Editors' Note: Alex Lubet (AL) is a work-injured musician and veteran of Workers' Compensation litigation. Ingrid Hoffman (IH) is a Deaf child psychologist, who team-taught a course called "Classical Music, Disability, & Film" at the University of Minnesota. The preponderance of disability themes in several well-known classical music films -- Mr. Holland's Opus, Amadeus, The Piano, Beyond Silence, Shine, Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould, Hilary and Jackie , and Immortal Beloved -- inspired their course. This article combines a "script" that faculty can use to inform their own discussion of these films with their students and a scholarly critique of the films that reveals their relationship to disability, deafness, popular culture, gender, commercial Hollywood, and Judaism. The authors are identified by initials so readers will understand who is speaking in certain sections.

The Disability Studies Script: Performing Impairment/Performing Disability in Films Featuring Classical Music

AL: Since the 1980s, such films featuring combined classical music and disability themes have proliferated. They may even constitute the majority of films about classical music. Unfortunately, there has been a lack of agency of people with disabilities (PWD) in these films, few of whom have had a significant role or say in their making, other than Deaf actors in Mr. Holland's Opus and Beyond Silence. More often than not, this has yielded problematic perspectives, such that many of these films need to be taught as (very valuable) lessons in how not to portray disability. They are all easily obtained and I have continued to use them in several general (non-disability studies) film courses as well, always, though, addressing their problematic portrayal of disability.

Methods of categorizing films are inherently multivalent. There is so much involved in this multimedia art form — narrative, visuals, sound — that teaching films almost invariably involves focusing on some elements at the expense of others. While we are conversant with the ways in which the technical aspects of film are used in the service of storytelling and other artistic goals, our strategy for classifying these films here is based on elements of their narrative, because we anticipate that this will be most useful to our readers.

We did not begin planning this course with this system of qualification. I simply selected films I thought would be effective. (There are several others with classical music and disability themes which were not included. I did not meet Ingrid until the course was in progress and then invited her to co-instruct.) The analysis came as a natural part of the process of writing about the course.

Since it is unlikely that colleagues would want to replicate this particular course — which would require a highly idiosyncratic skillset -- our categorization of subthemes should be helpful to those seeking to incorporate any of these films for reasons related to a variety of aspects of their content. We anticipate that this information will be useful in both disability film and other disability studies courses, as well as the inclusion of disability issues in more general or other-themed film courses, such as women in film, films about music (another course I teach) or films on Jewish themes.

The categories of analysis that stood out during our process of analysis were:

1) Impairment; embodied deficit of function. While the terms "impairment" and "disability" are often used more or less interchangeably, within the field of disability studies "impairment," which is an embodied characteristic regarded as functioning within a deficit range, is used in contrast with "disability," the social ramifications of embodied impairment. For example, blind people have a visual impairment. One disability that results from the social reaction to their blindness is shockingly high levels of unemployment.

2) Historicity. Some of these films purport to be biographical. Others are fantasies based on historical characters and make no claims to accurate biography. Still others have fictional characters.

3) Complexity. These films range from "art films" -- very complex, challenging to view, without, clear plot line possibly not apt for certain classes -- to light Hollywood fare. Many lie between these extremes; arty and intriguing, but readily grasped by and enjoyable to most college students.

4) Gender. The differences between films with male versus female protagonists can be very interesting and especially illuminating about attitudes toward disability.

5) Jewish themes. A surprising number of these films have prominent Jewish characters or elements of Jewish culture. This may make them particularly interesting choices for some courses.

Categories of Impairment

Parsing these films according to the impairments depicted proved highly enlightening. In class, it led to a discussion of the disability studies literature on disclosure; whether or not to reveal the nature of one's impairment. Simi Linton (1998) calls the practice disclosure of one's specific impairment into question. Early in her landmark book Claiming Disability, Linton declares herself a PWD (person with a disability), while deliberately not identifying the nature of her impairment. In Chapter 6, she "outs" her use of a wheelchair (p. 140), when a situation requires it. Even then, the etiology, root cause of her impairment, an intimacy that is very few people's business, is never discussed.

One discovers quickly that the taxonomy of impairment, though hardly simple, yields a basic truth about how filmic narrative strategies differ from written and oral literatures. In film, disability is typically rendered — performed or otherwise depicted -- rather than cited, mentioned in dialogue. In film, an impairment need never speak its name -- and often doesn't. Deafness (Mr. Holland's Opus, Beyond Silence and Immortal Beloved ), muteness (also amputation) (The Piano), or multiple sclerosis (Hilary and Jackie), are obvious in the actors' performances. Were they not, they are also named.

