Disorienting the Past,Cripping the Future in Adam Elliot’s Claymation

Introduction

The acclaimed Australian animator Adam Elliot has dedicated his career to illustrating the experiences of people with disabilities. Elliot’s unique animation style lies in his use of clay, stop-motion and black-and-white 16mm film, with a voice-over. His feature animation Mary and Max (2009) and his second trilogy-in-progress – Harvie Krumpet (2003) and Ernie Biscuit (2015) – are very explicit about disability, e.g. Asperger’s syndrome, depression, Tourette syndrome and deafness. His first trilogy – Uncle (1996), Cousin (1999) and Brother (2000) – presents disability in a more obscure manner: unidentified ‘strangeness’ followed by a mental crisis in Uncle and vague behavioral problems and asthma in Brother. Only in Cousin does the disability receive a name: cerebral palsy. Although the claymations may be interpreted as part of Australian national cinema in the 1990s – which was marketed as ‘quirky’ and off-beat’ (Ferrier, 2001: 76) – I will focus on their deviations from mainstream cinematic styles and ableist ideologies. I analyze Elliot’s first trilogy and suggest it does not stand out except for its ambiguity towards the normative. However, I argue that it is unique in its retrospective of loved and lost family members with disabilities, offering spectators a disorienting perspective of the past and opening up the possibility of different kinds of corporeal futures.

The first trilogy is narrated from the point of view of a grown man, who is re-telling his childhood memories surrounded by family members with disabilities. Uncle is told through the eyes of a loving nephew and reveals the story of a quirky man who was struggling with his wife’s suicide, the loss of his dog and his solitude. The animation ends with the uncle’s death, alone on a couch in an institution. Cousin unfolds the memory of a relative and friend with cerebral palsy, who is moved to a distant foster home after his parents are killed in a car accident. Brother is by far the most personal of the three and focuses on the nuclear family: the father is a former acrobat, alcoholic and a wheelchair user, the mother works as a hairdresser and sells cigarettes on the weekends, and the brother is asthmatic, has a squint and behavioral problems. The claymation ends with the brother’s death in bed, discovered by the storyteller.

In this article, I present Adam Elliot’s black-and-white, stop-motion claymation as evoking its viewer’s corporeal body as susceptible to disability, and thus temporarily able-bodied. The spectatorship of clay in a hybrid genre invokes our corporeal body by cinematic and narrative means, allowing a re-reading of disability as an analytic category through which humanity is examined. The hybridity of the trilogy is an infusion of documentary ‘domestic ethnography’ or home videos, centering familial ‘others’, with fictional film-noiric elements that allow entrance into the dark realm of recollection. By conjuring these oppositional cinematic styles and genres, disability is represented as the definition of the human experience through an ethical remembrance. The viewers are offered bodily experiences that emphasize the body’s vulnerability and perishability, presented not in a tragic or inspirational fashion, but as inseparable from human existence.

This article constitutes a theoretical meeting point of film studies, crip studies and phenomenology. Film studies, and Vivian Sobchack’s (2004) Carnal Thoughts Embodiment and Moving Image Culture in particular, have used phenomenology to describe experiences of spectatorship and ethics. Disability studies have also relied on this philosophy in forging a touch-ethics, as presented by Janet Price and Margaritt Shildrick (2006). Drawing from their insights on bodies and spectatorship, as well as on Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006) and Carrie Sandhal’s Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer? (2003), I will argue that Elliot’s trilogy utilizes crip experience to disorient the spectator. I use Sandahl’s active use of the words ‘queer’ and ‘crip’ as analytical tools: ‘queering’ and ‘cripping’. ‘Queering’ describes the practices of exposing the queer sub-text of mainstream representations, imposing a new meaning on the image, or deconstructing its heterosexism of representation. Similarly, ‘cripping’ entails the practices of revealing the assumptions of the ableist body and its exclusionary effects. Significantly, ‘both queering and cripping expose the arbitrary delineation between normal and defective and the negative social ramifications of attempts to homogenize humanity’ (Sandhal, 2003: 37).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, adopted by both film and disability studies, aims to abolish ‘otherness’ by disturbing the boundaries between the object/subject dichotomy through the alternative of perceiving ourselves and all matters of the world as ‘flesh in the flesh of the world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 137). Our reaction as spectators is similar to our relations with the world – it is intersubjective and experienced through our bodily senses. At the same time, film studies have been enriched by documentary and film-noir research which unpacks the ways in which subjectivity is constituted through the ‘other’. Domestic ethnography, as defined by Michael Renov (1999) in Domestic Ethnography and the Construction of the ‘Other’ Self, offers a construction of subjectivity through the familial other. Film-noir allows an examination of mental, physical and sexual otherness and social deviations. Moreover, disability studies’ critique of cinematic and literary representations of people with disabilities aids in distinguishing whether the work that portrays disability as ‘other’ by marking it as tragedy or worthy of pity and thus reinforces the individual/medical model or by critiquing social structures and therefore affiliated with the social model.

The philosophical intersection between crip theory, film studies and phenomenology offers an exploration of the deconstruction of self/other, abled/disabled relations. Finally, the theoretical conjunction of the three fields allows exploration of the ways in which Elliot’s clayographies offer a form of ethical spectatorship by disorienting the viewers.

