Joaquim Jordà and Núria Villazán's Mones com la Becky [Monkeys Like Becky] (1999) is a challenging film whose analysis contributes to the wider field of disability studies in two ways. First, it anticipates the development of what Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell (2010) have called the "new disability documentary cinema," and second, it delivers this term into an explicitly global mode. In pursuing these two themes, this article attends to the layered ways in which the filmmakers exploit the formal elements of film to represent cognitive difference. 1

As evident in what follows, Mones com la Becky is clearly not an example of what Mitchell and Snyder would call an "introduction to my disability" film. 2 Due to its formal experimentation and its lack of a single narrative arc it is difficult to concisely describe the content of the film for those who have not seen it. Any such attempt has to disentangle three relatively autonomous strands of interest that together comprise Mones com la Becky. From one perspective, the film is a meditation on the horrific international history of the lobotomy. The title's mention of 'Becky' comes from the name of the chimpanzee who was an early victim of prefrontal lobotomy in the US. 3 Intrigued by news of this event, Portuguese neurologist António Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz (1875-1955) developed a leucotomy procedure that was applied to humans and subsequently became a widespread practice in the United States, due to the efforts of Walter Freeman (1895-1972). 4 Judged within this historical frame, it is the Portuguese scientist who is the subject of Jordà and Villazán's film. 5 Consistent with what viewers might expect from a biopic, the violent attack that ended Egas Moniz's life finds its way into the film. An English-language review of Mones com la Becky published in Variety magazine in 2000 concisely summarized the scientist's story for readers in these two sentences: "Moniz won a Nobel Prize in 1949 for pioneering work in psychosurgery while also lobotomizing up to 20 patients a year, driving a nail-like instrument through their skulls as part of a drive to empty Portugal's prisons and hospitals. He died after being shot 18 times by an ex-patient, upon which he uttered the immortal words, 'It wasn't you who shot me, but your illness.'" 6 Moving far beyond the expectations of a biographical documentary, indeed, Mones com la Becky distills something compellingly theatrical and at once cinematic from the leucotomizing scientist's manner of death. In the process, Jordà and Villazán deliver what might be a simple indictment of the violence of ableist scientific discovery—powerful but somewhat one-dimensional—unto a more personal and complex mode of storytelling. The filmmakers' exploration of this historical figure employs research, interviews and theatrical segments—and includes dialogue in four languages (Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, English)—fashioning a visual argument that the social history of cognitive disability is in fact already global.

From another perspective, the film records the creative energies of a specific group of people living with schizophrenia and residing in the Therapeutic Community of the Malgrat del Mar Crisis Center in Barcelona. While the story of Egas Moniz introduces viewers to an embodied scientific history rooted in the most perverse, violent and colonizing forms of cognitive ableism, by contrast, the story of the Malgrat del Mar Crisis Center employs visual cinematic evidence to underscore the autonomy, self-direction and creative potential of populations living with schizophrenia. 7 Here the filmmakers make the intriguing decision to include Portuguese actor Jôao Maria Pinto in the documentary's action. The film includes a number of staged reenactments dramatizing Egas Moniz's life—starring Jôao Maria Pinto and set apart by their black-and-white presentation—that almost appear to be filmed in a biographical mode. 8 Yet Pinto's role is also to direct the center's residents in the scripting and production of a play centering on the historical figure of Egas Moniz, in which the actor himself holds the starring role of the scientist. 9 Jordà and Villazán's film spends significant time with Pinto and the residents as they develop and practice their lines. The finale of the film captures their theatrical performance of Egas Moniz's death scene, in front of a live audience, complete with Pinto's delivery of the line "It wasn't you who shot me, but your illness," and subsequently even the cast and crew watching a recording of that same performance. The fact that Pinto was diagnosed as manic depressive as a result of having a cerebral tumor extracted adds to the filmmakers' decision to cast him in a film whose other aspects center around cognitive difference. 10 Mones com la Becky's culminating sequence drives home the fact that representations mediate our engagement with disability history just as they mediate our engagement with disability art.

