• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • About DNS
  • Subscribe to DNS
  • Advertise with DNS
  • Support DNS
  • Contact DNS

Disability News Service

the country's only news agency specialising in disability issues

  • Home
  • Independent Living
    • Arts, Culture and Sport
    • Crime
    • Education
    • Employment
    • Housing
    • Transport
  • Activism & Campaigning
  • Benefits & Poverty
  • Politics
  • Human Rights
You are here: Home / Arts, Culture and Sport / BFI’s free film collection shows 100 years of disabled people on film
Two men in a room watched by a nurse

BFI’s free film collection shows 100 years of disabled people on film

By John Pring on 24th January 2019 Category: Arts, Culture and Sport

Listen

Leading disabled actors and directors and key figures in the disability movement are featured in a new collection of free online content that shows how disabled people have been represented on film in Britain over the last century.

The British Film Institute has released more than 170 documentaries, short films, charity appeals, home movies and news reports dating from 1911 to 2017.

The Disabled Britain on Film collection includes work featuring film-makers and actors such as Liz Crow, Mat Fraser, Jamie Beddard, William Mager and Charlie Swinbourne.

Among the films is Crow’s Resistance, a short drama from 2008, featuring Fraser and Beddard (pictured), about the Nazi’s Aktion T4 euthanasia programme.

The collection also features Heredity in Man, a chilling 1937 film which features Julian Huxley, brother of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley, extolling the principles of eugenics, and arguing that people with learning difficulties – or “defectives” as they were then often termed – were happier living in huge institutions.

He concludes that “it would have been better by far for them and the rest of the community if they had never been born”.

The Huxley film was produced as Hitler was using the same ideas to unleash Aktion T4, which would lead to the murder of hundreds of thousands of disabled people at the hands of Nazi doctors.

Also included in BFI’s free online collection is a 1983 documentary on Ian Dury, in which he talks about how becoming disabled affected his life and music and explains the thinking behind his disability rights punk anthem Spasticus Autisticus.

The collection also features a number of films released by disability charities in an attempt to raise funds from the public, featuring actors such as Sean Connery and Charles Laughton, but also documentaries which feature the voices of disabled people speaking for themselves.

These include Y Gwr O Gwr Aran (1978), a Welsh language portrait of a disabled husband, father and teacher; A Day in the Life of Kevin Donnellon (1972), which documents the life of an 11-year-old thalidomide survivor; and The Smallest Woman in the World (1972), a news report on Joyce Carpenter, from Bromsgrove, who at the time was thought to be the world’s shortest woman.

There is also a smaller collection of films to rent, including the 14-minute Disabled, made in 1967, which features a three-minute interview with a young Paul Hunt, outlining his vision for a society where disabled people have independence, choice and control.

The interview was carried out five years before Hunt – who would play a key role in the campaign against institutional discrimination – was to co-found the ground-breaking Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS).

At the time, Hunt was living in the Leonard Cheshire home Le Court, where he and other residents rebelled against the restrictive regime.

He speaks in the film of how he was only living in an institution because he had “no effective choice”, and compared the situation in the UK with that in Denmark, where a development of flats in Copenhagen allowed disabled people to live independently.

He says in the film: “Some sort of realistic financial help is a priority, and also the provision of more nursing help to people in their own homes.”

He adds: “In general, the attitude of the general public could do with a little changing.

“One does meet a lot of misunderstanding, and prejudice, really, from people.”

 

A note from the editor:

Please consider making a voluntary financial contribution to support the work of DNS and allow it to continue producing independent, carefully-researched news stories that focus on the lives and rights of disabled people and their user-led organisations.

Please do not contribute if you cannot afford to do so, and please note that DNS is not a charity. It is run and owned by disabled journalist John Pring and has been from its launch in April 2009.

Thank you for anything you can do to support the work of DNS…

Share this post:

TwitterFacebookWhatsAppReddit

Tags: Aktion T4 BFI Disabled Britain on Film Ian Dury Jamie Beddard Liz Crow Mat Faser

Related

Round-up: Coffey rejects ESA call, face covering exemptions, BFI presses Reset… and sunflower lanyards
30th July 2020
Coronavirus: Action celebrates disability arts while highlighting pandemic concerns
18th June 2020
Disabled talent calls on film industry to act now on disability
6th February 2020

Primary Sidebar

Access

Latest Stories

DPOs ‘shocked and dismayed’ over survey, as government faces threat of legal action

Philippa Day: Secret DWP report reveals errors ‘that led to disabled mum’s death’

Philippa Day: Capita made changes to PIP assessments after young mum’s death

Philippa Day: DWP civil servant denies PIP ‘culture of scepticism’

Silence from police chiefs over face mask exemptions, despite gap in guidance

Call for urgent immigration action over care worker shortage

Documentary exposes hostility… and a need for widespread change in attitudes

Statistics regulator refuses to push DWP over impact of universal credit

Philippa Day: Young mother ‘took her own life after being told to attend PIP assessment’

Philippa Day: DWP phone agent ignored sobbing claimant who later ‘took her own life’

Advice and Information

DWP: The case for the prosecution

Readspeaker

Footer

The International Standard Serial Number for Disability News Service is: ISSN 2398-8924

  • Accessibility Statement
  • Privacy Policy
  • Site map
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Copyright © 2021 Disability News Service

Site development by A Bright Clear Web