Troublesome Gazes: Filmic Depictions of Non-normative Bodies
Matylda Szewczyk
mszewczyk@uw.edu.plUniversity of Warsaw (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5029-3935
Abstract
The article is an academic review of Adam Cybulski’s book “Kłopotliwe” ciała. Strategie przedstawiania fizycznej “anormalności” we współczesnym filmie fikcji [“Troublesome” Bodies: Strategies of Presenting Physical “Abnormality” in Contemporary Fiction Film] (2021). The book is a comprehensive study of disability in film, preceded by chapters explaining the author’s methodology and discussing cultural discourses of disability. The following chapters concentrate on historical ways of presenting disability in film, from its beginnings till the contemporary times, marked, according to the author, by the making of David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980). In the second part of the book, contemporary examples of films are assigned to four strategies of presenting disability in film, introduced by Cybulski: sentimental-affirmative, voyeuristic, panoptical and metatextual. Constituting, above all, an analysis based in film studies, the Cybulski’s book also asks questions on the relationships between the construction of filmic gaze and social reality, thus becoming a discussion on the cultural role of the medium.
Keywords:
body in cinema, disability in cinema,, narrative strategies, cinema history, modern cinemaReferences
Cybulski, A. (2021). „Kłopotliwe” ciała. Strategie przedstawiania fizycznej „anormalności” we współczesnym filmie fikcji. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego.
Google Scholar
Kwiatkowska, P. (2011). Somatografia. Ciało w obrazie filmowym. Kraków: Korporacja Ha!art.
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Authors
Matylda Szewczykmszewczyk@uw.edu.pl
University of Warsaw Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5029-3935
PhD; she specializes in media studies, film history and selected practices of contemporary visual culture (especially relations between visual culture and science). She is interested in the ways in which images both reflect and influence cultural changes, working especially within the area of reproductive medicine, images of foetal development, pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. Author of W stronę wirtualności. Praktyki artystyczne kina współczesnego [Towards Virtuality: Artistic Practices of Contemporary Cinema] (2015), co-editor of Sztuka w kinie dokumentalnym [Art in Documentary Cinema] (2016) and Cięcie ciał. Ruchome obrazy [Cutting Bodies: Moving Images] (2018). Head of the Section for Film and Visual Culture at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw.
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