Evidencing still another perspective on Mones com la Becky, viewers will note the marked appearance of Joaquim Jordà himself in the film, a decision that blurs the lines between filmmaker and documentary subject. Many consider this to be Jordà's cinematic masterpiece precisely because of the way it prompts consideration of his personal experience with, and progressive cinematic interest in, material experiences of cognitive disability. His interest in disability representations in particular can be traced back to the fact that in 1997 he suffered a cerebral ictus, which caused him to experience agnosia and alexia. The final film he created before his death from cancer in 2006—Més enllà del mirall, which Núria Villazán finished editing after his passing—introduces these autobiographical elements more deliberately into a choral consideration of the material experience of cognitive disabilities. 11 But as Carles Guerra points out, Mones com la Becky is "el primer documental de su filmografía que asume la enfermedad del propio cineasta como una condición insoslayable" [the first documentary of his filmography in which the illness of the filmmaker himself is an unavoidable point of reference]. 12 In this documentary one can see a burgeoning awareness of how normative social conditions come to be enforced through a historical legacy of cognitive ableism. Jordà's insistence, soon after its release, that the film is "una defensa del hecho de ser diferente" [a defense of the fact of being different] helps to frame Mones com la Becky as a salvo launched against the historical legacy of ableist science. 13

In the film, the three perspectives outlined here become fused into a coherent, if complex, documentary meditation on cognitive difference. The narratives of the historical figure Egas Moniz, of the dramatic project developed by the residents with schizophrenia at Malgrat del Mar, and of Jordà's own personal story, all work together, prompting viewers to rethink their understandings of the social experience of cognitive disability. The first section that follows, "Joaquim Jordà and the New Disability Documentary Cinema" introduces readers to the director's cinematic work, signaling the biographical and artistic signposts that mark his progressive turn toward the creation of challenging disability documentary. Mones com la Becky must be seen as a forerunner of the new disability documentary cinema as described by Mitchell and Snyder (2010) in that it highlights the value of ensemble thinking identified by the authors. It also serves as evidence for Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's insights into the "generative potential" of disability images and the productive work involved in the act of Staring (2009). Next, "Layered Documentary Modes in Mones com la Becky" investigates the film's artistic structure as a piece of documentary filmmaking. In particular, the intriguing use of sound, editing, and, most of all, embedded theatrical reenactment, prove challenging to the underlying assumptions regarding passive spectatorship that so often obtain in film criticism. Engaging with Bill Nichols' accounting of the modes of documentary representation reveals that Jordà's "documentary of creation" departs from the expository and observational modes. Instead, it draws on elements of the interactive, reflexive and poetic modes in order to layer themes of (self-)representation over its content. The brief concluding section, "Toward a Global Articulation of Second-Wave Disability Studies" synthesizes these points of view on the director and the film in order to reflect on the global potential of second-wave disability studies scholarship.

Joaquim Jordà and the New Disability Documentary Cinema

Joaquim Jordà Catalá (1935-2006) was an accomplished Catalan scriptwriter, editor, translator and filmmaker. 14 Importantly, he became one of the leaders of the Barcelona School of filmmaking, which in the 1960s drew inspiration from the French New Wave of the 1950s and led to the Master del Documental de Creación program in the Instituto de Educación Contínua at the Universidad de Pompeu Fabra de Barcelona. 15 Jordà's early films include the short El día de los muertos [Dead Day] (1960, w/ Julián Marcos) and his first full-length feature Dante no es únicamente severo (1967, w/ Jacinto Esteva). 16 He is most well-known, however, for what might be called his essayistic cinema. 17 This trend toward the essay film is evident in products created over the course of his career: Numax presenta… [Numax Presents…] (1979), El encargo del cazador [The Hunter's Task] (1990), Mones com la Becky (1999), De nens [On Children] (2003), Vint anys no és res [Twenty Years Is Nothing] (2005), and Més enllà del mirall [Beyond the Mirror] (2006). The reputation he cultivated through these and other films earned him a number of prizes, from the Premio Nacional de Cine de Cataluña in 2000—awarded shortly after the release of Mones com la Becky in 1999—to the Premio Nacional de Cinematografía, awarded posthumously in 2006. 18

