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Cinema has a painful paradox at its heart. This is an artistic medium with a canon that celebrates outsiders, whether fictional misfits or the renegade auteurs behind them. Yet, over a century out of the gate, the neurotypical gaze remains the norm. But thanks in part to the efforts of three collectives, that may be changing. New visionary spaces are being opened up and everyone is welcome.
In most other respects, experimental film The Stimming Pool, mixed-reality experience Impulse: Playing with Reality, and curation initiative Stims Collective are very different from each other.
‘The design of the project was to put cinema in the laboratory rather than autism,’ says artist-filmmaker Steven Eastwood who co-directed The Stimming Pool with a group of autistic artists, the Neurocultures Collective, aka Sam Chown-Ahern, Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Robin Elliott-Knowles and Lucy Walker.
The Stimming Pool arrives at the BFI London Film Festival after an award-winning run on the festival circuit. Each artist devised their own contribution: Elliott-Knowles introduces a lost horror animation at a B-movie film club; Chown-Ahern has an eye-tracking test that shifts into being about focus itself; Lucy inhabits a magical border collie; Brown satirises the testing process; and Bradburn conceives of an autistic camera (wielded by Aftersun cinematographer Gregory Oke) that learns how to ‘stim’ – a repetitive movement that soothes anxiety but which many autistic people have been socialised to mask.
We want to everyone to feel comfortable, not just neurodivergent people
The result are hypnotic threads that weave in and out of a recognisable reality with relaxed rhythms that evoke one of the group’s stated influences, Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. ‘It’s not a “here is what autism is” film,’ says Chown-Ahern, ‘because that would be rehashing what has been done before’.
Bradburn agrees: ‘A lot of films produced by autism charities are almost ethnographic and reinforce the stereotype that we are so different that we need to be understood in a more intellectual, academic or medical sense.’ She notes that feeling trapped by a label is not an experience exclusive to autism. The film, she stresses, is for ‘anyone who feels like it resonates with them’.
May Abdalla and Barry Gene Murphy from the immersive storytelling studio Anagram disagree good-naturedly over the value of labels. They co-directed Impulse: Playing With Reality, a 40-minute mixed-reality narrative that absorbs the viewer (or player) into the conflicting impulses and heightened sensitivities of ADHD. ‘If there was a way of doing this project without saying “ADHD”, it would have been preferable,’ says Abdalla. ‘Although people uncover revelations by finding “I am in this group” and there’s relief in that, there's a risk that we then become servants to this new line of terms. So, what can this medium do to say, ‘Let's go into the fog of that feeling.'”
The winner of Venice Film Festival’s Immersive Award, Impulse combines interactive game-play – the opening section replicates ADHD overwhelm all too well – with soothing explanatory tissue offered by a narrator named Echo (Tilda Swinton) and four animated documentary stories from Omar, Errol, Leanne and Tara, individuals the directors found via ADHD charities and doctors, and whose extreme life choices made new sense post-diagnosis. ADHD is over-represented in the prison population, and just as Goliath, Anagram’s previous mixed-reality narrative about schizophrenia, was taken up in teaching hospitals, the plan is to take Impulse into prisons.
We’re drawing on something extra-sensory
That said, the pair are adamant that their goals are less to do with social advocacy and more to do with the possibilities of this new technology. ‘We’re drawing on something extra-sensory,’ says Murphy, ‘Once you’ve submitted to this virtual world, you're more open to a lot of things. You can engage with your body and the weight of your feet.’
Anagram is already planning its next mixed-reality experience, Amorphous, about body image. Abdalla says: ‘The itch we're trying to scratch is about representing an inner reality.’
A capacity to represent inner reality is one reason why cinema is often cited as an ‘empathy machine’, yet there is a bitter irony to the fact that sub-groups in most need of empathy are frequently flattened into stereotypes. Ableism is alive and well on screen, whether it’s the ‘better off dead?’ disabled tropes found in the 2016 romantic drama Me Before You, Sia’s autism drama Music, or the inspiration porn of Dustin Hoffman’s autistic character in Rain Man.
On the flip side, cinema still has the power to redress this, as the newly formed Stims Collective did at their recent launch screening at BFI Southbank.
This Is Going To Be Big is a documentary that feels like a clarion call from a utopia. At a school in Australia, teenagers with intellectual disabilities, ranging from autism spectrum disorder to generalised anxiety disorder, are putting on a musical. The film teases out the histories of student cast members, Halle Josh, Elyse and Chelsea, during the countdown to their performance. Meanwhile, a picture emerges of a trusting student-teacher dynamic built on intimate accommodation of individual support needs. Within this caring and supportive environment, the teenagers shine and their characters emerge as charismatic and highly cinematic.
We didn’t have spaces like this when I was growing up
‘I found it very emotional as we didn't have spaces like this when I was growing up,’ says Lillian Crawford introducing the film with Georgia Kumari Bradburn (deviser of the autistic camera on The Stimming Pool). As the Stims Collective, Crawford, Kumari Bradburn and Dr Ethan Lyon share a mission to curate and create relaxed spaces for neurodiverse audiences.
The film is a perfect mission statement for what the collective is striving for: events that are as mindful of their audiences’ comfort as they are of conventional programming considerations. Due to the infinite diversity of both neurodiversity and humanity in general, this is a moving target. As Crawford says: ‘We want to create a space where everyone feels comfortable, not just neurodivergent people. If I can make one person go to the cinema who would not otherwise have gone, that’s all I want.’
The Stimming Pool screens at London Film Festival on October 11, 13 and 16, Folkestone Documentary Festival on October 19 and Cambridge Film Festival on October 26 and 29. A complementary exhibition is live at The Grundy Gallery in Blackpool until December 14.
Impulse: Playing With Reality can be accessed at London’s Southbank Centre from October 12-27 as part of the LFF, and is available now online for MetaQuest users.
Stims Collective’s next relaxed screening will be Battleship Potemkin, plus intro and discussion, at the BFI Southbank, October 29.