Screening the paralysed body.

• Main Author: Sng, Charlene Hui Ling.
• Other Authors: Brian Keith Bergen-Aurand
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::English
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/42519
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This essay studies the embodied experience of paralyzed bodies in Breaking the Waves (1996), The Sea Inside (2004), and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) in relation to formal aspects of film, in order to begin to form a connection between the ontology of cinema and the ontology of paralysis. “The contemporary fields of body theory, queer theory, feminist studies, disability studies, trauma studies, medical anthropology, narrative ethics, and the study of mourning and loss offer many ways to contemplate the relations between texts and bodies” (Spiegel and Charon 134). As such, I believe that film (as an audiovisual medium) can engage the spectator (at the moment of viewing) in an embodied experience like paralysis in a number of ways. Like Robert F. Murphy relates in The Body Silent, I hope to help others better understand the embodied experience of paralysis, so as to create awareness that disability “is not simply a physical affair…it is…[an] ontology, a condition of…being in the world” (Murphy 90). Disability is like gender, race, class and many other socially constructed categories but so much more—it is not a condition that needs a cure, but rather, demonstrates another way of ‘being in the world’.