Jordà's legacy is decidedly multi-dimensional and goes beyond his films themselves to entangle with larger questions facing the Catalan film industry and its continuity. Fernando Canet has written that "With his 1999 film Mones com la Becky/Monkeys Like Becky Joaquim Jordà inaugurates a fertile production wing for the Catalan university programme [at Universidad Pompeu Fabra]," thus underscoring that "one of those who established the basis for the Barcelona School in the 1960s becomes the promoter of a new school that once again finds its epicenter in the city" some thirty years later. 19 That said, his contributions to the documental de creación, a technique that was not often used in Spain at the time, are the pinnacle of his artistic legacy. 20 Mones com la Becky perhaps serves as a paradigmatic example of this cinematic style. Also important, it was released in the context of a surge in documentary filmmaking in Spain. That is, this cinematic form was enjoying greater acceptance and awareness as a result of critical interest in such films as José Luis Guerín's Innisfree (1990) and Víctor Érice's El sol del membrillo [The Quince-Tree Sun] (1992). 21 As a documentary representation of schizophrenia and cognitive difference, the film has undoubtedly influenced later filmmakers such Ione Hernández, who created the informational documentary 1% esquizofrenia [1% Schizophrenia] (2007), and Abel García Roure, who was himself a student of Jordà's prior to filming Una cierta verdad [A Certain Truth] (2008). 22 Unlike these later films, however, Mones com la Becky's reputation in the critical literature is assured as an archetypal example of challenging documentary structure and stylistic innovation.

Though concise definitions are hard to come by, it might be said, as Matilde Obradors does, that "El llamado documental de creación establece un nuevo vínculo de las imágenes con la realidad" [the so-called documentary of creation establishes a new link between images and reality]. 23 To elaborate, the camera is not content to capture and critique; instead, it tends to interact somewhat more actively with subjects and spaces. The result is a more ambivalent engagement. The documentary of creation blends tropes that viewers may want to associate with either traditional documentary or fiction film. 24 Here the artistic voice, perspective and even the bodily appearance of the filmmaker is more pronounced and even overt. It thus becomes more difficult for spectators to sustain the belief that they are watching an objective treatment of realty in the simple sense. In truth, of course, such simplistic beliefs in the supposed objectivity of cinematic representation are always misguided since, as American documentary filmmaker Errol Morris informs us, "Reality isn't handed to us whole." 25

While the violent transnational history of cognitive ableism is definitively a central theme of Mones com la Becky, Jordà is simultaneously intrigued by other considerations. The mastery of his approach is that these other considerations—which concern representation and its links to embodied cognition—do not distract from, but rather ultimately reflect our attention back to this systematic violence. The filmmaker intervenes in Mones com la Becky from behind the camera but also in front of it and, through this intervention, he seeks to disrupt the expectations of both the film's subjects and its viewers. 26 He appears on-screen close to the 30-minute mark of the film in a segment that is defiantly autobiographical and draws on b/w and color footage of his own operation and recovery: he explains his neck scar, shows his pills, and tells his personal story. Later he again appears on screen in his role as director, as he delivers the paradigmatic direction to stop filming ("cut"). His appearance further calls attention to the creative capacities of artistic producers who embody cognitive difference—a group that links director Joaquim Jordà, actor Jôao Maria Pinto, and—given the film's intriguing intervention—the numerous cast of Malgrat del Mar.