The most interesting things we learn attempting to sort films by impairment go unrevealed when identification is explicit. In Amadeus, Shine, and Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould, the impairments of the protagonists are "invisible" or "hidden." They are neither explicitly named nor is accurate, confident diagnosis possible by viewing. Shine's critics have variously diagnosed in its protagonist, pianist David Helfgott, schizophrenia, schizo-affective disorder, depression (About the Production: 1996) and the damaging effects of "too much electroconvulsive therapy, or too many major tranquilizers (Greenburg: 1996).

In classical music/disability-themed films, "deafness/muteness" and "invisible" impairments are the prevalent themes. The latter's etiologies are less important than it is that these conditions are unvaryingly depicted as resulting in deficits in socialization. Even Hilary and Jackie's portrayal of cellist Jacqueline Du Pré's multiple sclerosis, mostly associated with physical disability, is similarly sociopathic to the films dealing with mental illness. This permits viewers to decide for themselves the relationship between Du Pré's "madness" and her MS (Meekosha, 2000). One reviewer detects in Emily Watson's portrayal of Du Pré's manifestations of bipolar disorder (Crickmer, 2000).

Impairment is ultimately portrayed in all these films as an inability to communicate effectively. Specific medical diagnoses are ultimately irrelevant; deafness, muteness, sociopathy, even the amputation of a finger that renders protagonist Ada unable to play The Piano, are all essentially represented as variations on a theme of inarticulate Otherness, alienated and alienating difference. Other impairments such as blindness, in real life common among musicians, and mobility limitations, with which audiences are familiar from celebrity virtuoso classical violin soloists Itzhak Perlman (a polio survivor) and Rachel Barton (an amputee), are not depicted in these films. Reality, impairments that are familiar from actual musical personalities, appears not to satisfy the needs of filmic storytelling (Lubet, 2004). I suspect that this is because simple and true success stories in which an impairment is irrelevant to a musician's gift and hard work seem insufficiently dramatic. (Itzhak Perlman has a cameo playing himself in the film Music of the Heart, a film whose disability subplot was too minor to include in this course.)

The means by which the impairments chosen for these films are rendered supports powerfully both disability studies' distinction between socially constructed disability and biological impairment and the wisdom of Simi Linton's circumspection about disclosure. While sorting these films by the impairments depicted may not provide a clear set of medical diagnoses, their onscreen realization reveals the social nature of disability, insofar as the characters with disabilities, regardless of their differences, are uniformly inarticulate and Other, distanced from "normal" society.

Shine is arguably the most famous classical music/disability film of all time. It is both celebrated and reviled, the latter on psychiatric and historical grounds. Critics of Shine cite its untruths, ableism (anti-disability prejudice), and anti-Semitism (Shakespeare, 1999; Weissbard, 1998; Rufus, 1998; Fishkoff, 1996). Both what mental illness(es) and whose mental illness(es) are depicted are left to the viewer to surmise. Shine's protagonist, pianist David Helfgott, is certainly portrayed as mentally ill; his abusive, domineering father Peter is implicated as the patriarch of a defective family system that drives David mad. One psychiatric film critic has diagnosed Helfgott via Shine with "schizotypal cognitive disorder" (Stone, 1999).

As in Shine, poor fathering that ranges from distant to violent, along with bad mothering, a commonly if falsely cited explanation for both mental illness and atypical sexual orientation, is depicted in Amadeus, Mr. Holland's Opus, Immortal Beloved, and Beyond Silence. In these films, where there is a father present, there is culpability, whether dad, child, or both are disabled. In contrast, in Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould, Gould speaks nostalgically if not at length of his mother and there is no hint of her culpability in anything.

Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould has less forthright markers of impairment in the portrayal of its legendary classical pianist protagonist. Gould's documented hypochondria and psychological dependence on prescription drugs are quite explicit in the performance (Ostwald, 1995). Otherwise, the viewer is free to decide, based on the performance, whether the pianist is pathological or merely eccentric. Gould is frequently (posthumously) diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a condition on the autistic spectrum which, it may be — and is -- argued, is a non-neurotypical human variation with social manifestations and not an impairment at all, particularly given the numerous famous overachievers and intensely creative thinkers among its alleged "sufferers," their social difference not necessarily unconnected to their genius. That the film portrays Gould as above all really weird is itself disabling, a social slight to a man widely regarded as a musical genius.

