As part of the Cymru Anabl project (read more here), staff from the Screen and Sound Archive have been reflecting on a number of items in the film and video collections that relate to disability or are made by disabled people.
Many of these films have been digitised as part of previous BFI Screen Heritage projects, such as Unlocking Our Film Heritage. Thanks to that project, some of the archive’s films are therefore easily available online to watch – for free! - on the BFI Player.
As we developed the Cymru Anabl project it became clear that we could collaborate with the National Library of Wales’ volunteers by using some items from this collection of films.
A simple task was designed to explore how present-day users feel about past films. Among those who took part were individuals who also identified themselves as disabled, meaning they brought their lived experience with them to this task and the films.
All that volunteers had to do was watch a handful of films and offer us a personal response to them. There were three questions for the volunteers to think about as they watched the films, with the intention of prompting consideration of the films’ content, their production context, and the way in which they’re presented. Of course, the volunteers were also welcome to share any additional feedback which wasn’t directly linked to these questions.
There were five films available for the volunteers to watch (they weren’t required to watch all of them).
The Opening of Prince of Wales Hospital at Cardiff (1918) is, as the title suggests, a record of the opening of ‘The Prince of Wales Hospital for Limbless Sailors and Soldiers, Wales and Monmouthshire’. It documents dozens of former soldiers and sailors showing their injuries and the prosthetic limbs that they now use. We also see a number of dignitaries who attend the opening and who get to see some of the workings of the hospital.
This is a BDDA Film Taken By Members of the Cardiff Branch (1935) documents members of the ‘Cardiff Deaf Club’ on a number of excursions to places such as Weston-Super-Mare and the Elan Valley. The film includes intertitles which use finger-spelling rather than on-screen text.
Call Us By Name (1968), which celebrates the RNIB’s centenary, was directed by Bernice Rubens, the famous author and only Welsh winner of the Booker Prize. In the film a number of blind people, of all ages, share their experiences of living in a ‘seeing’ world and how the RNIB supports them to develop their skills.
J.G: John Ivor Golding (1973) was directed by Neil White, in his final year at Newport Film School. It’s a portrait of John Ivor Golding, a local character who lived in Whitchurch psychiatric hospital. It’s an experimental film in its form, which puts focus on Golding’s unreliable storytelling, and it often presents a dark portrait of life at the time.
Y Gŵr o Gwr Yr Aran (1978) is a portrait of Frank Letch, who was born without arms, and his life in Llanuwchlyn, having moved there from England and learned Welsh fluently. The film is an extended interview with Frank, who discusses his attitude toward life, his condition and his relationship with the Welsh language.
Overall, the volunteers enjoyed the film and considered them to be positive portraits of disability. Particularly, they were all agreed that the fact that these films platformed the voices of disabled people directly was vital to this positivity. For example, hearing first-hand accounts from blind people in Call Us By Name was striking and positive for the volunteers. In a similar vein, the volunteers were also hopeful that a film made now similar to The Opening of Prince of Wales... would ensure that the voices of the hospital patients were heard.
A film that stood out from the selection was J.G, a comparatively dark film with difficult content. Some of the volunteers chose not to watch this film because of the content advice provided by us about the film, and those that did watch the film were surprised that no content warning was provided on the BFI Player. This was important feedback for us and underlined the importance of recent work undertaken by some staff of the department in this field.
One volunteer noted something that was common to a number of the films, namely the emphasis on the need to be productive, for example through a focus on jobs and work. For this volunteer, this was notable of an unfair attitude often taken toward disabled people, even among otherwise positive portraits. This reveals the importance of the social model of disability, which recognises that social barriers – such as inaccessible workplaces – are what need addressing, rather than the productivity of people disabled by those very barriers.
Beyond the films themselves, some volunteers noticed the metadata which accompanied the films. As with the above suggestion that content alerts should be included as metadata where appropriate, other suggestions from the volunteers – such as creating audio versions of metadata – were also useful feedback for us. There was also a comment that subtitles should of good quality to ensure accessibility, with the archival subtitles on Y Gŵr o Gwr yr Aran being an example of inferior subtitles.
The feedback we received from the volunteers about this set of films was very useful to us in terms of developing the wider project outputs, including creating priorities for work in this field that will need to happen in future. Special thanks, then, to Gwyneth, Eilir, Betsan, Rachel Ann, Shani and Sara for their contribution to the task and the project!
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