Docu-film-noir animation: Memories of an alternative family photo-album

The trilogy’s visual style – almost motions-less black-and-white film – offers an experience that evokes the memory of going through a family photo album. The alternative album produced by Elliot re-includes the lives excluded from the conventional album. Elliot addressed his first films, this trilogy, and mentioned this effect: ‘In a way, my earlier films were like flicking through a photo album; you just see little vignettes and photographs that happen to move and blink at you’ (Mitchell, 2011). Nevertheless, the images presented in these shorts go beyond dominant family-album or home-video images. The traditional albums are there to commemorate supposedly beautiful and happy family moments. One such moment appears in Cousin when Adam’s aunt is taking a picture of him with his cousin, when both are dressed as super-heroes. Another representation of the family photo is encountered in the scene in which the storyteller is notified about the death of his aunt and uncle, and looks at a framed photograph of the two with his cousin.

Elliot’s alternative is realized through a confrontation of the conventional family album that portrays the happy family in its leisure time. Patricia Zimmerman (1995: ix) explains that the amateur film, much like the family photo album, is utilized by parents to direct the primary narrative – ‘the grand, happy epic of nuclear family life’. In the final chapter of the book, Zimmermann explores some works, produced with a home-video camera, that subvert traditional family movies. One of the examples she offers is a work that examines, and does not merely reproduce, the familial. These works allow a deconstruction of fictional fantasies of family life, and their alternative lies in the child’s turning the camera in the opposite direction (p. 153). In the spirit of these videos, Elliot deconstructs the familial fantasy and turns the camera to his parents, uncles, brother, cousin and pets. These filmmakers aggressively deconstruct the bourgeois privileges of the heteronormative nuclear family and, like Elliot’s trilogy, explore the self and the private sphere. In the same way, Elliot’s trilogy rewrites the familial through the transgressive voice, crossing the boundaries between the work and its creator, between the documented and the fictional, and between the public and the private.

In the trilogy, the blurred boundaries between documented and fictional are depicted through the incorporation of autobiographical aspects. Indeed, Elliot defines his biographical clay animations as ‘clayographies’ (Desowitz, 2009). Elliot confesses to embellishing reality, adding exaggerations and completely fictional scenes. In his feature animation Mary and Max, he chose to transform into an eight-year-old girl.

In autobiographical animated documentaries, Annabelle Honess Roe (2013) suggests, animation functions as an alternative way of ‘accessing’ the past. Thus, ‘the animated documentary can be a medium for the exploration of a fragmented past of forgotten, perplexing, yet often formative memories’ (p. 142). Further, animated documentaries about personal memory and history can be seen as a reaction to hegemonic power systems. By the 1990s, autobiographical, personal and subjective filmmaking had become a means to protest political and social injustice (p. 144).

Nevertheless, the autobiographical elements of the trilogy are not enough to define the films as documentaries – the images do not depict ‘real’ people and the voice-over consists of professional narration. Yet, the films are reinforced by other documentary characteristics. The static black-and-white cinematography, accompanied by a voice-over, interpretation makes use of ethnographic documentary style and conventions. Is the fact that the story is animated by moving images of clay figures and not by actual photos from the creator’s family album enough to deny their representation of past memories? The tension created between first-person documentary and claymation allows the creator to address the absence of these representations in the family photo album. This tension is present in all the trilogy’s animations and adds a nostalgic (in the word’s literal meaning of ‘return to the pain’) perspective to the unrepresented images.

The animation of the alternative family album is further stressed by the trilogy’s voice-over. At the end of the third short, the sentence ‘Memories of you I will always keep’ is uttered, with a black screen at the background. In addition to the affirmation of the sense of looking through an imagined photo album, the voice-over affiliates the trilogy with documentary cinema. The narration is of an omniscient storyteller who reflects on his childhood. Nevertheless, it is not an authoritative narration, but rather a self-doubting, subjective telling that resembles first-person documentary voice-overs.

In addition to the overall resemblance to first-person documentary, the trilogy’s focus on the family echoes the documentary features of ‘domestic ethnography’. Michael Renov defines such films as documentaries that focus on the ‘self’, constituting its subjectivity through the familial ‘other’ in the intimacy of the home. These films depict family members or individuals in routine and intimate relations with the director, as their lives are tied by blood or community. Thus, the film-maker is never in a fully ‘external’ position. Family relations determine memories, physical resemblance and temperament, which can be shown but not evaded (Renov, 1999: 144). The use of clay to represent family members allows the avoidance of physical similarities. Nevertheless, Elliot persistently preserves them. In domestic ethnographies, the subjects exist only by constituting their relations with the filmmaker; in the trilogy, this feature is enhanced by the characters’ namelessness and affiliation with the director: ‘uncle’, ‘cousin’, ‘brother’.

Through the domestic ethnographies’ features, the trilogy crosses the fundamental boundaries of documentary, entailing indexical image and/or sound. Classical documentary cinema with both image and sound resulting from the world has been expanded to include variations on these conventions, the most prominent of which are animated documentaries. In a film like Maria’s Journey (dir. Miguel Gallardo, 2010), for example, a father narrates and animates his adolescent daughter with autism. The film may be included in the possible category of animated domestic ethnography as the father constitutes his subjectivity through his daughter’s daily routine and animates physical resemblance in childish drawings. Yet, while Maria’s Journey at least preserves indexicality in sound, Elliot’s trilogy offers a different form of indexicality in its analog filming and fingerprints on the clay.