The actions of the Malgrat del Mar residents themselves are arguably the heart of the documentary, and through their representation, the filmmakers demonstrate a number of insights that scholars have paired with disability images in general and the new disability documentary cinema in particular. The work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell suggests some principles that can inform the way in which we approach the viewing experience and the filmic representation of Mones com la Becky. In their contribution to The Problem Body (2010) they outline the problems and potential of disability representation in film, emphasizing the concept of the "new disability documentary cinema." 27 Here they posit disability images as an opportunity to reflect upon and potentially critique normative assumptions. 28 Implicitly building on a line of disability film criticism including Cinema of Isolation (Martin Norden, 1994) and Screening Disability (Anthony Enns and Christopher Smit, 2001), the scholars denounce the way in which "disabled bodies have been constructed cinematically and socially to function as delivery vehicles in the transfer of extreme sensation to audiences." 29 In opposition to the ableist representation of disabled people as isolated individuals, they emphasize "the portrayal of disability ensembles" in the new disability documentary cinema against the "lone figure" disability representation of Hollywood-style cinema. 30 These representations, they argue, are more pronounced outside of mainstream cinema in "in(ter)depedent" disability film festivals. 31 Most important, new disability documentary cinema testifies to a "human life lived." 32 The time Jordà and Villazán's film spends with those living with schizophrenia residing at the Malgrat del Mar Crisis Center, their insistence on collaborative interaction in a theatrical production, his focus on everyday experience over an exceptional view of cognitive difference as a 'delivery vehicle in the transfer of extreme sensation,' and his reliance on documentary modes that are not easily assimilated into mainstream markets, all make it reasonable to approach Mones com la Becky as a prime example of the new disability documentary cinema. 33

Equally important, Garland-Thomson's book Staring: How We Look (2009) performs what the disability theorist calls an "anatomy of staring," classifying the manners and meanings of the stare with relevance for spectators of Jordà's film. 34 "The stare," she writes, implicitly calling to mind a classic article by film scholar Laura Mulvey, "is distinct from the gaze, which has been extensively defined as an oppressive act of disciplinary looking that subordinates its victim." 35 There is a "generative potential" to how we look; when starers invest in "the arduous visual work of reconciling the curious with the common," staring can then lead to knowing. 36 This activity "challenges our assumptions by interrupting complacent visual business-as-usual" and "offers an occasion to rethink the status quo." 37 When not clothed in normative trappings, images of disability can thus grant viewers a certain "permission to stare," potentially "gratifying our 'deep curiosity' while at the same time inviting 'empathy' and 'sensitivity'." 38 The complex documentary strategies used in Jordà's documentary, as explored in the next section of this essay, ensure that viewers engage in a certain amount of visual work while watching the film. The aim of Mones com la Becky, clearly, is to destabilize the oppressive act of disciplinary looking, to invite empathy and sensitivity via curiosity, and ultimately to encourage a different mode of knowing about cognitive difference. The documentary representation of people with schizophrenia engaged in everyday activities becomes a way of challenging viewers' assumptions. The representation of this same population engaged in the act of theatrical representation prompts even more nuanced reflections. Ultimately, the film destabilizes the notion of representation in order to encourage viewers to reflect critically on the historical legacy of cognitive ableism.

Layered Documentary Modes in Mones com la Becky

As a disability documentary Mones com la Becky uses the strategies of representation outlined above (ie. biographical reenactment, theatrical dramatization, and directorial intervention) to connect the artistic discourse of cognitive difference in the film to the social discourse of cognitive difference outside of the film. There are two aspects to distinguish here. First, there is the vector of the film's motivation, construction and composition. There are artistic, aesthetic and formalist dimensions of the way it shapes relationships between selected material items (audio, visual; iconic, indexical). Second, there is material social reality from which artistic, aesthetic and formalist representation draws and which it impacts. Artistic discourse and social discourse actively combine to comprise a sort of fabric of representation in which they exercise a reciprocal influence. As the complex structure and intriguing content of Jordà and Villazán's film underscores, social discourse informs artistic representation, and artistic representation informs social discourse. Attending to the nuances of those documentary modes investigated by scholar Bill Nichols provides an understanding of how Mones com la Becky induces spectators to reflect on the nature of this fabric of representation. 39 Ultimately, the film's strategies "fold the viewer's consciousness back upon itself so that it comes into contact with the work of the cinematic apparatus rather than being allowed to move unimpeded toward engagement with a representation of the historical world." 40 While Nichols reserves this quotation specifically for his discussion of the stylistic departures of the reflexive mode of documentary, here I make the argument that complementary aspects of the interactive/participatory, reflexive, performative and poetic documentary modes all work together to effect this redirection of consciousness.

