Internationales Kurzfilmfestival ,,Wie wir leben'' 

Munich  Disability Film Festival    -  2001  -  Lecture - Paul Darke PhD.

 

I look at film ( as with genetics) in two ways: the Medical Model and the Social Model.  The model I work to is the Social Model primarily and the fundamental basis of the Social Model is that there is no such thing as people with disabilities.  We, disabled people in general, are, as such, disabled only by external factors: i.e., it is not us who are disabled it is society that is disabling and oppressive.  The Medical Model, on the other hand, advances the ideology that it is us (within and on the individual) who are disabled as a pathological reality; it places the problem within our body and our minds.  Thus, it ‘pathologies’ disability as a personal issue.  The Medical Model puts the whole problem onto, and within, the individual; so, equally, it individualises disability: ‘….the reason that I can’t get into a building is because I can’t walk if it has steps’.  Of course it’s not my problem it has steps it’s the buildings and the ideology of a culture which excludes others in such a way; it is a construct, it is a social factor.  

 

So, it is society disabling me.  I don’t have a problem, it is not me with a problem, it is society.  Thus, the Social Model is a very different way of looking at things than the Medical Model would and from the interpretation normally used.  The most conventional view, the dominant view, is the Medical Model, a paradigm, or ideological nexus, that looks upon disability as a personal tragedy.  Whereas in the Social Model ‘disability’ is social oppression: it is not a tragedy that I can not walk but what is a social fact is that society create things that oppress me, excludes me, and disabled people. 

 

Two of the writers in England who are mainly responsible for this in England are Michael Oliver and Colin Barnes.  They have recently written a book called Social Policy and Disability and this reduces these models even further so that the Social Model is about, at its basest, identifying social exclusion.  Thus, the aim is to achieve, through the application of the Social Model inclusion as opposed to the more insidiously normalisation ideology of integration.

 

If you look at the Social Model in detail you can see that it talks about lack of education - a lot of disabled people don’t do well in society because we are uneducated and, as such, it is not because we are disabled it is because society has excluded us.  The Social Model reveals that discrimination is disability not that we are impaired – it reveals such issues and realities to be social factors not pathologically related to the nature of an impaired body.  In employment we suffer discrimination, we get segregated services, we live in poverty and endure inequality – these, by the application of the Social Model, are revealed to be social constructions unrelated to the pathological nature of impairment.

 

The Social Model talks about three key areas of discrimination: institutional - that’s like government, benefits things, an educational system that creates different education for us from them - that’s institutional.  Environmental, physical barriers that exclude us: steps; lack of lifts; and loads of other kinds of barriers.  Then there is attitudinal – people’s attitudes towards the disabled that are constructed socially and reinforced by socio-cultural/medical factors such genetics.

 

The biggest problem the Social Model identifies for us is the hegemony of the Medical Model; the paradigm that places everything within us, in me, when, in fact, disability is a political issue.  It is not a personal issue.  The application of the Social Model is how I look at films; by applying the Social Model to see what model(s) any given film is using and seeing what it is saying.  Is everybody fairly clear on that?  Any questions?  You can ask questions at any time.  It is not me, the disabled, who have to change, it is society and that’s my, and disabled people’s, right.

 

So, the Social Model is about identifying what is the true cause of disability, it’s not that I can’t walk it’s that society consciously created barriers that exclude me.  So, what the Social Model identifies is the social exclusion of us. We still have impairments and that’s the difference: there is disability - social exclusion - and then there’s impairment - which is that I can’t walk.  To some extent a very rigid interpretation of impairment is that the two (disability and impairment) have nothing to do with one another; they are totally unrelated.  

 

The Medical Model on the other hand sees disability as an individual thing and as such it’s the enemy.  It objectifies us it makes us pathologically aberrant.  It individualises what is a social problem and it creates systems and structures that oppress us.  For example, social workers oppress us as they are the gatekeepers to services whilst they do not deal with disability.  So, society, as part of its oppression and discrimination of us, sets up special schools, therapists, doctors and our lives are dominated by these people in a socially disabling way which is not to do with our impairment.  A good example of that in England is that if you are disabled you go to the doctor every three months even if there is nothing wrong with you and they still do it, pointless, except as a form of control and oppression.