Despite the stylistic resemblance to the documentary and the appearances of the director’s name in the films, there is no evidence that any of the illustrated events actually occurred in Elliot’s life. Moreover, this semi-documentary sense evoked by the cinematography and voice-over is also utilized to construct fictional elements that draw from the retrospective narration encountered in film-noir, i.e. contrasted lighting that implies otherness.

The claymations draw from some of film-noir’s most prominent visual motifs, including disturbing lighting, camera angles and mise en scène (Place and Peterson, 1998[1974]: 66–69). Although produced in different eras and nations, and with different cinematic tools, both film-noir and the trilogy share a common interest in disability. People with disabilities played an essential role in film-noir, as Michael Davidson (2010) suggests, especially in the reinforcement of normality. Film-noir, produced in the US during the Cold War, featured people with disability in a very similar manner to Hollywood’s use of African-American, Latino or Asian characters – to provide the racial/physical/mental counter-narrative for the protagonists’ existential discomfort. Furthermore, in many film-noir movies, physical or cognitive disability symbolized sexual mystery, which would have remained unseen otherwise, in accordance with the codes of the 1950s and 60s. In his discussion of Cold War film-noir, Davidson argued that the cinematic style transcends superficial characteristics, representing otherness in a culture of sameness (p. 66).

The trilogy’s film-noir elements, e.g. contrasted lighting, black-and-white film, and retrospective narration, make use of disability to represent that which remains outside the bourgeois nuclear family. However, with its dark retrospective gaze on disability, opposite to that of the film-noir, the trilogy refrains from representing disability as a ‘lack’ (Lacan, 1960–1961, in Fink, 2015). Instead, disability is tied to a beloved and missed family member. The family memory, as Annette Kuhn (1995) suggests, combines the personal and the private with the political and the public: ‘Memory work makes it possible to explore connections between “public” historical events, structures of feeling, family dramas, relations of class, national identity and gender, and “personal” memory’ (p. 4). Elliot’s family memories intersect class, gender and disability. Although, in all three films, the protagonists – as well as the other characters – are male, their representation deviates from hegemonic masculinities because they do not have access to patriarchal privileges such as proper health care or safe jobs. This other masculinity is constructed by two predetermining factors: socio-economic status and disability.

Moreover, these non-hegemonic identities may be understood not only as a response to the portrayal of class, masculinity and disability in Hollywood, but also as a deviation from mainstream Australian National Cinema in the 1990s. Australian cinema emerges from its importing and indigenizing, blending and Othering dynamics, and from its negotiation of its political and cultural weakness (O’Regan, 1996: 154–194). Despite growing cultural diversity, people with disabilities are generally represented in stereotypical and disabling ways in Australian mainstream and ‘new media’ (Goggin and Newell, 2005: 34). In the 1990s Australian cinema, disability is individualized as a medical pathology or personality defect that people who have impairment should seek to cure or hide (Ellis, 2008: 3). These representations utilize disability in forming a kind of ‘unreal’ or idealized Australian nation, a place where it serves certain purposes, none of which are reflective of actual experiences of alternative narratives of disability (Duncan et al., 2005: 154).

Elliot produces alternative narratives of diverse disabilities presented as affiliated with the gendered bodies of the working class. Cousin ends with an unclear future, as the character is seen/imagined wandering with a shopping cart, resulting from his desire to do so or marking his financial distress. Uncle ends with an institutionalization in a static space, where even medical treatment is absent. This hospitalization, voluntary or not, is not only the result of a mental crisis following depression, grief and loneliness, but also a socio-economic marker. Brother, which opens with a visual depiction of life under electrical wires, links Elliot’s characters to places of residency of Australian working-class. The alcoholic father uses a manual wheelchair as result of a work accident, and thus the mother works two jobs to support the family – as a hairdresser and a pie seller. Finally, the brother’s death from asthma raises some questions as to the working classes’ access to proper medical care.

Using sociological studies, Alison Kafer (2013) argues that there is a dialectic between class, race and sickness. A study from 2009 found that it is four times more likely for a doctor to prescribe an antipsychotic treatment to a child insured by MedicAid than to one with a better healthcare plan. Therefore, racism, economic oppression and disability are inseparable (p. 32). Scholars have found that ‘blacks with diabetes or vascular disease are nearly five times more likely than whites to have a leg amputated.’ Another study discovered that, in the case of prostate cancer, blacks are more likely to have a testicle removed as part of the treatment. These studies suggest that blacks and underprivileged populations are treated more aggressively due to the inaccessibility of quality treatment for chronic illness. The higher rates of amputation, and thus disability, Kafer concludes, show that ‘some futures (and some bodies) are more protected than others’ (p. 34).

In a chapter entitled A Leg to Stand On, about her prosthetic leg, Vivian Sobchack (2004) also articulates the connections between class, gender and age. In recognition of her economic privileges, Sobchack describes her insurance plan’s (HMO) generosity in providing quality care for her prosthetic. However, social restrictions of age and gender constitute a limitation: ‘the HMO might refuse me not only because the “C-leg” costs US$40,000–$50,000, but also because I’m a woman of a certain age who is generally perceived as not needing to be so “well equipped” as someone who is younger (and male)’ (pp. 218–219). Thus, addressing disability through the subjective disabled-body’s experience of the private evokes the public and political oppressions of class, gender, age and race.