Mones com la Becky quite decisively eschews what Bill Nichols calls the expository and the observational modes of the documentary while also playing with their conventions at a distance. For example, the film certainly lacks the narrative confidence implicit in the "voice-of-God" narration that for Nichols defines expository documentary. 41 One could say, however, that the jarring initial and recurring uses of recorded primate audio throughout the documentary directly substitutes for such an expository narration. Chimpanzee vocal expressions are edited into the film, serving as a reminder of the chimpanzee named Becky who was an early victim of prefrontal lobotomy in the U.S. These vocalizations occur in the same places that a narrative voiceover would (at the beginning, the end, during transitions). Inasmuch as it substitutes for expository narration, this primate audio arguably destabilizes any attempt to read the film through tropes of logical argument (these tropes being so entrenched in expository documentary), and even comes to displace the cognitive ableism that passes for rational thought entirely. 42 The problem Nichols identifies in his discussion of expository narration as the question of "who is speaking for whom" in documentary film is, in artistic terms at least, thus sidestepped in this instance. In its place Jordà and Villazán offer a reminder of the brute assertion of vocal presence; one that resonates with the visual presence of its on-screen actors whose embodied cognitive difference also communicates directly with viewers through the iconic, indexical, and temporal qualities of cinema.

Nichols defines the observational mode of documentary as being characterized by "the nonintervention of the filmmaker." 43 The director's rejection of the simple observational mode is made clear through his interventions via nondiegetic sound/music, interviews and reenactments. Yet early in the film Jordà and Villazán play with noninterventionism on screen. A lengthy sequence that lasts over two-minutes toward the beginning of Mones com la Becky feigns an observational mode precisely in order to disrupt it. Viewers must watch patiently as Portuguese actor Jôao Maria Pinto walks along a busy street with automobile traffic and then exits the street through a doorway to a private yard. He walks up a relatively steep inclined outdoor path, enters a building, and ascends stairs. Later he walks past shelves and shelves of books, crosses through an open stairwell and sits down at a table in an archive bearing an open book. 44 He sits down at the open book and proceeds to read aloud from the headlines and body text of a variety of archival texts concerning Egas Moniz. This sequence itself seems intentionally unremarkable and somewhat plodding. Yet this pace is important because it increases the dramatic effect of what happens next: a researcher to his left has been distracted by his reading aloud and she shushes him, enforcing the silence of their surroundings. The camera documents her disapproval as she returns to her own work. Taken at face value, the researcher's vocal condemnation reveals how contrived such observational scenes tend to be. That is, in order to have captured Pinto's reading activity without such a disruption, Jordà would have had to design an artificial environment, or at the very least choose to film during a time when the archive was less occupied. The scene thus humorously draws attention to the choices made by filmmakers that are often hidden from view in the final product. This is a theme for which Mones com la Becky develops an increasing affinity. Most likely, of course, this should be seen as the first of many scenes in the film in which the filmmaker's 'staging' of material is overt. In a sense, this scene alone is sufficient to affect a shift away from the observational mode of documentary representation. Overall, the directorial decision to abandon an observational frame testifies to his passion for the subject of cognitive difference, but also to an explicit, if theatrical, critique of cognitive ableism's supposed historical claims to objectivity.

As the film moves on it becomes increasingly clear that the director is not content to simply observe and maintain a noninterventionist position. Key elements of the film directly suggest an interactive/participatory documentary mode, but aspects of the reflexive, performative and poetic modes are also present and contribute to fashioning a much more complex cinematic text. Consistent with what Nichols calls the interactive/participatory mode, there are a number of segments with named interviewees included in Mones com la Becky: with Egas Moniz's living relatives Maria do Rosario Macieira Coelho, Antonio Macieira Coelho, and Eduardo Macieira Coelho; with neurosurgeons João Lobo Antunes, Antonio Monteiro Trindade, and J.A. Burzaco; with biopsychologist Elliot S. Valenstein, philosopher Jorge Larrosa, sociologist Ignaci Pons, and psychiatrist Valentí Agustí. On-location research and footage is privileged throughout the film, and the director's visible presence on screen in a variety of these settings testifies to his intention to participate in the documentary and interact with its subjects. As appearing in the end credits, the filming locations include "Malgrat de Mar, Arenys de Munt, Palafolls, Barcelona" (Catalonia), while other locations include "Lisboa, Estarreja, Avanca" (Portugal) and "Michigan" (USA). Even where formal interviews are not present, the intention of the director and crew to interact and participate in the film's action is clear (e.g. accompanying residents from the Malgrat del Mar on their trip to the Barcelona Zoo). 45