 

 Is everybody clear on the differences of the models? Medical Social: if my doctor says I can’t walk that’s about my impairment it not about my disability.  Disability - I have a friend who says use the double ‘D’: if you are going to use the word disabled see if you can replace it with the word discrimination.  If you can you are using disability in the correct, Social Model Way.

 

I recognise that we are not there yet.  I may go and see my doctor but that’s due to my impairment not because of my disability.  That is the distinction between the two words – impairment / disability - which is vitally important.  Whereas, for the medical profession, it is all one thing: ‘disability’.  The distinction is that if I need to see a doctor I need to see a doctor about my impairment not because of my disability.  My disability is the fact that the doctor insists on seeing me every three months un-necessarily.  The need to control and regulate the impaired is always about the profession not the person - all I ever wanted to do was get in a wheelchair, give me a wheelchair and I was happy.

 

We have impairments and that’s what the individual thing is, we are all different in that respect.  But we all experience social discrimination, that is the collective aspect of the Social Model.  

 

Any other questions on that?   The Social Model is the way I look at what I see; I am going to use that model from now on when looking at films and how they reinforce the pathologising nature of genetics to marginalise disabled people even more that ever.

 

Perspectives on disability: way of looking at disability.  The argument is the Social Model argues, as with most progressive ideas, that it is right the model, the Medical Model is wrong.  The Social Model recognises that disability is a social discrimination issue and then there are also the impairments of individuals.  Alternatively, the Medical Model pathologises the whole kit and caboodle of impairment and disability.

 

Anyone else got any views on this?  Or am I talking bollocks to you all.  No.  I think most people agree actually.

 

Using the Social Model the aim is to identify art, and that includes cinema and images, that individualises disability; art that pathologises impairment as disability.  Art so often implies that the reason that a person is in the situation that they are in, in any given movie for example, is due to their individual pathological impairment.  For example, this slide is a painting by Millais, The Blind Girl, she is a beggar, she’s poor.  The implication is that it is a result of her blindness, whereas the Social Model would say that this is a mystifying perspective because the reason is that it’s much more complex than that and there are many other issues which are marginalised whilst pathologising impairment as disability.  Disability is universally eternally.

 

Although disability is not totally seen as an individual essence as it is in this painting by W.H. Hunt called The finding of the Saviour in the Temple.  Here with the disabled beggar, in the left-hand corner, the disability (and impairment) is resulting from sin (given the context).  A lot of the individualising stuff of disability in art comes from the main texts that dominate society and in western culture that is the bible.  There is a very interesting work on Jewish culture and how texts within that have done the same (Abrams, Judaism and Disability).  Alternatively, there is the need for the good body to compare the aberrant one to.  So you have the bad: the individual suffering the personal tragedy - for that to work effectively, you have to have the good, the ideal and the supreme and I think this sculpture by Jacob Epstein of the body is the epitome of the good body.  The type, image, of the body which artists use – fascistically – is designed to marginal different bodies (be they black, abnormal or sexually other).  So you’ve got all of these images which create the good ‘normal’ and the bad ‘abnormal’.  Even when its not conventional: these, for example, are two paintings of an different elderly women.  A fairly straight forward conventional one (Rembrandt van Rijn’s Portrait of an 83-year-old Woman) but then you get the next slide by Massy (A Grotesque Old Woman); very different interpretations of graceful old age, very different portraits of an elderly woman.  Even the titles: ‘Grotesque’, the pejorative, to ‘83-years-old’, the descriptive.   Already in the artistic world you are getting the good – normal - and the bad- abnormal.  And mark my words, this perspective is still the dominant form of artistic representation of disability. 

 

On occasion some have tried to challenge this, Frida Kahlo is one example; the work she’s done about, not necessarily the Social Model, is work that is about identifying disability from a Social Model perspective.  Even when exploring impairment / disability, she is exploring it in a personal way which isn’t reducing it to personal tragedy but is actually saying much more.  Other painters, like Paul Kosoff have done the same; there’s another artist film-maker called Steve Dwoskin who is excellent.  If you ever go and see on of his films, they are very good.  It is about exploring disability in another way, so often what the application of the Social Model would identify is that if something in exploring disability as an external social form as a social expression of discrimination that’s good.  It’s a lot more complex than that but we’ll keep it to that for now. 

