What is the image that comes to mind when you consider people with disabilities in movies?

Is it Dustin Hoffman as the autistic brother in Rain Man or the multicultural cast of disabled veterans in The Men?

Throughout his career, David Mitchell, executive director of the Institute on Disabilities in Temple University’s College of Education, has looked at how people with disabilities have been portrayed in the media. He will provide the keynote lecture at the conference “Injured or Transgressive Body? Living the Force of Disability in Cinema, Arts and Sport” on March 21 in Milan, Italy. At the invitation of the Milanese Government, Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, a filmmaker and recognized Disability Studies scholar, will present “Body Genres: An Anatomy of Disability in Film.”


Mitchell and Snyder are co-founders of Brace Yourselves Productions, which has produced several documentaries on people with disabilities, their histories and how issues concerning them are portrayed in film.

Those portrayals have changed dramatically over the years due to two factors: advancements in special effects technology, and the advent of the hand-held digital camera, Mitchell said.

“There used to be a time where you had to have a disability to portray someone with a disability in film,” Mitchell said. “Special effects technology has changed all that.”

For example, when the movie The Best Years of Our Lives was made in the late 1940s, disabled actor (and winner of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor) Harold Russell played the role of the sailor who had lost both of his hands. It wasn’t until special effects technology had improved that actors like Samuel L.

Jackson in Unbreakable, Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot and Cuba Gooding Jr. in Men of Honor were able to portray people with disabilities without being disabled themselves, Mitchell said.

The second technological advance that has helped expand the presence of people with disabilities in film, the hand-held digital camera, has allowed certain stories to be self-told, Mitchell said.

“It’s the democratization of film,” Mitchell said. “When high-end equipment becomes accessible to people who didn’t have access in the past, the opportunity to control their image becomes more real.”

While in Milan, Mitchell’s co-creator, film director Sharon Snyder, will be screening one of the team’s documentaries, A World Without Bodies. The 2002 film tells the rarely heard story about how the Nazis perfected the mass murder techniques later used on 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.

“The Nazis used people with disabilities to perfect their mass killing techniques with little popular opposition,” Mitchell said. “The killings began through forced starvation and lethal injections, and ultimately ended with hundreds of thousands systematically murdered in gas chambers.”

Between 1939 and 1946, about 300,000 people with disabilities were killed. Mitchell explained that the horror continued for a year beyond the end of World War II. “Allied troops surrounded these institutions, but didn’t enter to stop the killings,” Mitchell said.

A World Without Bodies has been screened at several International Disabilities Film Festivals and is one of four documentary films produced by Brace Yourselves, including: Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back (1996), which won the grand prize at the New Zealand Disabilities Film Festival in 1996; Self-Preservation: The Art of Riva Lehrer (2004); and Disability Takes on the Arts (2004).

These documentaries and Mitchell's writings on the topic are the basis for the Institute for Disabilities' proposed general education class on disability and history of American film. The course will look at the cinematic history of people with disabilities from the beginnings of cinema to the present day.

For more information about David Mitchell’s films and all programs of the Institute on Disabilities, visit www.disabilities.temple.edu.