What predominates in the film, however, is the mode of reflexive documentary in which, as Nichols puts it, "the filmmaker is present on-screen not merely as a participant observer but also as an authoring agent." 46 The choice of this mode of filmmaking is, in part, clearly motivated by careful considerations of the ethical questions that assert themselves in some disability documentaries carried out in the observational mode. 47 The reflexive mode allows Jordà to direct the viewer's attention to questions of ethics in representation while still allowing the representation itself to unfold. Thus "the viewer's attention is drawn to the device as well as the effect," and the "representation of the historical world becomes, itself, the topic of cinematic meditation in the reflexive mode." 48 A prime example of reflexive documentary, Mones com la Becky distances itself from being a representation of the historical world precisely so that viewers will question their understanding of (disability) history. Here, the figure of Egas Moniz becomes the main point of connection between film and history for viewers. Yet, Jordà cloaks that connection under layers of reenactments, juxtaposing those reenactments to the theatrical representations carried out by the schizophrenic actors at the Malgrat del Mar. In this way he uses the perceived immediacy of cinematic representation (effected through iconicity, indexicality and temporality) to imbue the presence of the Malgrat del Mar actors with a greater reality and bring viewers closer to them. By contrast, his use of the overtly staged qualities of theatrical representation in representing the Egas Moniz storyline distances viewers from the scientist through tropes associated with fiction and consequently also from the legacy of cognitive ableism in which he is situated. To put this back into terms used by Nichols in contextualizing the reflexive mode: "More than the sense of the filmmaker's presence in the historical world found in the interactive mode, the viewer experiences a sense of the text's presence in his or her interpretive field." 49 If Jordà's use of theatrical representation in his earlier film Numax presenta… revealed history "como escenario ocupado y determinado por el poder burgués" [as the stage occupied and determined by bourgeois power], here it is intended to reveal the representational ambitions of normative ableist power. 50 In having to interpret these and other aspects of Mones com la Becky, viewers must also do the visual work necessary in order to reflect upon the social construction of cognitive disability as received through historical legacy.

The film's occasional use of performative documentary and poetic documentary modes further forces viewers to puzzle over the stories they are being shown. At one point, Jordà incorporates footage recorded in the wake of his cerebral ictus wherein he recites a poem by Peruvian author César Vallejo titled "Los heraldos negros" [The Dark Heralds] (1918). Here, a strategy associated by Nichols with the performative mode provides "added emphasis to the subjective qualities of experience and memory that depart from factual accounting." 51 Within the context of the film, the poem's key refrain "Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes… yo no sé" [There are such hard blows in life… I don't know] points ambivalently toward two possible referents. First, the material experience of cognitive disability in an ableist society embodied in Jordà's own cognitive difference, and second, also the seemingly irrational, normative violence of the lobotomy inflicted on so many people in international contexts. The influence of the poetic documentary mode can be seen not merely in the primate audio already mentioned in this article, but also in the film's intriguing staging. Mirrored reflections and an iconic garden labyrinth, for example, serve as symbols of distortion/self-aware thought and states of confusion. 52 As with Vallejo's poem, the labyrinth garden setting (in Horta, Barcelona) also exercises an ambivalent function: in my view pointing toward both the impairment that can accompany the material experience of cognitive disability and simultaneously also the confused ambitions of the ideology expressed through cognitive ableism.