 

Theatre has done the same: a lot of theatrical productions which have done the same as film, pathologising of impairment as disability, have become films: i.e., The Miracle Worker about Helen Keller.  Also, there are many others: A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, which is about a couple’s attempt to deal with a child with cerebral palsy (which was also a successful play in England, written in the 60’s, and is usually playing in a theatre in the UK all the time.  Equally, suspect is the fact that it is also often an ‘A’ level text.  The play is a deeply personal thing, where the solution of the play is the death of the child, a necessary fact in the play to enable happiness to exist.  So, it’s a pretty damming indictment of disabled people from the author.  Though it is a 1960’s play it is, tragically for us, a standard text.  It also became a film, with Allan Bates, which I would not recommend.  Even more recent plays, i.e., Arthur Miller’s Breaking Glass about Kristelnacht, in the rise of Nazism in Germany, used disability in a similar derogatory and metaphorical form.  Disability is often used metaphorically for aspects of human nature which are seen as negative: weakness, dependency, ineffectualism and infantilism (be that in individuals or society).  Disability is used to reinforce society’s normalising ideologies through the negative use and implications of disability – the very thing that is seen as necessary and in need of genetic rectification.  Images of disability reinforce the negative to justify the acts of destruction it seeks to carry out against Others: disabled people.  The degree to which they do this is revealed in the degree to which medical hegemony sacrifices a significant number of its own ‘normals’ in order to maintain its control.  For example, in carrying out various pre-natal tests to screen out disability over a 1000 ‘normal’ babies are destroyed a year.  Now that’s hate.

 

Television is full of stuff that does exactly the stuff just in a slightly different form.  More ‘positive’ representations put a new light on it when it shows the heroic disabled individual and the normalised disabled individual.  Such a process, of represented individualisation (and medicalisation), are part of the process of de-politicising the issue of disability onto the personal issue of impairment.  So, again, representations are still individualising disability as impairment, but it makes a very clear distinction that if you as a disabled person who wants to get on, the only way you are going to do so is if your more like the ‘normal’.  If you are more normal that does not validate disability or impairment or disabled people at all; all it is doing is validating normality - the very thing, through these images, that is used to oppress and reinforce disability (‘double D’ – discrimination).  That does not stop it being enjoyable; I absolutely love, for example, Ironside and I watch it most days but there is a deeply suspect ideology behind it.  

 

If we go back in time, films are often come along in very distinct periods and times.  You have seen Freaks, the objectifying of disabled people, making them the object of disability, implying that it is nothing to do with society; it is all about them, individualising disability as a deeply negative thing.  Freaks, Hunchback of Notre Dame, are good examples.  Even right up to today, films like Young Frankenstein follow a similar tradition; but the issue is much more complex.  For example, Young Frankenstein is, I personally think, one of the best and most disability politics films of all time (along with The Idiots) but we are not going to go into that today because of the complexities of what it’s dealing with, but it use very standard images.

 

The distinction I would make from a lot of other writers is that they talk about stereotypes of disability, the freak being one of them.  I think there are very few stereotypes of disability, there are archetypes: the presumption is disability uses these images because its true, disabled people are all of these things - they are pathetic, they are dependent, they are a burden, they are vengeful, they are tragic (tosh).  Archetypes can be redefined and demystified, as stereotypes if we, the disabled, stand up and say that such archetypes are misrepresentations and wrong.  But the presumption is that they are true which is why they are much more difficult to challenge. But again Frankenstein (the original) and Young Frankenstein - see the two films together they are brilliant but one can see the difference immediately.

 

Comedy uses disability all the time, again often to ridicule the individual though there are examples where it does more than that, or that it is fun.   I do not want to say everything is bad (or that x, y or z should not be allowed) but if looked at from the Social Model perspective impairment as disability is used in a very negative way.  There are still great things that can be enjoyed about it.  Harpo Marx, for example, is to me a master, but his use of muteness is really suspect if one looks at it in a very politically dogmatic way (I do not).  The freakish film is still made today.  And until the Social Model is universally acknowledged Freaks and its ilk will still be made – even for kids in a film like The Mighty.   An American Independent film called Gummo, a very recent, and a very, very doggy film, is much worse than Freaks.  Another similar kind of film, I’m just flicking through these 100 slides, is Tell Me That you Love Me Judy MoonEdward Scissorhand, and Eraserhead, they are of the same ilk. 

