My publication is the outcome of a project exploring visual characterisation and narrative within film surrounding mental disability. I spent most of my project exploring how setting, design and visual motifs within films that cover mental disability exist to construct and communicate certain sentiments and experiences that are too abstract or directly related to the phenomenology of disability to be centred within the story beats of the plot- within my final piece I wanted to use this imagery and explore through text and illustration the basic narratives that provide these motifs and aesthetic fields with meaning and with their connotations (emotionally, socially, visually) within the context of mental disability in a primary, first person or non-observational lens. I believe that the specific meaning of these films as they approach mental disability is something that can be incredibly easily understood as simply atmospheric or emotive in non-specific ways to non-disabled people as the experiences depicted are not the primary subject of the overwhelming majority of these films- and so I wanted to create a piece that explicitly tied the visual languages of disabled experience on film with the narratives and frameworks that they can often represent within the life of a person with a mental disability.
I wanted to use the imagery of mental disability within film to expand upon and explicitly present the narratives, experiences and frameworks that they draw from and alluded within the everyday life of a person with a mental disability.