The melancholy depiction of the mundane in Elliot’s claymations echoes Sobchack’s ‘unsexy’ (p. 219) details of the phenomenological experience of life with a prosthetic leg. For Sobchack, these descriptions aim to counterweigh prosthetic metaphors that privilege the exotic or erotic over the everyday intimate relations with technology. Her elaboration on the actual prosthetic allows phenomenological descriptions of different perceptions of space, e.g. searching for parking or the anxiety of walking down a long street (pp. 220–221). The subjective–autobiographical point of view of disability in the trilogy may be attributed to an attempt to avoid using disability as a prosthetic or a metaphor, and focus on corporeal experiences.

Finally, in its bodily and phenomenological depictions, the trilogy relies on domestic ethnographies’ documentary cinematography, the 1990s videos that critique the family, and the dark and nostalgic tones of film-noir. The combining of these styles – in addressing personal and political memories of disability and class – is not conflicting, but produces a melancholic (or ‘unsexy’ as defined by Sobchack) gaze at everyday physical, transient human existence. Through these cinematic forms, evoking a sense of nostalgic reminiscence, the trilogy asserts being in the world as an experience of the flesh.

Stop-motion claymation: Moments of perishable corporeality

In addition to the intersecting documentary and fictional cinematic genres, Elliot developed a unique representation of the disabled body through stop-motion claymation. The use of clay allows the artist to stretch the elastic boundaries of the material and represent its infinite fluidity. This potential is realized in Jan Švankmajer’s ‘fantastic documentaries’. Švankmajer, as read by Paul Wells (1997: 177), used clay in some of his most famous films – for example Dimensions of Dialogue (1983), Virile Games [The Male Game] (1988) and Darkness Light Darkness (1990) – in challenging the body as a matter and playing with its physicality. Švankmajer’s claymations present the human condition as subject to fluidity, and the body becomes the site on which humanity projects its passions, fears and uncertainties. Although the bodies in the trilogy are presented as uncertain, incoherent and inconsistent, they preserve their physicality through the materiality of clay and the work’s realistic autobiographical style (referring to a ‘real’ person with a disability).

Discussing Will Vinton’s documentary Claymation (1978), Wells argues that the director ‘essentially demonstrates the “materiality” of clay by illustrating its malleability and consistency, and its capacity to literally evolve from a coloured mass into solid and articulated forms’ (Wells, 1998: 59). Thus clay – a suitable metaphor for the flesh – is also used in Elliot’s animations to represent other phenomenological aspects: clay tears, veins on an old woman’s legs, a squint, and other illustrations of the corporeal body. None of these characters is represented as fantastic, particularly ‘brave’, or able to overcome impairment – all are diverse people with passions, tragedies and disabilities. Their physical being is far more decaying and transitory than elastic and fluid.

Disability is presented visually and is reinforced narratively. Uncle, the first animation of the trilogy, depicts loneliness that evolves into depression. Shortly after his wife commits suicide and his dog is run over by a car, uncle experiences a mental crisis, is institutionalized, and dies alone. Cousin, the second film, describes a boy with cerebral palsy, temper tantrums and an arm that is ‘not connected to his brain’. He is transferred to a far-away foster home after his parents die in a car accident. Brother, the third animation, tells of a boy who suffers from asthma and possibly also from an attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. In addition to the protagonists, the characters that appear in the trilogy also have diverse bodies: a wheelchair-user father, an institutionalized elderly man, a nearsighted saleswoman with veins that pop out of her legs, and a neighbor with macrocephaly. The use of clay does not free these characters from their diverse flesh but rather emphasizes it. Disability runs like a thread throughout the narrative and manifests itself in all characters.

The idea of a ‘narrative prosthesis’, presented by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (2000), explains the use of disability as a ‘crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight’ (p. 49). In a literary sense, a prosthesis strives to create an illusion. A body that is described as lacking or dysfunctional needs compensation in the shape of a prosthesis. The prosthesis depends on the ideological assumption that the abnormal needs ‘crutches’ to be normalized. Providing a body with prosthetics, Mitchell and Snyder assert, allows it to be contained within the realm of tolerable deviation. When disability is significantly remote from the accepted norm, prosthetic intervention cannot erase the difference and thus aims to bring that person to an acceptable degree of normality. Consequently, in many mainstream representations and perceptions, prosthesis serves to ‘cure’ disability. However, while narratives use the disabled’s potentiality for abnormality, those who live with disabilities are oppressed and discriminated against on the basis of those praised ‘abnormalities’ in real life (pp. 1–13). In light of all the diverse ways in which it is presented in the trilogy, instead of being erased or pathologized, disability is normalized by its visualization.