 

A revisionist view of disability of this kind of freaky imagery took place after the second world war when, using Martin F. Norden’s label, the dominance of the Noble Warrior came on the imagery scene - we in the UK would more likely call them the Super-Crip (because they are not always war-linked).  We call such images the Super-Crip, those who expend their entire lives trying to be normal.  The Social Model would say if the individual wants to do that that’s all well and fine but it doesn’t improve the lives of disabled people and actually marginalises those unable to be normalised even more.  To extend the debate further I must say that I am not, in this brief lecture/paper getting over the complexities of the issue.  If one looks at it very simply, in society some disabled people now are better treated than they have ever been in Western culture - not how we want it but its true.  How we are treated and socially integrated has, over the last 200 years, improved enormously.  But, and it is the biggest but on earth, the flip side of that is that the population of people who are born disabled is decreasing due to abortion; depending on the impairment, it can be a reduction of almost 100%.  

 

Lets put that in context: is it all right for me to sit up here as a white middle class man who has been to university, who has benefited due to luck, but if you (or me, literally) are going to be born with Down Syndrome you won’t be born - you will not see the light of day - in 99% of cases due to abortion.  It is the same with my impairment, Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus.  The idea that it is better now has a nightmare flip side which genetics is reinforcing and will ensure the extermination of most congenital disabled people.  These images, I believe, reveal that completely and its something that we all should be aware of and it should inform what we do, think and feel and allow around the issue of genetics.  

 

The Nobel Warrior, or Super-Crip is so often picked up.  If we look at the whole notion of positive and negative images – a pointless differentiation in my view - the Noble Warrior is a good example. Let me go through some of them: The Men, Marlon Brando; Bad Day at Black Rock, Spencer Tracy; Coming Home, John Voight and Jane Fonda; Inside Moves, Harold Russell’s only other film made 40 years after The Best Years of Our Lives; and even Forrest Gump - not actually Forrest Gump but the other character in the wheelchair played by Gary Sinese.  A modern variation on the theme is The Waterdance, its not a war accident but has the same kind of theme and ideology.  If you think about most people seeing one of those films or the brave person who normalises themselves to progress and get the rewards of society - even a film like My Left Foot is the same – the image is crass but so hegemonically dominant that it dictates governmental policies and inter-personal relationships between the non-disabled and the disabled).  The positive/negative debate about images of disabled people – discriminated against people - is powerful but a retrograde step in the battle to improve the value of disabled people.  We, in all these films looked at, depending on how we look at them, can be positive and/or negative.  

 

So, for example if we take the Medical Model as true - I suffer in life because I can’t walk - if I see normalising images of someone who can’t walk but makes the effort, gets fit, walks on crutches, gets up stairs, or what ever impairment it may be, if I believe the Medical Model then this is a positive representation as it tells me what I believe to be the truth (it is not – but that is a separate issue).  It is apparently showing me the way forward.  But, from the Social Model, it is a negative image because it completely ignores society, blames the individual who does not do that for their marginalisation, or praises the individual for doing individual things, such imagery blames the individual disabled spectator for disability and its resulting discrimination – such images are typically individualistic.  The negative / positive debate is so difficult because what one disabled person sees as positive another may see as negative because they are not seeing it as the same thing because they are coming from different interpretative perspectives.  I think that makes it easier to understand and why, to convince one another of their arguments won’t work because often they are coming from these models that they are using to interpret – model which are diametrically opposite.

 

The idea that if disabled people start making their own products – images - it will make a difference; it could do.  I think it often will but, obviously, because I come from the Social Model perspective only if such images are constructed within a Social Model paradigm.  For example, The Waterdance, with Eric Stoltz, was made by a disabled guy but the disabled person is in Nobel Warrior archetype that is somewhat reactionary and in no way progressive.  Again, what specific individuals do is not an issue - we all do what we have to – equally, we don’t live in the Social Model world we live in the hegemonically dominant world of the Medical Model …

 

Is everybody getting that difference?  One of the interesting things about cinema is its obsession with blindness - visual impairment.  Which I think is very interesting.  I personally feel that it is because its cinema, cinema is something conventional that you see – it is light and shadow.   It is about the use of light, thus blindness as a subject is very interesting.  Hollywood and most other countries have gone into it in a big way, from films like The Enchanted Cottage and Eyes of the Night - this is a blind detective story in which the detective gets his man at the end because he turns the lights out.  I love cinema even though I may be sounding very negative but I love seeing what it does and how it does it.  For example, this is a picture from Torch Song with Michael Wilding and Joan Crawford. It is all about looking and seeing the whole picture - which is a man at a piano in his tweeds, nice, got a suit on, and there’s a woman next to him who is showing herself of like there is no tomorrow.  But obviously as a blind man Wilding is looking far off in to the distance unable to see the beauty in front of him.  That’s what is so interesting about cinema; how it constantly creates this kind of mis-en-scene, a cinematic construction which is, and they so often are, wonderful, incredibly creative. 

