Disability in Animation

Joeita Gupta:
I am Joeita Gupta, and this is The Pulse. Let's talk about animation. No, I'm not just talking about cartoons. In the last 20 years, the animated film genre has exploded, spawning a wide range of creative work and a field of academic inquiry in its own right. Animation can subvert norms, introduce unexplored subjectivities, and push the envelope by immersing audiences in alternative worlds. Animation can be a game changer for people with disabilities, inviting audiences to rethink ableist perceptions, and even to consider the role of our senses in spectatorship. By presenting impossible worlds animation can cause ripple effects in how we come to understand our embodied experiences and even pave the way for a disability-inclusive world. Today we discuss crip animation. It's time to put your finger on The Pulse.
Hello, and welcome to The Pulse on AMI-audio. I'm Joeita Gupta, and I'm joining you as I always do, from Accessible Media Studios in Toronto. My guest today is someone that I have been itching to have on the program for a really long time. Slava Greenberg is faculty member in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Slava is the author of Animated Film and Disability: Cripping Spectatorship. Slava, hello and welcome to The Pulse. I am so overjoyed you could finally join us today.

Slava Greenberg:
Thank you so much for having me. And yeah, it took a while and across different time spans and timelines and time differences and we made it.

Joeita Gupta:
We finally made it. I think people don't realize that we've been trying to organize this interview for almost... I want to say eight months. And I feel that in that time you have moved... How many times would you say you moved, Slava?

Slava Greenberg:
Probably over eight places and apartments.

Joeita Gupta:
Oh my goodness. Well, listen, I am really happy you could join us to talk about this fantastic book, Animated Film and Disability. Your book title references Cripping Spectatorship. For those of us who don't really think about spectatorship as something that is the subject of academic inquiry, what do you mean when you say cripping spectatorship?

Slava Greenberg:
Well, first thank you for the question and for having me. And spectatorship is actually quite the prominent topic within some studies and within some theory. And one of it's more timely a divergence or going deeper into thinking across and just hopping over to the end, but is also listenership. And it is also part of, a lot of times we speak of spectatorship as all-encompassing and also including other senses and thinking about spectatorship as involving all senses of our bodies and not specifically thinking about viewership as in looking at an image, but perceiving the entirety that film has to offer through different parts of our bodies and all of them at once.
And within film theory, thinking about spectatorship did start with metaphors of the eye and thinking about viewership as a central aspect of this larger experience. And some of the first theories have been around the gaze and thinking about the male gaze were the first steps of film theory about thinking about the relationship between the audience members as part of the experience and not just filmmakers and producers and shown critics. So that changed the perspective. And now here we are several decades later and I'm offering to think about that gaze in broader terms and incorporate within film theory thinking about crip spectatorship and what that may offer film theory and film history at large.

Joeita Gupta:
So what is crip spectatorship? Because when I think about spectatorship, my entry into this is really reading a Bell Hooks' seminal essay about the oppositional gaze and how for audiences of Black women, what their exposure to cinema was like and how they would often critique what they saw on the screen. Or it would be very intentional in switching off their critique to enjoy cinema that didn't necessarily depict realistically the lives of Black women. So that's where I come to this is thinking through Bell hooks and some of their work around the oppositional gaze. But your book is very unafraid in putting right in the title, Cripping Spectatorship. So what are you trying to say with that?

Slava Greenberg:
So I think that Bell Hooks is an amazing starting point and is exactly where this book is politically. And it does come from the oppositional gaze and thinking about the oppositional ways of looking at mainstream cinema. And if we're thinking about Bell Hook's friends and family members who she talks about and their different types of spectator ships and their ways of saving certain films and TV shows to be able to enjoy being represented. So here I'm demanding a little bit more than that and going even further. And that's why I do begin with mainstream cinema and thinking about how it constructs the ableist gaze in ways that are very similar to the white gaze and to the male gaze and the way that they are embedded within the cinematic apparatus and in the way that we are thinking about what cinema is and who is supposed to accommodate.
And then I offer moving away from that for a moment and thinking about or rather dreaming about a different type of world and going with that. And that being our demand is how crypto folks imagine lives pasts and futures and trying that being the standard for the rest of cinema largely put. So I am asking to flip the table and say okay. Now let's look at the media that allowed most freedom to crip artists express themselves, and what did they do with those means of expression and what were the things that they were passionate about? What were the ways that they imagine crip futures?
And then let's take that and then bring it into mainstream cinema and try and make cinema more similar to that. And then not just cinema, then also the movie theatres that we go to and then other ways of consuming art and culture and thinking about crip ways of being in those spaces and how those types of lived experiences are the ones that teach the rest. And obviously, in my opinion, benefit diverse types of beings in the world and inhabiting those spaces. So I think that's basically what cripping spectatorship does is seeking those types of artistic endeavours that are trying different ways, playing around with the medium, playing around with cameras, with puppets, with animated, different types of images.