Thus, the disability illuminated in the trilogy is not a ‘crutch’ to the existential depiction of the storyteller, but is a rather diverse platform for being in the world of non-normative bodies. Moreover, disability defies what narrative prosthesis reinforces, i.e. the dichotomy of able/disabled bodies in the service of ableist culture. In fact, the trilogy lacks an average or normal body, as all bodies are represented as mutable, decaying and vulnerable. Disability, as sculpted by Elliot, is not restricted by medical classifications and diagnoses, and the tragedies embedded in the protagonists’ lives are not causalities of physical, cognitive or mental disability, but are rather connected to social and economic marginalization. This notion was further discussed by Elliot in an interview where he attributed his preoccupation with films about outsiders to the feelings of injustice he experienced as a child. Elliot spoke of the power of filmmaking as a voice for outsiders, who are chronically subjected to a lack of empathy and understanding. This notion is realized in Elliot’s patronage of the Other Film Festival: New Cinema by, with, and about people with a disability (Australian Center for the Moving Image [ACMI], 2010). This analysis of the trilogy seeks to explore the subversive potential in corporeal representations of disability, as opposed to animations that replace the disabled body with abstract and fluid images. The undermining qualities of these claymations may be further examined through crip theory. Alison Kafer (2013) binds feminism, queer theory and crip theory in reading the ways through which the compulsory normative bodies are constructed, whereas others are excluded. Kafer suggests that:

Critical attempts to trace the ways in which compulsory able-bodiedness/able-mindedness and compulsory heterosexuality intertwine in the service of normativity; to examine how terms such as ‘defective,’ ‘deviant,’ and ‘sick’ have been used to justify discrimination against people whose bodies, minds, desires, and practices differ from the unmarked norm. (p. 17)

These shared restrictions and resistances may be used theoretically as they are unveiled.

In the spirit of the cripping–queering methodology (Sandhal, 2003), Jack Halberstam (2011) writes about Ginger, the favorite feminist clay animated character from Chicken Run (dir. Peter Lord and Nick Park, 2000). Ginger, like Dori – the fish with the short-term memory from Finding Nemo (dir. Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich 2003) – reminds us that there is something powerful about making mistakes and failing. These characters combine the sum total of our failures into a collective work that may suffice to beat the victor. Halberstam’s praise of failure as a form of a queer art echoes crip critique:

The concept of practicing failure perhaps prompts us to discover our inner dweeb, to be underachievers, to fall short, to get distracted, to take a detour, to find a limit, to lose our way, to forget, to avoid mastery, and with Walter Benjamin, to recognize that ‘empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. (Benjamin, 1969: 265, in Halberstam, 2011: 121)

‘All losers are the heirs of those who lost before them. Failure loves company’ (Halberstam, 2011: 120). Politicizing failure through queer theory allows further challenging notions of disability by celebrating its ‘crippness’. Similarly to the mentioned characters, the plasticine bodies in the trilogy also fail to fit the unmarked norm.

Elliot’s characters preserve the boundaries of the decaying flesh and offer an alternative to normative victories by celebrating different bodies that fail to fit the ableist model. The somewhat realistic representation of the clay disabilities includes a reference to specific conditions, for example cerebral palsy, asthma, paraplegia, depression, obesity, Asperger’s, alcoholism, macrocephaly, and more. Elliot thus suggests a bodily diversity that derives from the reality of people with disabilities and shows a commitment to that community. Moreover, the positioning of these characters in the intimate familial sphere reclaims the ‘family album’ as a political as well as a personal notion, and calls for the liberating effects of such inclusions.

The diverse representations of disability set in the private space of home are illustrated as inseparable from human existence. These intimate cinematic moments, including sickness, disability and death, are not presented as tragedies but rather as the storyteller’s constituting phenomenological experiences. The death or loss of a family member recurs throughout the trilogy. One of the repeating turning points in the shorts is the death and burial of a pet, foreshadowing the death or loss of the protagonist. In Uncle, for example, the protagonist’s mental and physical decay begins with the demise of his dog Reg. In Cousin, the protagonist buries his three pet snails – Ken, Annie and Max – before his parents die in a car accident and he is moved, losing touch with the storyteller. In Brother, Janette, the family bird is forgotten by him outside and dies. The claymation ends with brother’s death of an asthma attack. Thus, the materiality of clay is emphasized twice and links human transience to that of animals. The trilogy thereby expands the conventional family to other corporeal beings.

The emphasis on the ‘fleshness’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 130–155) of the human body and its potential for decay is central to phenomenological analysis, and is even more cardinal in its meeting point with disability studies. Sara Cohen Shabot (2006) used phenomenological ethics to describe subjectivity as the embodied existence of being in the world. Cohen Shabot suggests that this ‘embodied subjectivity should be described as gendered, mutable, and perishable’ (p. 228). In the trilogy, this principle is realized in the recollection effect, as argued by Kuhn, which embeds the personal into the political features of gender and class. Moreover, the bodies in the films animate what Janet Price and Margarit Shildrick (2006: 74) define as the touch ethics of being in the world with a disability, including the ‘disintegrity and permeability of bodies, the fluctuations and reversibility of touch, the inconsistency of spatial and morphological awareness, the uncertainty of the future’. These bodies are constituted by the dialectics between the materiality of clay and its interactions with the creator’s corporality (for example, his fingerprints on the clay) as seen in stop-motion. Clay and stop-motion complete each other in the animation process and force a physical encounter between creator and material through touch. In addition to the aesthetic aspects, the corporeality of Elliot’s characters is constituted by narratives that offer one certainty of the future: decay and death.