Amadeus differs from Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould in its yet more veiled portrayal of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a PWD. It is certainly clear to viewers that someone in the film is impaired. Its villain, Mozart's composer-rival Antonio Salieri, narrates Amadeus from his institutionalization in an asylum for the mentally ill. But Mozart also declines devastatingly in the final years of his all-too-brief life; self-medicating with alcohol. Less obvious is how viewers are expected to interpret Mozart's pitiful life skills, his vocal tic, and his penchant for scatological language.

Much has been written about Mozart's health, much of it based on numerous contemporaneous accounts (Simkin, 1999). Tourette's syndrome is sometimes implicated; a mild case is plausibly rendered in Tom Hulce's portrayal of the composer in Amadeus. I do not know author Peter Schaefer's intentions regarding Mozart as a PWD, in particular whether he intended to depict Tourette's or another condition. This is something that makes teaching Amadeus so interesting and an excellent springboard for class discussion.

If heretofore discussed films construct disability as a form of internal exile, social ostracization, Hilary and Jackie is as guilty as any "mental illness" film of portraying cellist Jacqueline Du Pré, who died of multiple sclerosis, as a social and sexual misfit. The several films we taught that depict deafness and/or muteness reinforce also this motif of disability as a communication deficit. They confirm what many viewers have probably already intuited about what popular constructions of disability and classical music have in common.

Disability is conflated in these films (and elsewhere) with isolation, although it is also sometimes surmounted in (somewhat) happy endings in The Piano, Mr. Holland's Opus, Shine, Hilary and Jackie, and Beyond Silence. This sense of isolation invariably reinforces the condition of narcissism that psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud regarded as being an inevitable byproduct of impairment. The ubiquity of this Freudian surmise that has become an article of faith in popular culture, through its renderings of disability on film and in other media, indicates audiences wish/choose to believe that Freud is right.

Popular culture links disability narcissism and classical music by noting that the latter is also an esoteric concern. Since classical music is, by definition, not popular music, its rarified, obscurantist nature is practically a tautology. Thus, both disability and a passion for classical music create social outcasts.

If behaviorally-manifested impairments are conjoined with deafness/muteness in these films as examples of disability as a communication disorder, the latter, deaf/mute films, are distinctive in what they can teach about Western narrative in general and cinema in particular. (Since The Piano, which has a mute, sign language-using protagonist, "looks deaf", we regard it as belonging in a subcategory with those films with a deafness theme.)

Initially and intuitively, plot pairings of music and deafness may seem peculiar. Although Western literatures -- novels, plays, films -- may seem lifelike, they are in fact not much like real life. A well-told story, unlike a typically-lived life, employs active detail. Unlike life, a film's path from cause to effect for everything that happens within is eventually clear. No detail is wasted. (Life, by contrast, tends to be messy, confusing, and often inexplicable.) And — very important — the typical narrative structure of film, which follows the model of most Western storytelling in, for example, plays and films, requires conflict. Deafness versus music, especially classical music, is easily read in this contra-distinct way as inability (to hear and thus make music) versus extraordinary (musical) ability. This is an apt recipe for tragedy, which, in these films, is sometimes surmounted, sometimes not.

Social construction aside, medical/clinical information can be an invaluable analytical tool. Without it, Mozart and Gould seem merely eccentric. One might not realize Shine's indictment of David Helfgott's allegedly abusive father (Helfgott, 1998), as the source of his psychosis conflicts with both contemporary psychiatry (Stone, 1999) and evidence of the resilience of Holocaust survivors, among the least likely people to become abusive in this way (Sigal, 1995). (Despite Shine's implications, Peter Helfgott was not a Holocaust survivor, having escaped Poland, unlike less fortunate family members.)

The Deaf Culture Script

Clinical knowledge of Deaf Culture enables the careful scrutiny of cinematic portrayals of deaf life. Mr. Holland's deaf son's doctor cautions the parents against using gestural communication; bizarrely but, sadly, this is quite realistic. The Holland's son Cole communicates with the Pidgin Signed English (PSE) he learns in deaf school, rather than ASL, the Deaf community's language of choice. PSE is a convenience for hearing audiences, its crude quasi-English word order is easily used simultaneously with spoken English. Subtitling ASL would have demonstrated its richness and independence from English. Later, a chastened, better educated Mr. Holland treats Cole's school to a concert whose rudimentary light show is intended as a synaesthetic surrogate for Beethoven's Ninth. The idea of the simplicity of the lights serving as an analog for the complexity of the symphony is condescending and silly.

