"It's the Same World": A Case Study on Projection and Gaze

"It's the Same World": Film produced by the UN for the 1981 International Year of Disabled Persons (IYDP)

It's the Same World: On Disability, Projection, and Gaze

The postwar era was defined by the specter of destruction and violence – a daily environment that lasted far beyond the end of hostilities in 1945. Disability, like the rubble in Europe and Asia, was also a social and physical legacy of war that redefined national and international political systems. The international community needed to implement new policies and programs to deal with the millions of injured veterans returning home. Following the success of other yearlong awareness initiatives such as the International Year of Women in 1975 and the International Year of the Child in 1979, the UN decided to approach the question of the world’s largest minority with the International Year of Disabled Persons (IYDP) in 1981.[1] The UN commissioned a film to coincide with the year, in an effort to present the world with “a plea for full participation and equality for the disabled” and a message of disability prevention and consciousness-raising.[2]  The resulting product – 1981’s It’s the Same World – was the latest in a long line of UN short documentaries from the era that sought to promote what Glenda Sluga calls “an international outlook among a transnational public” through cinema.

Film production at the UN was often a multi-agency affair that needed to reconcile the distinct and overlapping interests and budgets of the different agencies and private companies. The Joint United Nations Information Committee (JUNIC), which oversaw inter-agency cooperation in developing and disseminating public information, organized funding and developed content for It’s the Same World. The UN often outsourced production for its films to private production companies – It’s the Same World was the work of Dick Young Productions, New York City-based producers that proved to be the UN’s go-to company for short documentary films in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

A World of Caricatures: Defining "The Disabled"

The film begins with a close-up shot of a young girl shyly looking into the camera. As the camera pans out, she begins to sing and dance, performing a choreographed sequence with three others, and the voiceover declares that they are all deaf. A haunting electronic soundtrack is interspersed with the disembodied sounds of deaf children and later, the cries of babies. Over the course of twenty minutes, the film cuts from one village to another, hopping around the globe, and offering brief, stylized glimpses of what it describes as the lives of disabled children. A discordant organ plays over one scene, as lepers, shrouded in darkness, pray and sleep. One child walks toward the camera, leaping into the frame. The scene cuts to a silhouette of a child, her head craned back as she takes medicine against a moonlit backdrop. The scene is macabre in its composition. It is reminiscent of the visual language of freak shows – the long tradition of depicting the disabled as objects of morbid fascination. A scene from a Lebanese amusement park where a deaf boy “pantomimes” his aspirations, complete with carousel music only adds to the film’s carnivalesque exhibition of its subjects. The voiceover explains that the boy is uneducated, making a living selling Chiclets at an amusement park to buy a ticket to his favorite ride, and seeks to go away with the camera crew – a life with seemingly no purpose or meaning, and one that the film interprets merits nothing but escape.[3]

The voiceover and social workers in It’s the Same World emphasize ensuring that the disabled ultimately become “productive” – a pedagogical and institutional effort to give them opportunities to become “useful members of society.”[4] This goal is the result of what the film offers as a solution to the “problem” of disability: harmony, presented through the image of happy blind kids playing with “normal” kids in Indonesia.[5] This is a consistent theme in the film: to define and create the material, tangible value of the disabled within societies. Through an inherently clinical documentary gaze, the film imposes definitions and sensibilities on communities and societies where self-consciousness and self-identification of “the disabled” as a distinct political entity, with common goals and interests, had not been realized. Few of the film’s subjects are adults – the vast majority are children, with their sentiments and aspirations expressed through caretakers, social workers, parents, and other adult authority figures. The sentimentality of the voiceover and the authority of a narrator far removed from the lives of the children depicted demonstrates an inherent imbalance in power and agency between the film’s “vulnerable” subjects and the observer – the viewing audience, the film’s producers, and the commissioning organization.

Humanitarian Imagery and Subject Agency

This imbalance in power is codified in the film’s outline: “The narration will suggest solutions while the images present the problems.”[6] The narrator holds the sole power of assessment in the film, providing the context through which the viewer interprets the subjects. The faces and images of “problem” are from the villages and societies of the Global South – the montage of disabled children in poor and disadvantaged communities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The only Western disabled faces come at the film’s conclusion, in the form of a surprise reveal. First is a cameo of Terry Fox, the young Canadian who had lost a leg to cancer and had entered public consciousness with his challenge to run across Canada. Then, the film attaches a body to the narrator of the film, revealing the narrator to be blind singer-composer Tom Sullivan.

Yet, while the two white men have more agency in the film (they have speaking roles), they serve as no more than poster children – defined by others as representatives of a diverse and fluid group. As Monika Baar notes, “‘elite’ or ‘privileged’ members of [‘vulnerable’] groups… often became the international spokespersons of their own group and made appearances in UN media, because they had access to unusual opportunities, like travelling abroad or an education in a Western country.” Privilege and greater access to celebrity and recognition provided both a larger voice and the burden of having to speak for an entire community.

The film’s tendency to simplify its subjects in its sweeping montage is reflected in the production outline’s bare-bones checklist for the film’s cinematography: “Ramps. Wheelchairs. Special Schools. Facilities. Handcarts, canes, crutches, caretakers, cautions, sympathy, misconceptions…”[7] These are decontextualized fragments, images, and vague concepts meant to elicit reactions and be easily digestible and consumed by the gaze of the non-disabled viewer. This imagery doesn’t exist in isolation. Much as his outline for “It’s the Same World” had begun with a list of different fragments of what he and his production team saw as a disabled person’s life, Young’s script for 1981’s “Journey for Survival,” on water access, begins with a similar montage of decontextualized images and tropes. “Dead animals,” an “African woman with starving baby,” a “water-bearers montage,” and a “Tanzanian woman” populate Young’s script and vision for the film.[8] These tropes persist in the UN’s films because they are easy for the audience to identify and understand. They provide a specific moral and emotional framework in which to react and narrate the problem in need of attention.[9] The filmmakers’ guiding vision in the outline reveals as much: “None of the film will be ‘educational’ in the traditional sense of facts, programs, and statistics. Instead, our intent will be to reach the viewer’s mind…through his or her heart.”[10] The film, and its portrayal of its subjects, was intended as an exercise in eliciting visceral audience emotions, not an intellectual appeal.