The theme of death and loss, which haunts these clayographies as defined by Elliot (and will be further discussed in the following section), concludes the films and prevents the ‘good’ or ‘happy’ representation of family life. The description of the bodily experience is made possible through the use of clay but, not less importantly, through the use of stop-motion. Similar to the manner in which film-noir elements allow the dark realm of life enhanced by documentary style in the trilogy, stop-motion intensifies this realm through the corporeality of clay. Halberstam (2011) finds that stop-motion enables the darkness of animation to come through, creating a dynamic between motion and stillness, life and death. They argue that ‘there is no question that stop-motion lends animation a spooky and uncanny quality; it conveys life where we expect stillness, and stillness where we expect liveliness’ (p. 178). Moreover, the relations of power, dependency and submission between those in front of the camera and those behind it are the ones we try to escape by going to the cinema. Therefore, ‘the ghostly shifts between action and direction, intention and script, desire and constraint, force upon the viewer a darker reality about the human and about representation in general’ (p. 178). The dark realm of Elliot’s trilogy is not merely aesthetic, but also mental and ideological. The theme of death, which ends each of the shorts, becomes a subversive response to children’s animations that end with capitalist utopias of ‘living happily ever after’. Such utopias are expressed in the idealization of the ‘happy family’, and its construction through the family album.

The failing, decaying and dying bodies of the trilogy are mostly set in the sphere of the private home (excluding uncle’s death in an institution). This suggests that the political subtext of the animations is that physical, mental and cognitive disability is an integral part of our surroundings and should remain so; people with disabilities are and should be inseparable from family and community life. The trilogy portrays a boy’s coming of age alongside beloved family members with disability, told from the point of view of a reminiscing adult who endeavors to keep them alive. Death and disability define corporeal experience, and their artistic and public recognition allows their politicization.

The emphasis on the ‘fleshness’ of the human experience may be interpreted as a continuation of the philosophical and political movement that critiques modern medicine for its segregation and institutionalization of people with disability. This critique of the medical establishment, articulated over the years by theoreticians like Michel Foucault, Roy Porter and others, has exposed that sickness, disability and death are integral to the human experience. Disability remains in the intimacy of the home despite modern medicine’s attempts to transfer it to external, supervised spaces. Death, like disability, is presented by medicine as an enemy or a failure that must be prevented or at least explained. Since modern medicine cannot completely avoid disability and death, its task has become to supervise, restrict and control them (Gabbert and Salud, 2009: 222). In opposition to the hiding of sick, disabled and elderly people in closed and remote institutions as a means of exclusion and control, as seen in Uncle, the trilogy represents these states as an important part of the home, family and community.

Finally, the trilogy’s use of clay in preserving the perishable qualities of the human flesh, including disability, gender and class emphasizes the bodily being in the world. Moreover, the stop-motion’s dialectics between movement and stillness (life and death), reflects childhood memories of diverse bodies and minds, and also death and loss – all of which define human corporality. While these bodily variations appear in animations marketed to children, where they are often displaced to animals, monsters and puppets, and have ‘happy’ endings, in Elliot’s works the adult spectator is directly confronted with the corporality of disability, failure and death.

Disorienting spectatorship in Adam Elliot’s trilogy

In the previous sections, I suggested that the trilogy’s hybridity resides in its integration of realistic and fictional cinematic styles; of documentary and film-noir, as well as in its combination of the symbolic and fragile features of clay. These intersections evoke a glance back into a family photo album, and thus offer a retrospective gaze produced by the conscious state of remembrance. In addition to the binding of recollection with disability and perishable corporeality, the trilogy personalizes this experience by identifying the storyteller/director as ‘Adam’. In Uncle and Cousin, the spectators are presented with ‘Adam’s’ nuclear family and home. This gradual acquaintance exposes the director’s most intimate and constituting memories, and invites the spectator to do the same.

The cinematic proximity to death requires an ethical and political examination, especially when representing people with disabilities, because in mainstream cinema their lives have often been represented as not worth living. Death, in many popular films, offers the eugenic solution of a future without disability and a present in which people with disabilities are culturally perceived as already dead (Darke, 2010: 97–108; Dolmage and DeGenaro, 2005).

Another use of death in narratives about disability is an ending in death, thus evoking spectators’ emotional response. This kind of ending, that uses disability to advocate euthanasia, often sacrifices the experiences of people with disabilities for other political goals. In his pioneering essay about cinema and television, Paul Longmore (2003[1985]) suggests that although some films address the discrimination, ostracism and romantic rejection experienced by people with disabilities – for example Mask (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1985) and The Elephant Man (dir. David Lynch, 1980) – yet the spectators are offered relief in the ‘killing off’ of the protagonist at the end of the film. Longmore rightfully argues that it is easier to feel sorry for a victim of prejudice when he is no longer around (pp. 135–137). In both films – Mask and The Elephant Man – the disabled protagonist struggles with otherness, but death does not enable him to evade this ostracized state.

In opposition to this dubious cinematic history of death and disability, Elliot’s trilogy offers a different kind of relation. His juxtaposition of documentary and fiction, as well as his animation of a clay world in stop-motion, represent a world crafted from decaying material, with various kinds of people who live and die in it. The experiences invoked by the deaths in Elliot’s trilogy are not gazes of pity that allow the able-bodied to feel altruistic and reapprove their belonging to a moral community (Hayes and Black, 2003: 114–132). Instead, the trilogy presents all characters as perishable – ants, dogs, birds, uncles and brothers – offering an ethical spectatorship that evokes the corporeality of the human experience.

