And I still haven't done that. Nor have I actually seen her full productions beyond the generous info at her website (that info includes film clips, stills, and scripts, by the way). But let me list a few of the many things that fascinate and thrill me about her work:
1.) Her documentary film The Real Helen Keller explores the famous woman behind the iconic deaf-blind celebrity. Here's the film script (.pdf), which is an excellent read by itself:
Narration: Helen was one of the first people to understand that charity was not the answer. She recognised that disabled people lived in poverty because they were excluded from jobs and that poverty in turn created illness and impairment. She argued that what was needed was radical change.2.) Her short experimental film Frida Kahlo's Corset.
In an era when venereal disease was a leading and unmentionable cause of blindness, she was willing to campaign on this in the press.
Georgina Kleege (author of Blind Rage): People were scandalised when she wrote about it, because she had to write about venereal disease and sexual promiscuity and issues she wasn’t supposed to think about. But at the same time she talks about the issue obviously as a woman’s issue, a woman’s health issue. She also perceived it as an economic issue because she understood that more affluent women would have access to better healthcare, so for her it was information that needed to be given to less affluent women, so that they could make demands of whoever was providing healthcare to them. So she had a mind, it seems to me, that made these sorts of connections that other people weren’t making.
3.) Her project to design the Access Tripod, a tool that would allow wheelchair-using filmmakers to run a handheld camera themselves instead of directing someone else to capture their creative vision.
4.) And her experimentation with ways of making films more accessible to all viewers. Anyone who has ever tried to use the captioning feature tacked onto a commercial film DVD has experienced how separate the accessibility features are from the film itself. Sometimes the captions are ridiculously inaccurate*. Sometimes text is unreadable or descriptions incomplete. Often, it's not an available feature at all. In my family, that means one person who is hearing impaired misses out on much of the dialogue and the shared experience is lessened for us all.
Liz's company is exploring new ways of using captioning, sign language and audio description (ACS) as an integral part of the creative process of her films. Does it make me a film geek that I find this incredibly exciting? Maybe.
Anyway, Liz Crow has been short-listed for a DaDa Award under the category of "New Media" and it's time for the public to vote. The DaDa Awards are sponsored by NWDAF, the North West Disability Arts Forum, based in Liverpool, England. NWDAF is dedicated to promoting equal access to art for all disabled and deaf people, from celebration of disability culture within art to employment to full audience access.
Anyone can vote. Vote before November 27. And check out the other nominees in all eight categories too.
Other links about Liz's work:
Netribution Film Network interview with Liz Crow about Frida Kahlo's Corset
21 Things to Remember, a short film by Liz Crow (link is to "clip 1" with "clip 2" available below it providing audio description)
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*One of my all-time favorite films, Jesus of Montreal, has captioning where something like this frequently occurs: The character on screen clearly says, "I'm 18 years old" while the text just below reads "I'm 23 years of age."
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