 

This is a still from the film Night Song, which again I love, a wonderful example because the blind man is in bed in a hospital ward and, conventionally, it would be quite a closed ward, but not this ward.  The guy is blind (awaiting a cure) so you must have out of his window the most spectacular view – a view he cannot see.  Again, this is about marginalising blindness, denigrating the blind, but its not just the beauty of the scene construction, it is saying that to not see – be sighted - you are missing out on life.  It is making very basic statements.  There are many more examples.

 

Disabled woman don’t appear very much, disabled black people even less, the argument for that is that, as Aristotle once said: ‘women are but disabled men’.  Women are already disabled by being women so if you want to marginalise women who are disabled you just have to show women; that’s the logic of it.  The same is true of black images of disability – they are not necessary in the construction of normality as  they are the other.

 

 

People with a Learning Difficulty don’t get much of a better deal either, again it comes back to this thing about society.  It, society, is rewarding disabled people who attempt to normalise themselves: you get jobs if you do the right things.  Cinema reveals this process to the audience but equally it reveals by its absence that society is also practising mass extermination of disabled people of certain groups: people with Spina Bifida, Downs Syndrome, et cetera.  You are just not going to be born and that list is growing (genetics will extend it more and more).  Thus, such group are not in cinema’s repertoire - so society is dealing with these complexities.  

 

One of the few LD characters to appear is Forrest Gump, there is also Lenny in Of Mice and Men.  Fundamentally my perspective of images of disability is that disability is used in order to create what the ‘normal’ is in opposition to what abnormality – impairment as disability – is.  In society the ‘normal’ doesn’t actually exist, it only exists in opposition to the abnormal - that’s why there are so many images of disability in cinema and culture – including disability television.  There are 1000s  in UK alone and some disabled people would argue that disabled people are invisible in the television, invisible on the cinema, not on the stage, et cetera, but images of us are, quite literally everywhere.  One of the beauties of how it is done is that you don’t see it, as such, that itself reveals it to be complex but not invisible. Disability is not represented but impairment is unavoidable if you exist in culture.  But medically, socially and culturally (and the cultural notion of genetics simply perpetuates the illusions and delusions that a normal exists) impairment as disability is used to create the normal; fundamentally, by saying what is good and what is bad in a comprehensively corporeal way that is easily understood by all.   

 

So the good disabled person is, or what often disabled people will sadly say is positive, is the disabled person who is married has kids has a nice job, but that that image bears no relationship to most disable people conceived is irrelevant – most are terminated with malice.   Equally, in England, for example, 80% of disabled people live in poverty – so the normalised images of the disabled person as a fully constituted citizen of the state has no relationship to reality.  What it does do, conversely, is create the negative of disability which is the bad, the personal tragedy, the miserableness of it (from a Medical Model perspective).  It is saying that if your not normal that’s the kind of life you can expect so make sure you stay normal or all those other things are down that line.  

 

On that basis what to me is positive, not positive but good, are those images that challenge the whole concept / dichotomy of normal / abnormal; film’s that set out to undermine those two distinctions are the best example of what is good from both a disability perspective but also creatively.  The best example would be The Idiots by Lars von Trier, a film that came out last year; I don’t have slides of that.  Two of the previous films to do this were both Spanish: El Cochetito – ‘The Wheelchair’ - in the 1950s and Accion Mutante, because they challenge the whole concept of what is normal.  They don’t necessarily do it well but at least they try.  That is the challenge ahead – to reveal to the normal that they do not exist and then, and only then, will they stop trying to destroy us.