Joeita Gupta:
In your book you say that it's the experience of being trans and disabled that first turn you on to animation. Why is that?

Slava Greenberg:
Well, generally just speaking, I see trans and crip experiences very much aligned regardless of inhabiting both identities separately. I also think that together we share various types of histories and experiences of medicalization, and not just that but various types of ways. But in the sense that there are different, I would say media that evoke and provoke transformative experiences for audiences. I think this is a type of connection between all three, between crip, trans and animation lies at the same transformative creative moment that invites imaginative types of futures.

Joeita Gupta:
I definitely think there are some synergies there, whether or not people within the trans communities and the disability communities are often willing to recognize the synergy, but there's such a commonality of experiences. I loved the anecdote from the book where you talk about how they put a sign up for the disability washroom and the gender-neutral washroom. It's the same space and you feel really excited by the possibilities inherent there where we have washrooms that are open to all bodies and all genders and sexuality. So I thought that was a really powerful moment in the book.
The other part of the book, and you dedicate entire chapters to them. So I'm going to ask a lot of you to distill the ideas in the book in a very short amount of time, but you talk a lot about blinding the spectator and deafening the spectator. What are those concepts meant to get us to think about?

Slava Greenberg:
Well, they're both part of the opportunities that I think disability holds for cinema, rethinking film theory as of all and centrality of certain sentences that are part of film history. And as I started saying about the gaze that has always been so central to film theory and such a... I don't know, it's like film theory from a certain period of time has almost all entirely revolved in some way or another around the gaze and about spectatorship through that lens of thinking about it as a metaphor for an eye and the screen is an eye. And then also the projector is an eye in thinking around these types of metaphors and the types of looks between the first through Laura Mulvey, the female gaze in the theatre, and then the gaze on screen and that dynamic between audience members and screens. And that holds these power relations that then Bell Hooks went so much deeper into and explaining those types of dynamics where also audience members have the power to reject images, imagine them otherwise, and then also recreate them in other ways in their own lives.
And it's a much more nuanced dynamic, but thinking about this type of spectatorship and doing something about provoking spectators to rethink that primacy of vision that they think that cinema is all about. And then what happens when they are deprived of that privilege that they hold dear such as interpreting the world through sight. So there are films that intentionally disorient spectators by depriving either some or all visual stimuli in varied ways. So not in the stereotypical type of blackening or darkening the screen as the stereotype of what a blind person may see. And then going a little bit into varied aspects of what that may be. So in some aspects, those types of films blur some of the screen in some parts of it in varied ways across the same film. Other films play around the dynamic of having mental visual images that are aroused by either the person's old mental state of mind or anything in their surroundings.
So disorienting the spectators in the way that they are completely reliant on the voiceover of that. Normally it's the disabled person speaking and that authority has to lead and guide audience members through and regardless of whether they are blind or they are not, and whether they're visually impaired or what their status is, they are in the same way blinded through that experience and are equally reliant on that voice because whether they see or do not see the images on screen, those are there to disorient and sometimes distract and interfere with what you're supposed to be listening for and listening to in the nuances of the voice and the narrative in that film. So that was an example of Black Sun, but also there are other examples of animated films that disorients spectators and in that sense blind them in the way that they shift the perspective of the world and they show that knowledge is not something that is translatable from a single image, but is a much more nuanced, sensual experience across time and across, of course, different sensual stimuli in different spaces.

Joeita Gupta:
Yeah. I was reading the book and I pointed out to my husband that in one of the chapters around Blinding the Spectator, there's actually a reference made to a book that deals with the experience of colorblindness. And my husband was so pleased. He completely perked up because my husband has colorblindness. And I think it was probably... He said, "I have to go check out that film." Because it was probably the first time that we'd ever encountered a film that tried to bring to the audience a sense of what it's like to live with colorblindness, for instance.
So that's what leads me to my next question. I mean, there's obviously some value, and you'll forget the understatement. There's a tremendous value for audiences to be able to decenter the role of vision and other senses in the way that you're describing when we talk about cripping spectatorship. But if you were to think about the filmmaking process, do you think there's some value in shifting the gaze and maybe making more room for the ability to tell different types of stories or even telling the same stories but in different ways, the moment we take the able-bodied idealized audience, the person for whom all these films are supposedly being made once we take that person out of the picture?