These deviations toward interactive, reflexive, performative and poetic modes, taken together, are extremely significant, and have a cumulative effect. That is, the further Mones com la Becky moves away from the expository and observational modes, the more viewers must work to interpret the film. It should not escape the viewer that the ability to think through puzzling data is precisely what is lost after a prefrontal lobotomy that results in a docile chimpanzee or human. The film's challenging structure and engagement with multiple modes of documentary filmmaking thus prioritizes the role of cognition in spectatorship. In doing so, it defines cognition in a capacious way so as to deliberately include populations who embody cognitive difference (collectively these include schizophrenia [Malgrat del Mar], manic depression [Jôao Maria Pinto] and alexia and agnosia [Joaquim Jordà]). Moreover, the filmmaker's reliance on the reflexive mode, as Nichols makes clear, "emphasizes epistemological doubt." 53 Here, that doubt is relevant for spectators who have begun to question the official historical narrative and perhaps also the social construction of cognitive disability, one that imagines schizophrenia as a lack or a problem awaiting violent 'correction.' Simultaneously, the iconic, indexical, and temporal qualities of film convey the embodied cognition of schizophrenic patients at the Malgrat del Mar as a relatively unremarkable and thus positive presence.

The film's biggest puzzle comes from the juxtaposition of the two storylines in Mones com la Becky. This juxtaposition becomes ever more daring and ever more blurred as the film progresses, much as if it were an artistic experiment running marvelously out of control. In particular, emphasis on the theme of representation itself is employed as a way of destabilizing each of these two juxtaposed narratives. This has two distinct consequences. In the Egas Moniz narrative line, the use of reenactment is somewhat superfluous. Historical details, for example, might have been shared in a more traditional expository documentary format, or in the observational frame that Jordà initiates in the Portuguese archive scene at the beginning of the film but artfully truncates. By using theatrical reenactment in this storyline, however, the film leads viewers to question and contemplate the scientist's actions and suppositions, and thus perhaps also to question and contemplate the ableist background of his scientific legacy. In the case of Malgrat del Mar storyline, however, reenactment is turned into a productive force and viewers are not meant to question and contemplate but merely to witness an act of representation. What is witnessed is quite mundane, but no less important for being so: bodies and minds in collaboration, unimpeded by the violence of ableist science, self-directed in creative expression.

It is interesting that the film's implied spectator is active in the first storyline, and relatively passive in the second. In the first case, confronting the purposely estranged theatrical reenactments of details from Egas Moniz's life proves to be more perplexing than witnessing the performance of the play in Barcelona. In the second case, viewers witnessing the dramatization performed by actors with schizophrenia become interested not in the spectacular nature of people (as a vehicle for transmitting extreme sensation, as per Snyder and Mitchell), but in the spectacular nature of the representation they have collaborated to produce. This deft move by Jordà shifts the notion of the spectacular image off of the cognitively disabled body toward the act of artistic creation itself. The subject of the camera becomes an active participant. Equally, disability is rendered visible not in the social field but in the artistic field. In the process, the filmmakers interject embodied cognitive difference into the story of Egas Moniz as an unavoidable productive force. The documentary's final conceit is at once both marvelous and thought-provoking: the scientist's own life story is activated, only made possible in this sense, by the very creative force of cognition that he dedicated himself to obliterating through the leucotomy procedure.

Toward a Global Articulation of Second-Wave Disability Studies

Due to its themes and use of varied documentary modes, Mones com la Becky advances a clear assertion: people with cognitive disability possess the autonomy to represent themselves. Embodying this point are not only the residents of Malgrat del Mar but also Pinto and Jordà himself. Cognitive difference thus becomes not solely the object but simultaneously the subject of representation. In turning the viewer's consciousness back upon itself so that it confronts the cinematic apparatus and the very notion of representation, Jordà and Villazán's film also forces viewers to confront the apparatus of disability representation—in both the artistic and the social fields. In a short 93 minutes, this challenging and underappreciated documentary demonstrates the value of attending to the ways in which the academic field and political project of disability studies has expanded in recent years beyond print literature to include film, beyond physical and sensory disabilities to foreground cognitive and psychiatric disabilities, and beyond its Anglophone roots to include transnational, global themes. 54