 

Keywords

Archetypal

Mystification

Iconography

Mise en scene

Metaphor

Melodrama

Mind-body dualism

Making special

Catharsis

Aesthetics

Aesthetic distance – suspension of disbelief

Acculturation

Atavism

Always-already read – frederick jameson

Simulacrum

Verisimilutude

Ideology – common sense – set of beliefs – ideological effect

Idealism

 

Reason can subsume suffering under concepts – Theodor Adorno

 

Give suffering a language (harold schweizer) by calling it suffering

 

Schopenhauer – aesthetic: a knowledge without desire

 

Aesthetic standards presented as essential are void now as they are neither timeless nor universal; they reflect the values and beliefs of euro-patriarchy. (Mary Devereaux)

 

Key Disability Films for Future Reference

 

A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg  GB  1970 (Released 1972) writer  Peter Nichols (from his own play)    director   Peter Medak   

music   Elgar 

 

The Raging Moon GB  1970 (USA title: Long Ago Tomorrow

writer director Bryan Forbes (from a novel by Peter Marshall)

Malcolm McDowell, Nanette Newman, Georgia Brown, Michael Flanders

 

The Elephant Man    EMI/Brooksfilms (Stuart Cornfield)

US   1980 director   David Lynch   photography   Freddie Francis 

John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, Freddie Jones, John Gielgud, Michael Elphick

 

Whose Life Is It Anyway?     

US   1981   writer   Brian Clark (from his play) and Reginald Rose 

director   John Badham    

cast   Richard Dreyfuss, John Cassavetes, Christine Lahti, Bob Balaban 

 

Duet For One    

GB   1987   writers   Tom Kempinski (from his play), Jeremy Lipp

and Andrei Konchalovsky

director   Andrei Konchalovsky music   Bach (and various others)

Julie Andrews, Alan Bates, Max Von Sydow, Rupert Everett, Liam Neeson   

 

My Left Foot International/RTE (Noel Pearson)

GB   1989   writers   Shane Connaughton and Jim Sheridan

(from book by Christy Brown)     director   Jim Sheridan   

Daniel Day-Lewis, Ruth McCabe, Fiona Shaw, Ray McAnally, B. Fricker

Other Disability Films for Future Reference

 

Accion Mutante                                 Spain 1995                  Dir: Alex de la Iglesia

Afraid of the Dark                              GB 1992                     Dir: Mark Peploe

The African Queen                            GB 1951                     Dir: John Huston

Almost an Angel                                US 1990                      Dir: John Cornell

Annie Hall                                         US 1977                      Dir: Woody Allen

Annie’s Coming Out                         Australia 1984            Dir: Gil Brealey

Antonia’s Line                                   Holland 1995              Dir: Marleen Gorris

Bad Boy Bubby                                  Australia 1993            Dir: Rolf de Heer

Bad Day at Black Rock                      US 1955                      Dir: John Sturges

Batman Returns                                 US 1992                      Dir: Tim Burton

Baxter                                                 GB 1972                     Dir: Lionel Jeffries

The Best Years of Our Lives               US 1946                      Dir: William Wyler

Beyond the Stars                                 US/Canada 1988         Dir: David Saperstein

The Big Lebowski                              US 1998                      Dir: Joel Cohen

Bitter Moon                                        GB 1992                     Dir: Roman Polanski

Blind Fury                                         US 1989                      Dir: Phillip Noyce

Blind Terror                                       GB 1971                     Dir: Richard Fleischer

Blink                                                  US 1994                      Dir: Michael Apted

Born on the Fourth of July               US 1989                      Dir: Oliver Stone

The Boy Who Could Fly                   US 1986                      Dir: Nick Castle

Breaking the Waves                           Denmark 1996            Dir: Lars Von Trier

Brimstone and Treacle                       GB 1982                     Dir: Richard Loncraine

Broken Silence                                   Germany 1996                        Dir: Caroline Link

La Buena Estrella                              Spain 1997                  Dir: Ricardo Franco

Cactus                                                 Australia 1986            Dir: Paul Cox

Carlito’s Way                                     US 1993                      Dir: Brian de Palma

Carry On ... (generic)                          GB 1958 >1992          Dir: G. Thomas / R. Thomas

Cat O’Nine Tails                               Italy 1971                   Dir: Dario Argento

Charly                                                 US 1968                      Dir: Ralph Nelson

Children of a Lesser God                   US 1986                      Dir: Randa Haines

A Christmas Carol                              US 1938                      Dir: E.L. Marin

Citizen Kane                                      US 1941                      Dir: Orson Wells

A Clockwork Orange                         GB 1971                     Dir: Stanley Kubrick

Coming Home                                    US 1978                      Dir: Hal Ashby

Crash                                                  US 1977                      Dir: Charles Band

Crash                                                  Canada 1996               Dir: David Cronenberg