IH: Mr. Holland's Opus is a fairly accurate representation of the experiences of an American family with a young deaf child. Parents' first suspicion a child is deaf, upon her failure to respond to loud environmental sounds, ultimately leading to clinical diagnosis, often results in their frustration and depression. Cole Holland's mother suspects his deafness when a fire truck blares and he does not awaken. The Holland's then try "hearing tests" such as making loud sounds behind Cole. Often, parents stomp and are calmed when their child responds, thinking they have made only noise, not realizing that they also caused tactile vibration, a common attention-getter in the Deaf World, and that this is what he perceives.

The kind of psychological, cognitive, and emotional distance in hearing parent-deaf child relationships (Marschark, 1993) that is portrayed in Beyond Silence and Mr. Holland's Opus is also common. The cause of this distance is not the child's deafness, but the family's lack of a common language. In both films, parents of deaf children were urged by medical professionals not to use sign language, something that is still common advice from clinicians with little or no knowledge of formal sign languages or Deaf Culture.

Cole Holland's educational experiences are representative of most deaf children in America today. When teaching deaf children to speak and hear (the "auditory-verbal" approach) is unsuccessful by the time children enter school, a Pidgin sign language is generally encouraged as a "lesser evil". In the U.S., the usual language of instruction for deaf/hard-of-hearing children is PSE. But children at residential Deaf schools learn American Sign Language from Deaf teachers, older students, and Deaf staff.

Often, hearing mothers learn sign language more fluently and develop closer relationships with deaf children than do hearing fathers. In Mr. Holland's Opus, Cole asked his mother to interpret for him to make sure his father understood him. Closer relationships with the mother may be partly related to sign language, but they are also common in families where neither parent signs. In Beyond Silence, Martin's father punishes him for laughing during his sister's recital while his mother usually lets him do as he pleases. Such preferential treatment commonly causes the animosity between deaf and hearing siblings.

Relationships between hearing parents and their adult deaf child were also accurate represented in Beyond Silence. Adult deaf children of hearing parents often dread family functions. Martin and Kai are not at all excited to attend the family Christmas celebration, excluded from the festivities, including the sister's and father's musical performance. Other relations discuss them as if they weren't even present. This isolation culminates in what is for Martin and Kai the crushing experience of their hearing daughter Lara's intense interest in her aunt's clarinet performance; emblematic of her choosing the hearing world over their Deaf Culture. Understandably, Martin and Kai are happy to leave the family gathering. Their letting Lara spend the night with her aunt symbolizes their recognition that she fits better in the hearing world .

Kai has the same vestibular dysfunction I have, which is relatively common among deaf people. Thus, she cannot ride a bicycle at the film's beginning. Strongly encouraged by Lara, who wants Kai to be "normal", she attempts to learn bicycling. Kai's dependence on her vision both for balance and to see traffic signals puts her at risk, unaware during a family bike ride, of a large vehicle behind her. A similar incident later takes her life.

Other experiences common in the lives of German Deaf people are accurately represented in Beyond Silence. Germans generally view PWD as helpless and tragic. The most apparent example is when Martin and Kai depend on Lara to interpret when talking to her teacher and at the bank. In Germany professional interpreters are rare; generally family members fill that role. Thus, Lara could translate as she pleased for her own benefit.

None of Beyond Silence's Deaf actors were actually German, although they used German Sign Language. Howie Seago (Martin) is American, and Emmanuelle Laborit (Kai) French. Both spent three months in Germany learning GSL, a necessity stemming from the lack of available professional Deaf German actors (DeLorenzo, 1998), doubtless another manifestation of professional and personal limitations endured by deaf Germans.

Immortal Beloved accurately portrays deafness from the perspective of an early 19^th century late-deafened adult, composer Ludwig van Beethoven, who becomes deaf after completing his education and starting a career. The developmental stage when deafness occurs can have a profound impact. Children usually easily incorporate deafness into their identity, taking pride in Deaf Culture. Most late-deafened people identify as disabled and do not learn sign language. Beethoven was able to continue speaking and did not have the problems writing many individuals deaf since childhood experience. He was thus comparatively easily able to communicate through writing notes. Many of these are preserved in the composer's "conversation books," which have provided scholars with considerable biographical information.

Having an established career when deafness occurs, especially in a sound-related occupation such as music, can obviously cause problems. Beethoven relied on his phenomenal gifts for aural imagery and tonal memory and on tactile vibrations from his piano, to "hear" his music. Still, his obvious frustration was vividly portrayed in Immortal Beloved.

