Reelabilities: NY Disabilities Film Festival (Documentaries)

I’m learning more to listen to my own rhythms.

— Jacks McNamara, Crooked Beauty

“In the darkest and most abjected places, there’s still beauty,” says Jacks McNamara. The screen shows dark trees and gray waters, as she goes on, “And beauty is not something that arises from everything being perfect and orderly and straight. Beauty is the thing that manages to grow in the cracks in the sidewalk and manages to struggle out between the buildings and between the barbed wire.” If McNamara’s observation isn’t precisely soothing, it’s persuasive, helped by a series of stark and lovely images: weedy grasses from low angles, cinder block walls and windows.

This is the sort of poetry offered throughout Crooked Beauty, Ken Paul Rosenthalʼs documentary on McNamara’s struggle with bipolar disorder. Sometimes illustrative and sometimes juxtaposed, the visual and audio tracks guide you through a dauntingly complex life experience, from childhood abuse and despair through diagnosis and treatment (what McNamara terms her “interface with the mental health profession”), on to self-understanding and an appreciation of difference.

It’s difference that shapes the lives of those with disabilities, as they’re separated from those without, as they are also judged, categorized, and frequently feared. As much as McNamara wanted at first to fit in, to feel like she imagined others felt, now, she has come to respect difference, to see in it beauty and resilience.

And in this, McNamara is not alone. One of several documentaries in this year’s Reelabilities Film Festival, which screened in New York City from February 3-8, Crooked Beauty translates the experiences of McNamara, an artist and writer and founder of the Icarus Project. After years of diagnoses and medications and therapies, she says, “A lot of us that get labeled bipolar… have these really kaleidoscopic tendencies in our brains, where we can’t filter out as much of the world as a lot of people do. We have 500 antennas out in every direction all at once and we’re bringing in tons and tons of information on all these channels.”

Other documentaries in the 2011 Festival represent other sorts of “kaleidoscopic tendencies.” Ofir Trainin’s Wandering Eyes traces another passage through mania and depression. Onetime frontman for the band Algiers, Gavriel Balachsan suffered a series of breakdowns in 2004, before landing in an institution. Much of the film is comprised of his songs and also self-documenting on video between 2006 and 2008, after-hours confessions and qualms, his face closely framed in greenish night-vision (“This is a discussion between Gavriel and Gavriel, eye to eye, eye to eye”).

Gavriel is helped through his recovery by his younger brother Pinchas: in an early scene Pinchas sits outside in sunshine, his fiancée in his lap, the very picture of a regular masculinity, while Gavriel stands to the side in a doorway, smoking a cigarette as he describes what you’re looking at: “It’s such a bummer,” he says, “It’s something else a parallel universe.” Using art to find his way, Gavriel grapples with setbacks and successes, fears and his religious faith. It’s frustrating, he says, because he knows the rhythm of life, that each manic episode is followed by a devastating low point, and he must turn that knowledge into a means of coping, of appreciating his difference as well as reshaping it.

Paul Nadler presents his own journey in Braindamadj’d … Take II. When he’s injured in a car accident in 1994, Nadler’s doctors tell his father parents that he has just a 5% chance to recover. Over a series of photos and brief clips showing Nadler in earlier days — his career as a video producer at Montreal’s MusiquePlus — friends and family members describe his energy and ambition, as well as his occasional abrasiveness. As he comes back, Nadler confronts not only his current condition, but also who he was. “I have no idea what actually is due to the TBI [traumatic brain injury] and what is me,” he says, “I really don’t know and I think there is no way to tell.”

The film approximates his self-image. Repeatedly, he’ll end an interview segment by forgetting the question, and when he does maintain focus, he’s volatile, alternately funny and angry. Home videos show his mother’s difficulties with him at home during his rehabilitation, warpy frames suggest his view of the world now turned strange and hard to navigate. “He’s still abrupt,” says his cousin Daphnee, “He still speaks his mind.” As much as Nadler remains a performer, aggressive and self-adjusting, his film illustrates his efforts to know that mind as he speaks it.

Richard Butchins’ The Last American Freak Show offers still another view of speaking out, as well as sorting through what needs to be said to whom. Notoriously rejected by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2008, the documentary follows a traveling freak show. The performers, says organizer Samantha X, must be “genuine freaks: you need to be born with the deformity,” and range from Jackie the Half Woman to Ken the Elephant Man. While Butchins interviews the freaks and comments on the show (initially, he sighs, it’s “a complete shambles, the band is out of time and out of tune, there’s no stage, there’s no PA and the troops seem totally unrehearsed”), the film offers footage of the actual road trip — in a 20-year-old school bus refitted to run on waste vegetable oil.

The question that predictably frames the show and the film has to do with exploitation. As Deirdre (a.k.a., Dame Demure the dancing dwarf) puts it, “I guess it is kind of stereotypical” that she dances and performs stunts on stage. “I’m sure if I interact with the dwarf community, they would hate me for sending such a bad image.” Jackie reflects, “All forms of entertainment are exploitation, even the good-looking actresses, they’re all exploiting themselves.” Over home video footage of her performing as a child, she adds, “It wouldn’t be any more degrading if I was singing or doing cartwheels in the freak show… People look at me and are like, ‘That’s horrible,’ but I’ve always been like this.”

The show changes: the bits are refined, the rationales shift, and performers come and go. Erik, a giant they scout in Eugene, Oregon, joins for a few stops, then leaves, observing, “They think that they’re better than everybody else… When I’m off the stage, I can literally pull a whole community together” (Butchins adds as Erik ducks to exit through a doorway, “It’s clear that he’s had enough and I don’t think that we’ll be seeing him again”). And Butchins reflects on his own identification (his arm is paralyzed following childhood polio) and work on the film, he too wonders about the freak show’s exploitation. “The best thing that can be said about it is that it gives people like Ken and Jason [the Black Scorpion] a chance to be stared at on their own terms,” the filmmaker says.

The Last American Freak Show, like the other documentaries in this year’s Reelabilities, doesn’t quite define those terms. Neither does it judge them. Instead, it makes the case that however different disabilities may look (or not look), they are functions of culture and politics, just as abilities are.