Crescendo                                           GB 1969                     Dir: Alan Gibson

Crush                                                  New Zealand 1992      Dir: Alison Maclean

Cutter’s Way                                       US 1981                      Dir: Ivan Passer

Dance Me To My Song                      Australia 1998            Dir: Rolf de Heer

The Dark Angel                                 US 1935                      Dir: Sidney Franklin

Dark City                                            US 1997                      Dir: Alex Proyas

Dark Victory                                       US 1939                      Dir: Edmund Goulding

Day of the Locust                               US 1975                      Dir: John Schlesinger

Dolores Claiborne                              US 1995                      Dir: Taylor Hackford

Dragonwyck                                       US 1946                      Dir: Joseph L. Mankiewicz

The Eighth Day                                 Belgium/France 1996  Dir: Jaco Van Dormael           

Elmer Gantry                                      US 1960                      Dir: Richard Brooks

The Enchanted Cottage                     US 1945                      Dir: John Cromwell

Ethan Frome                                      US/GB 1993               Dir: John Madden

Eye of the Cat                                     US 1969                      Dir: David Lowell Rich

Eye of the Needle                               GB 1981                     Dir: Richard Marquand

Faster Pussycat Kill Kill!                   US 1966                      Dir: Russ Meyer

Forrest Gump                                     US 1994                      Dir: Robert Zemeckis

Four Weddings and a Funeral         GB 1994                     Dir: Mike Newell

Frankenstein                                      US 1931                      Dir: James Whale

Frankie Starlight                               GB/US 1995               Dir: Michael Lindsey-Hogg

Freaks                                                 US 1932                      Dir: Tod Browning

Gattaca                                               US 1997                      Dir: Andrew Niccol

Gigot                                                   US 1962                      Dir: Gene Kelly

Go Now (aka Love Bites: Go Now)    GB 1996                     Dir: Michael Winterbottom

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly     Italy 1966                   Dir: Sergio Leone

Gummo                                               US 1997                      Dir: Harmony Korine

Hana Bi                                              Japan 1997                  Dir: Takeshi Kitano

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter            US 1968                      Dir: Robert Ellis Miller

Hearts of Fire                                     US 1992                      Dir: Jeff Bleckner

Hilary and Jackie                              GB 1998                     Dir: Anand Tucker

The Horse Whisperer                          US 1998                      Dir: Robert Redford

The Hunchback of Notre Dame        US 1923 (silent)          Dir: Wallace Worsley

The Hunchback of Notre Dame        US 1939                      Dir: William Dieterle

The Hunchback of Notre Dame        France/Italy 1956        Dir: Jean Delannoy

The Hunchback of Notre Dame        US 1996                      Dir: G. Trousdale and K. Wise

Ich Klage Na                                      Germany 1941                        Dir. Wolfgang Liebeneiner

I Don’t Want to be Born                    GB 1975                     Dir: Peter Sasdy

The Idiots                                           Denmark 1998            Dir: Lars Von Trier

In the Company of Men                    US 1997                      Dir: Neil LeBute

Jennifer 8                                           US 1992                      Dir: Bruce Robinson

Jobman                                               S. Africa 1990             Dir: D. Roodt

Johnny Belinda                                 US 1948                      Dir: Jean Negulesco

Journey To Knock                              GB 1991                     Dir: David Wheatley

Junk Mail                                          Norway 1997              Dir: Pal Sletaune 

Just the Way You Are             US 1984                      Dir: Eduardo Molinaro

Kingpin                                              US 1996                      Dir: P. & B. Farrelly 

Kings Row                                          US 1942                      Dir: Sam Wood

Kiss of Death                                      US 1947                      Dir: Henry Hathaway

Lady Chatterley                                  GB 1993                     Dir: Ken Russell

Lady Chatterley’s Lover                      GB 1981                     Dir: Just Jaeckin

The Lawnmower Man                        US 1992                      Dir: Brett Leonard

Leap of Faith                                     US 1992                      Dir: Richard Pearce

Life Begins at Eight-Thirty               US 1942                      Dir: Irving Pichel

Live Flesh                                           Spain 1997                  Dir: Pedro Almodovar

Lolita                                                  GB 1962                     Dir: Stanley Kubrick

Magnificent Obsession                      US 1954                      Dir: Douglas Sirk

Mandy                                                GB 1952                     Dir: Alexander Mackendrick