Disorientation may be interpreted as a form of crip experience; spectatorship in a hybrid text which avoids mainstream representations, narrative and linear timelines. Disorientation allows the viewer to read disability, sickness, vulnerability and corporeality as the constituting experience of the human body. The restored family photos, as in some of the earlier-mentioned children’s animation, exchange the happy family moments and bourgeois successes for the organizing features of failure or disorientation. Sara Ahmed (2006: 15) suggests that we are oriented when we face the same direction as others:

The lines we follow might also function as forms of ‘alignment,’ or as ways of being in line with others. We might say that we are oriented when we are in line. … We follow the line that is followed by others: the repetition of the act of following makes the line disappear from view as a point from which ‘we’ emerges.

Failure is thus the subject’s inability or lack of desire to be socialized, or, in Ahmed’s words, ‘to be oriented’. This failure or disorientation is not only present in the trilogy’s bodies, which do not fit the norm, but also resides in the combination of fiction and fact, of documentary and film-noir. Thus, the films’ incompliance with these genres is cripping them and consequently making their ‘lines’ become more apparent.

Disorientation is produced through the blurring of boundaries between documentary and film-noir, both relying on a voice-over that signifies the oppositional ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’. Another disorientation made possible by these generic transgressions is the reminiscent tone shared by the two. The retrospective interrupts the straight lines that orient bodies in ableist and heteronormative directions. Recollection enables a disruption of linear and heterogeneous orientation because, as Ahmed suggests, ‘we have hope because what is behind us is also what allows other ways of gathering in time and space, of making lines that do not reproduce what we follow but instead create wrinkles in the earth’ (p. 179). This interference creates wrinkles in the earth and, along with Elliot’s fingerprints, on the clay bodies, providing a spectatorship outside conventional lines of time and space.

This disorientation is used to describe the characters from the ethical point of view of their creator. The ethical documentary gaze, Sobchack (2004: 241–242) argues, is dependent on the spectators’ judgment of the director and his treatment of the presented death. Thanks to Elliot’s apparent love for his subjects and the representation of disability without making it central, the produced gaze does not objectify disability and death. Importantly, the family ties of love and physical resemblance constitute an ethical spectatorship.

Ethical spectatorship, as defined by Sobchack, may be examined through the cinematic style used to represent death. Formalistic documentary films, she asserts, aestheticize space, use pauses, fade and dissolve, constituting moments of commemoration in the form of ‘visual silence’. The trilogy’s static cinematography, used to emphasize the sense of going through a photo album and reminiscing, allows the ethics of a visually-silent gaze. Uncle ends with a sequence of longshots of the protagonist’s corpse, in an armchair, focusing on his body parts and the objects they hold (a crumpet and a cup of tea). Brother, in a similar manner, is a sequence of shots on brother’s corpse as well as on his animals (pet lizard) and objects (a collection of cigarette butts) he was oriented to. These moments focus the humane gaze on the characters and their deaths. These deaths, although not indexical, offer an abstraction of death to invoke the ethics of perishable existence.

Thematically, the trilogy entails three forms of representation of death, evoking different experiences of spectatorships of each of these forms; the sudden and violent death, the suicide and the death ‘in one’s sleep’. The violent death is represented through the death of cousin’s parents in a car accident, anticipated by uncle’s dog’s death in the first film. This form of death is the most prominent in fictional cinema; it is violent and sudden, and takes place in the public sphere. Sobchack argues that cinema ignores the natural death, eroticizing it and marking it as a taboo. The removal of natural death from the public space and discourse, she asserts, creates pornographic images of a casual, violent death (p. 231).

Nevertheless, the deaths by accident – of cousin’s parents and uncle’s dog – are narrated and not visualized. The parents’ death is represented through the image of a phone that delivers the message and a happy family photo. The aunt’s suicide in Uncle is similarly implied rather than represented. The absence of visual evidence of these deaths intensifies the third form of death represented in the trilogy (of uncle and brother), the natural death in the private sphere.

The representation of death in one’s sleep, through uncle and brother, offers a silent visual commemoration and a focus on the body. The characters’ sleep allows illumination and contemplation through the images of their still bodies. In the closing sentence of the trilogy – after the last film’s ‘fade-to-black’ – the narrator says: ‘God saw you were tired and put you to sleep.’ These deaths, however movingly mourned, are presented as almost positive due to their peacefulness.

For the artistic peaceful moment of death to be considered ethical, Sobchack suggests that the representation is foreshadowed by connections to the political. As mentioned, the deaths in the trilogy conclude representations that ally the body with disability, age, gender and class. Disability, like death, is taboo and a visual stereotype because both mark the uncontrollable and the mysterious of the body’s being and non-being. The lack of control is most prominent in cousin’s left arm, yet all the bodies in the trilogy rely on the transformation of the perishable body. These are often emphasized by close-ups of red leg and eye veins, an enlarged head, an out-of-control hand, glasses with an eye-patch, and more. Combined with diverse bodies and minds, classical identifications are prevented and a disoriented spectatorship is offered as an alternative.