The initial draft did not pass the UN’s internal channels without some controversy. Charles W. Morrow, the director of the World Health Organization’s Division of Public Information in Geneva expressed concern about the film’s simplistic take on disability. In a telegram to Doss on June 20, Morrow noted,

We are concerned that emphasis on disabled child – opening scene – crippled beggar – blind piano player – perpetuate stereotypes. Message that greater access should be provided for disabled of course provides quote easy out unquote avoiding difficult question of true change in attitudes towards disabled. It should be noted in this connection that no repeat no society is made up of quote normal unquote people.[11]

Morrow had, perhaps inadvertently, tapped into one of humanitarian imagery’s glaring contradictions. Of course, sentimental images of innocent, disabled, and vulnerable populations could evoke the sympathies of the audience. But would this sympathy be self-serving, inviting pity rather than translating complex self-reflection into institutional change?

Humanitarian Imagery as Curation 

As Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno note in Humanitarian Photography: A History,

Humanitarian imagery only rarely gestured at political causation. And if it did, it would not – likely could not – convey political and social complexities. Indeed, the effectiveness of humanitarian rhetoric appears to depend on its apparent simplicity and directness of emotional address. It focuses viewer attention on suffering, framing it as unjust yet amenable to remedy. It erases distracting political or social detail that would complicate the duty to act. In this sense, humanitarian imagery is moral rhetoric masquerading as visual evidence. As such, humanitarian photography was, and is, politically and morally charged terrain.[12]

It’s the Same World’s lack of “political causation” was perhaps due to the very political nature through which the films were produced and developed. UN films from the era went through a pre-approval process from national governments that had consented to filming within their borders. For example, the WHO’s 1984 Film on Leprosy was cleared for release by the Government of India only after the organization had ensured any mention of droughts in the Tamil Nadu region was “kindly… deleted.”[13] Content was privy to the politics and special interests of individual national governments that sought both material aid for humanitarian causes and preservation of its image abroad. Thus, films like It’s the Same World were products of curation, told through the eyes of multiple institutions, not its subjects. Any complexities were edited – actual political and social detail scrubbed from the script – to accommodate the demands of different political actors and as a matter of convenience. As Morrow had hinted in his telegram, the systemic and institutional structures that perpetuated discrimination against the disabled were thus left unexamined in the film. Introspection invited the prospect of collective responsibility for oppression and intolerance, and the producers sought not to complicate viewers’ conscience and moral position.

While the International Year of Disabled Persons was met with criticism over insensitivity, It’s the Same World was received relatively warmly. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject) in 1980. It was Dick Young’s second of three consecutive nominations for UN-contracted documentaries – his first, “Remember Me,” made for the International Year of the Child, had been nominated the year before; the third, “Journey for Survival,” on safe water access, came in 1981. Its registry with the Academy – long Hollywood’s gatekeepers and cultural arbiters – suggests the film’s relevance (or at least resonance) in the mainstream, beyond the realm of public health administrators and officials. Furthermore, it was a harkening back to the historical relationship between Hollywood and the UN during the early years of the postwar era.[14] UN communications staff were swept up in the excitement of the film’s exposure. In a letter to Charles Morrow, Leila H. Doss, a Director in the UN’s Department of Public Information, gushed at the wide public attention to the film. She wrote, “I understand that when it was shown in Canada, the switch-board of the television station was jammed with calls for several hours…. The Canadian distributor says he’s had more success with this than with any other he has handled.”[15] Morrow too, who had previously expressed concern about the film, was pleased with the outcome, praising its message of “prevention” and “appropriate rehabilitation.”[16]

Humanitarian Imagery as Projection?

The Western audience that saw It’s the Same World in 1981 – those who had called into stations in Canada or seen the film in Europe and North America – were members of a culture where images of disability, the maimed, the crippled, and the invalid were images hidden and traditionally reserved to shock and induce pity. As witnesses to postwar decolonization and violence, and living only half a decade removed from the Vietnam War, the public’s vision of the disabled was informed by images meant to elicit visceral reactions: the recurring image of a young Third Worlder with the cleft lip, disfigured, misshapen body, or missing limb from a landmine, and the image of a maimed soldier – a once proud, strong man stripped of his faculties. These were ultimately stories of people in faraway places, in very specific and relatively uncommon situations; stories meant to assuage an insecurity with bodies and self – the perpetual fear of knowing that one’s precious mobility can be stripped at any moment. As the film notes, disability “respects no borders, nor do they know political, social, or economic boundaries” – disability can strike anyone.[17] And thus, It’s the Same World and its images of children elicit a sense of voyeur – one that stems from historical morbid fascination with the disabled body. It’s the Same World, and by extension, the 1981 International Year of Disabled Persons, was as much the product of the able-bodied West’s collective need to reaffirm a completeness of self amidst suffering, disabled bodies as it was a video to raise awareness for the IYDP. Its enthusiastic reception by a predominantly Western audience provided a sounding board that reaffirmed both the UN’s internationalism to the global public and the potential of media to extend the UN’s visual identity.

Thus, It’s the Same World serves as a microcosm of the prejudices, characteristics, and gaze of the photographs of “the disabled” presented and analyzed in this project, amplified by widespread visibility and glowing public reception.