A Man on the Beach                          GB 1956                     Dir: Jospeh Losey

The Man with the Golden Arm         US 1956                      Dir: Otto Preminger

The Men                                             US 1950                      Dir: Fred Zinnemann

Midnight Cowboy                              US 1969                      Dir: John Schlesinger

The Mighty                                         US 1998                      Dir: Peter Chelsom

The Miracle Woman                          US 1931                      Dir: Frank Capra

The Miracle Worker                           US 1962                      Dir: Arthue Penn

Monkey Shines                                  US 1988                      Dir: George Romero

Mr Holland’s Opus                            US 1995                      Dir: Stephen Herek

The Muppet Christmas Carol            US 1993                      Dir: Brian Hanson

Mute Witness                                      GB 1995                     Dir: Anthony Waller

Night Song                                         US 1947                      Dir: John Cromwell

Notorious Landlady                           GB 1962                     Dir: Richard Quine

No Trees in the Street                         GB 1958                     Dir: J. Lee Thompson

On Dangerous Ground                      US 1951                      Dir: Nicholas Ray

Passion Fish                                       US 1992                      Dir: John Sayles

A Patch of Blue                                  US 1965                      Dir: Guy Green

Paula                                                  US 1952                      Dir: Rudolph Mate

Paulie                                                 US 1998                      Dir: John Roberts

The People vs. Larry Flint                 US 1996                      Dir: Milos Forman

Persons Unknown                              US 1996                      Dir: George Hickenlooper

The Piano                                           Australia 1993            Dir: Jane Campion

Poulet au Vinaigre                             France 1984                Dir: Claude Chabrol

Rain Man                                           US 1988                      Dir: Barry Levinson

Reach for the Sky                               GB 1956                     Dir: Lewis Gilbert

The Road To Wellville                      US 1994                      Dir: Alan Parker

Salon Kitty                                         France/Germany 1978 Dir: Tinto Brass

Santa Sangre                                      Italy 1989                   Dir. A. Jodorowski

Saturday Night Fever                         US 1977                      Dir: John Badham

Scrooge                                               GB 1951                     Dir: B.D. Hurst

Scrooge                                               GB 1970                     Dir: Ronald Neame

Scrooged                                             US 1988                      Dir: Richard Donner

The Secret Garden                              US 1993                      Dir: Agnieszka Holland

The Seventh Seal                               Sweden 1957               Dir: Ingmar Bergman

Short Circuit                                      US 1988                      Dir: John Badham

Sick: The Life and Death of

     Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist   US 1997                      Dir: K. Dick

Sitcom                                                 France 1997                Dir: Francois Ozon

Sixth Happiness                                 GB 1997                     Dir: Waris Hussein

Sling Blade                                        US 1996                      Dir: Billy Bob Thornton

Sorry, Wrong Number                        US 1948                      Dir: Anatole Litvak

The Spiral Staircase                           US 1945                      Dir: Robert Siodmak

Starship Troopers                               US 1997                      Dir: Paul Verhoeven

The Story of

     Alexander Graham Bell               US 1939                      Dir: Irving Cummings

The Story of Esther Costello              GB 1957                     Dir: David Miller

The Stratton Story                              US 1949                      Dir: Sam Wood

The Switch                                         US 1993                      Dir: Bobby Roth

Tell Me That You Love Me,

     Junie Moon                                  US 1970                      Dir: Otto Preminger

There’s Something About Mary        US 1998                      Dir: P. & B. Farrelly

Touch                                                 US 1997                      Dir: Paul Schrader

Wait Until Dark                                 US 1967                      Dir: Terence Young

The Walking Stick                             GB 1970                     Dir: Eric Trill

Walter                                                 GB 1982                     Dir: Stephen Frears

Walter and June                                GB 1983                     Dir: Stephen Frears

War Games                                         US 1983                      Dir: John Badham

The Waterdance                                 US 1992                      Dir: N. Jimenez & S. Michael

Whatever Happened

     To Baby Jane?                              US 1962                      Dir: Robert Aldrich

The Wheelchair                                 Spain 1959                  Dir: Marco Ferreri

Wild at Heart                                      US 1990                      Dir: David Lynch

Woman of Straw                                GB 1964                     DirBasil Dearden

Young Frankenstein                          US 1974                      Dir: Mel Brookes

A Zed and Two Noughts                    GB 1985                     Dir: Peter Greenaway