlin to get surgery. But in between, he also profiles three artists who are largely or entirely blind: photographer John Dugdale, dancer Kayla Hamilton and writer Ryan Knighton. Dugdale makes the biggest impression; despite losing […]
by Steven Erickson on Aug 6, 2019
