WORKSHOPS

Professor Janet Harbord and Research Fellow Dr Bonnie Evans will conduct film archaeology, working with a number of UK and international film archives to situate autism within a developing narrative of bodies and their intelligibility.

This research will involve gathering and identifying archive films that feature medical interest in gesture, communicability and body language. Selection will largely focus on the use of film in psychiatric contexts although some medical films of other types of treatment will be reviewed and may be relevant. These archive medical films will then be cross-referenced with selected entertainment films to draw out concepts of the communicative body.

How did a definition of autism evolve from early twentieth-century medical film and how does this compare to entertainment film?

What insights can people who identify as autistic bring to representations of autism in film?

How can cinema be reconfigured through neurodiverse experience? Our sequence of carefully structured workshops will expand the findings of the archival research. In initial workshops run with autistic participants we’ve begun to make amazing discoveries, about social and screen ‘event boundaries’, turn-taking in dialogue exchanges, body proxemics and the fuzzy social rules of how close to stand to another person.  We’ve reverse-engineered eye-tracking software and remixed film audio to privilege atmosphere tracks over speech and loud music. Our autism friendly sessions consider discourses of impairment, disability, discomfort and difference, as well as autism as a condition with benefits. Each workshop is designed with our partners Project Artworks and collaborators Kate Adams, Sebastian Gaigg, and Damian Milton.

Filmmaker Steven Eastwood will work with producer Elhum Shakerifar and the production company Hakawati to collaborate with The Neuroculture Collective, a group of autistic individuals who will bring creative input and skills to the many aspects of the film production. Together they will produce a feature film, a multiscreen exhibition and VR artwork.Autism will be explored as a means to develop an alternative film language that is inclusive and derivative of the neurodiverse population. 

Typically, cinema has depicted characters with autism from the outside, giving stereotypical and inaccurate descriptions, looking in with fascination at a high-functioning or magical character who throws out of joint the ‘neurotypical’ lives of those around them. Medical films have similarly treated the behaviour of autistic individuals as eccentric and obscure. A cinema opening onto neurodiverse experience is not common. This is because collaboration with the autistic community is rarely a part of the filmmaking process.  Yet it has much to bring to our understandings of inner and outer life, ushering in novel ways of apprehending cognitive differences, suggesting new sensory and relational events on the screen. Is this a genre, films produced by psychiatrists, films about psychiatry?

A neuroculture collective made up of autistic individuals will bring creative input and skills to a film production.