While the study of print literature has been a bedrock of disability studies, and remains so to this day, Mones com la Becky can be integrated into the move beyond the historical literary bias of disability studies in the humanities. Disability criticism is now addressing sculpture, painting, comics/graphic novels, and—perhaps most significantly—both fiction film and documentary cinema, in greater depth. 55 Moreover, while these art forms all contribute to the greater disability studies project, there is a growing understanding that they do so in nuanced ways that reflect the artistic qualities associated with the medium of their composition. 56 Mones com la Becky pushes the agenda of disability studies critique forward into the realm of visual media. The film showcases the best qualities of what Snyder and Mitchell term the "new disability documentary cinema" in its preference for the portrayal of ensembles over lone figures, its refusal to use the cognitively disabled mind as a vehicle for sensation, and its insistence on testifying to more than one "human life lived." It illustrates the points made by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's insightful "anatomy of staring" by crafting a film that challenges assumptions, provokes viewers to rethink the status quo, invites empathy and sensitivity, and harnesses the stare's "generative potential" to suggest new ways of knowing. In line with Bill Nichols' careful categorization of the artistic form it offers a highly nuanced glimpse into the way documentary can speak to the very ethical questions implicit in its representation of subjects.

The film's focus on schizophrenia—not spectacular schizophrenia, but rather mundane schizophrenia—opens Mones com la Becky to increasing academic interest in cognition and psychiatric disability representations. While the focus on physical and sensory disabilities continues to be a key strength of disability studies, new approaches have investigated cognition and previously under-emphasized intellectual disabilities such as autism, Down syndrome and Alzheimer's Disease-Related Dementia. 57 The recent articulation of Mad Studies is itself in many ways a reformulation of concerns voiced by the antipsychiatry movement decades ago; and speaking even more broadly, investigations of what sometimes goes by the name of mental illness or psychiatric disability are increasingly visible in journal and book publications. 58 This trend, which I examined more carefully in the book Cognitive Disability Aesthetics (2018), has prompted the need to reexamine some of the assumptions central to the beginnings of disability studies and disability rights movements. A prime example of this is articulated explicitly in The Biopolitics of Disability (2015) wherein Mitchell and Snyder write: "Perhaps it is time to return to the scholarly suppressed topic of impairment." 59 Anticipated also in work by Alison Kafer (2013), Lennard J. Davis (2013), and particularly in an earlier essay by Mark Jeffreys (2002), this return to impairment serves as a way of exploring those material experiences of cognitive disability that had been relegated to the margins of earlier disability research. 60 Jordà and Villazán's film emphasizes, first, the way in which impairment shapes the material experience of schizophrenia, and second, a critique of the representations associated with the violent historical legacy of cognitive-ableism.

Perhaps most important, this analysis of Mones com la Becky should leave no doubt that disability studies needs to be more global and transnational than it has been to date. The global aspirations of disability studies have been clearly enunciated since the publication of two high-profile editorials, by Mitchell and Snyder (2010) and by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray (2010), both in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. 61 Certainly, disability research that aligns with individual national, linguistic, social or cultural paradigms will continue to make valuable contributions to our collective understanding of the ways disabilities are experienced, constructed and negotiated in specific places across the globe. Yet as the disability studies project becomes more global, it is important to recognize that the same forces at work in globalization of the discipline are implicated in the past and future globalization of ableism. Evidenced by Deborah Shaw's founding of the journal Transnational Cinemas in 2010, cinema studies itself as a discipline has been increasingly conscious of the limitations of national frameworks for understanding the production and reception of films as well as the representational aspects of cinema as an art form. Taking a closer look at Mones com la Becky encourages viewers to think beyond national boundaries and area studies formations. In the process, we glimpse the transnational scope and global potential of twenty-first-century disability studies, spinning a thread connecting Catalonia, Spain, Portugal and the United States. 62 In conclusion, Jordà and Villazán's documentary offers disability scholars an opportunity to assess the collective impact of all of the disciplinary turns enumerated above—turns that have recognized the importance of cinema, cognition, impairment, and global culture for the larger project of disability studies.