Slava Greenberg:
Those types of lessons I think would be learned from... In the first chapter I talk about three types of collaborative animated projects, and I'm thinking about, or what drove me, I think maybe is what you're asking. And I was thinking about the differences between animated films that were completely made by disabled artists normally about themselves and with them doing 100% of all the creative process, including editing, then distributing and everything, 100% first person crip animated films. And then I was thinking about films that looked like that, but were made by non-disabled artists. And then films that were placed in the middle that were collaborative projects sometimes between different disabled artists in ways that we're also thinking about being reflexive toward that collaborative process and involving the audience in the type of dynamic that involves collaborative projects.
And we're a little bit more thinking out loud about these types of collaborations. And I think what made me think about this in a more, I think precise way was after a screening of a documentary called The Sign for Love, an Israeli documentary made in collaboration between a deaf artist and a hearing director about his life and the process of him starting a family and having a kid. And then in the Q&A, the hearing director was speaking about the first rough cut of the film was all made without any edit sound because she was thinking about the fact that all the audience is going to be, or most of the audience is probably going to be deaf people. And she was thinking about how that would look for them and for the film to be visually tangible and not having to rely on the audio at all. So the voices are not crucial for the understanding of the film and that was how she edited it.
And then she showed it to diverse audience members, both to hearing and deaf people. And the feedback that she got from hearing people is that they needed the added musical or type of music accompanying some of the scenes because for them to have empathy, the type of sounds that they were used to from more mainstream films with some music added to them, was to them lacking in some way. And that was something that stood out to them. So she and the other deaf director decided that they will add some music to the film to be able to appeal to the hearing audience as well.
And I thought that that was a good solution to the problem, but also I think it shed light to the different needs of different communities in the audience and thinking about maybe the same type of attention being given to different types of potential spectators and leaving behind that boring stance of the general audience that also limits the way that films are imagined. And then screenings are imagined. And then in turn, theatres are designed and this whole thing. So just by flipping the perspective a little bit, we then open ourselves to newer possibilities of making film making animated film.

Joeita Gupta:
Well, Slava, I'm just looking at the time here, we're almost out of time, but you did have a short excerpt from the book you wanted to read. Why don't you go ahead and set that up for us and give us a bit of a reading.

Slava Greenberg:
Animated Film and Disability eliminates new methods of accommodating spectatorship for diverse body minds. It then describes the innovative aesthetics forms that they create. The book uses animation, a popular and accessible cinematic format to explore alternative bodily spectatorship in a developing cinematic expression. Crip animation relies on disabled subjectivities both in form and in content, and allows for a fresh outlook on the world from the margins. By immersing viewers in a temporary alternative body experience, this emergent form of cinematography introduces an entirely new type of spectatorship and felony history. This has transformative potential not only for films about disability, but also for mainstream cinema. And I think you read the exact same paragraph as well.

Joeita Gupta:
I think so. Slava, thank you very much for joining me today. It was a really interesting book to read. I'm going to come right out and say it. I'm nowhere near as smart as you are, so it took me a couple of times to go through it and I went through it a couple of times. It was a really fascinating book. Thank you so much for speaking to me about it, and thank you so much for your contribution to this important work around spectatorship. I think we all benefit tremendously from your scholarship. So thank you again for joining me today.

Joeita Gupta:
Thank you so much for having me and for your wonderful podcast and for all your activism for the community. I appreciate you and for having me here.

Joeita Gupta:
That was Slava Greenberg from the University of Amsterdam talking about their new book, Animated Film and Disability: Cripping Spectatorship. Well, folks, this is all the time we have for today. If you have any feedback about the show, you can always write to us at feedback@aami.ca. Give us a call at 1-866-509-4545. And don't forget to leave permission to play the audio on the program so we can play your voicemail if we get one. You're also able to find us on Twitter now X, you can look for @AMIAUDIO and use the hashtag Pulse AMI to get in touch with us that way. The videographer today has been Jay Kemp. Sitting in for Marc Aflalo, our technical producer today is Jordan Steeves, and I've been your host, Joeita Gupta. Thank you so much for listening. Enjoy the rest of your day.