Finally, if orientation means entrapment in a foretold past, present and future, thus disorientation may reshuffle these cards. Elliot’s physical and metaphorical fingerprints evoke three types of disorientation. The first is the generic hybridity that shifts the spectators from ‘truth’ to ‘fiction’. The second disorientation is brought about by the representation of a world crafted from diversely bodied and minded, preventing the spectator from rendering any of them as a disposable ‘other’. The third disorientation is realized through the disruption of the linearity and through a retrospective mode that denies eugenic fantasies of a future without disability. The subversion of the remembering gaze lies in its disruption of what Kafer (2013) identifies as the pre-marking of entire populations as futureless and already disabled. These kinds of disorientations invoke a phenomenologically-ethical spectatorship, reflecting on the perishability of the viewer’s own body. The trilogy’s ethics lies in its reflexive gaze at memories of temporary able-bodiedness/mindness, raising questions about the futures of people with disability.

Conclusion: The crip ethics of spectatorship

The exploration of the ethical spectatorship evoked by Adam Elliot’s trilogy through the theoretical kinship between crip disability studies, film studies and phenomenology, allows an examination of the treatment of disability and death by combining claymation, a family-themed semi-documentary and film-noir elements. Elliot’s animation style, drawing from these contradictory genres, invokes a sense of recollection as found in a re-imagined family album. The trilogy’s use of clay and stop-motion depicts a corporeal, fragile and perishable being in the world as experienced ‘through the flesh’. This opens spectatorship to disorientation – the failure to distinguish between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, and align with a ‘happy’ ableist future – offering the viewers a humane and ethical gaze.

The anomalous cinematic style of these clayographies resides in their integration of documentary and film-noir, centering on the private and homely of ‘domestic ethnography’; the contrasted lighting, filmed in black-and-white, refers to the film-noir as well as to the reflective narration shared by both genres. This style phenomenologically evokes intersubjective relations between the films, their creators, and their spectators. The animations draw from the home videos and amateur film’s critique of the ‘happy’ family and adjoin those who are excluded from these narratives as they are ‘out of line’ or ‘inappropriate’. The retrospective gaze the films offer, through their sense of reminiscence, allows Elliot to address personal and political memories of gendered, disabled and perishable loved-ones. The act of remembering, especially the dead, entails the potential of idealization, a characteristic of parts of the mourning process. However, the trilogy offers a nostalgic, yet prudent gaze. The recollection of family enables the substitution of oedipal narratives of parents and children in conflict, as Zimmermann (1995) suggested, with more diverse families. These family members are similar to the storyteller not only in physical resemblance and temperament, as defined by Renov, but also in the vulnerable, sick and perishable body, shared by the spectators.

The trilogy disorients its spectators by its generic oscillations between fact and fiction, its unconventional cinematic representations of disability and death, and its retrospective gaze. If orientation demands a predetermined future and success signifies agreement with capitalist, ableist and heteronormative ideology, this disorientation may offer an alternative. When spectators shift from ‘documentary’ to ‘fiction’ in a nostalgic world lacking a ‘typical’ body or mind, their ability to define an ‘other’ is prevented. All the bodies represented in the trilogy ‘go astray’ from the imagined able-bodied ideal; they are susceptible to sickness, accident, disability and old age. Elliot’s bodies are set on the continuum between the temporarily-able body and the disabled one. Thus, the ethics evoked by the trilogy allows spectators to process the basic aspect of human corporeality (Snyder et al., 2002).

The gaze on death may be an ethical one, as Sobchack (2004) argues, only if the anticipated events intersect with the political – class, racial, gender – aspects of the person presented. However, disability as a phenomenological experience and identity should be included in these diagnosing aspects. Disability is further devalued in a capitalist culture due to its striking non-productivity on the job market, preventing a significant contribution to the market economy. Consumer culture, Mike Featherstone (1991: 186) argues, ‘needs to simulate the fear of decay and incapability which accompanies old age and death by jolting individuals out of complacency and persuading them to consume body maintenance strategies’. However, in the hands of Elliot, disability and class are not feared but reminiscently explored. The ethical gaze is thus evoked by a crip disorientation of capitalist, ableist and heteronormative notions of the ‘happy family’.

Crip disorientation draws from phenomenological ethics that reclaim disability without casting away the ‘flesh’. The trilogy’s ethics lies in its depiction of this subjective embodiment, as Sara Cohen Shabot (2006: 228) suggested, as gendered, mutable and perishable. Nevertheless, the trilogy’s unique disorientation resides in its invitation to the viewer to look through a photo album and read the pasts and the futures of temporary able bodies.

Finally, the recollection of the nameless uncle, cousin and brother, and the tension between fiction and documentary, disorient spectators and allow them to produce their own undocumented images, unfit for the ‘happy’ family photo. Such memories inevitably include disabled bodies, sickness and death. Through its hybrid style – documentary, domestic ethnographies, and film-noir – and through the amplification of the body’s corporeality, the trilogy calls its spectators to produce an ethical recreation of their family albums. The moments worthy of documentation, preservation and memory, as presented in the trilogy, include disability, depression, suicide, sickness, loneliness and death. In addition, the animation extends the genetic lines to include birds, dogs, lizards, snails and neighbors. This semi-autobiographical semi-fictional trilogy presents its viewers with an alternative family photo album. Therefore, ‘memories of you I will always keep’, inviting the spectators to summon their own recollections.