AL: I was troubled by the contrived sign language in The Piano. While few viewers will detect this, an awareness that Ada's sign language was invented might create the impression there were no established sign languages at that time. The contrived sign language of The Piano, likely only noticed by Deaf linguists, might imply (falsely) that deaf people had not developed sign languages long before the 19^th century. If it is petty to criticize a film for insulting but a handful of people — which was the perspective of some of our students -- one must then ask how many must be so insulted for such callousness to become reprehensible. PWD are easily thus exploited; the population with any one impairment small, often communication-challenged, invariably politically weak.

IH: The sign language used in The Piano follows English word order, which is contrary to any natural sign language. And when the mother and daughter converse about a concept, they sometimes use distinctly different gestures.

In The Piano's 19^th-century New Zealand setting, the Deaf undoubtedly used a sign language, likely significantly different from that used today. Ada probably developed her own sign language because she was not involved in the Deaf World. Similar to Beethoven, she had a sound-based language system, but unlike Beethoven, as a hearing, but genuinely mute person, she did not rely on a visual/gestural system for understanding, only for her own communication. For Ada and her daughter Flora, it made sense to use an English-based gestural system. Although it is reasonable that they used a contrived gestural system, the gestures employed should have been consistent, a disappointment in a film that is in many ways otherwise so meticulous. For example, Holly Hunter, the actress who plays Ada, is actually a pianist and is credited with having performed the piano part in the film's score.

Deaf Culture and sign languages indeed have a venerable history. Sign languages have existed as long as there have been deaf people. There is evidence in books and artwork of the use of European sign languages since the Middle Ages.

Allusion/Illusion

AL: Medical/clinical scrutiny segues logically into our next system of categorization, another evidentiary standard by which films might be judged; their relation to the historical record. Of the films we taught, Mr. Holland's Opus, The Piano, and Beyond Silence aspire only to fiction. Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould, Hilary and Jackie, and Shine are docudramas. However, Shine and Hilary and Jackie bear (barely noticeable) disclaimers as to their veracity (late) in their closing credits, the result of complaints from some of the figures portrayed. While Gould and Du Pré, were deceased celebrities when these films were made, David Helfgott was an unknown, made famous by Shine. After Shine became famous, he toured widely as a pianist, to "overwhelmingly unfavorable" reviews (Teachout).

Positioned between forthright fiction and docudrama lie the films Amadeus and Immortal Beloved. Neither film claims to be anything other than a fantasy upon historical figures, respectively, composers Mozart and Beethoven. While both films create plausible senses of place and personae, drawing significantly from the historical record of the worlds of their respective protagonists, their use of artistic license begs for considerable suspension of disbelief, acceptance of the fantasy worlds they create. They are both fine films, especially Amadeus, which students enjoy far beyond what one might expect of a film about and full of classical music. Both films also negotiate well their issues of impairment and disability.

It is important to understand the ontology and epistemology, the nature and idea, of fact and fiction, particularly in regard to the depiction of impairment and disability. The veracity of all fundamentally factual narratives is always compromised in narrative accounts in all media by the inherent selectivity of reportage — some things are emphasized, others left out -- even in the absence of outright distortion. But "fiction"--even science-fiction and other fantasy genres--also draws from historical record. It is always grounded in those things that knowledge of history enables us to imagine.

The classification of a narrative on a fiction-nonfiction continuum is customarily associated with whether historical figures and events are depicted, thus the frequent use of disclaimers in film, where historical or living pictures are included in a narrative that contains some fabrication. Shine, Hilary and Jackie, and Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould all have real protagonists, contemporary, and, in Helfgott's case, still living. Both Shine and Hilary and Jackie have tarnished the reputations of family members living and deceased portayed in the films. Suffice it to say, sources abound wherein the controversies stirred by these films, especially Shine, may be investigated. These controversies, mostly related to disability, must be part of the pedagogy of these films.

By contrast, in the forthrightly fictitious Amadeus and Immortal Beloved, whose protagonists and everyone close to them are long dead and virtually legendary, it is difficult to see what harm these films do by manipulating biography. Nonetheless, these films are of greater pedagogical value and more enjoyable when compared to the historical record, which is, however, in both cases, partly mysterious.

When disability is represented in media such as film, the stakes are high, whether a story is "true" or not. Because of the varieties of isolation of PWD -- "special" education, asylums, the felt need to closet one's invisible impairment -- popular culture is a primary reference on disability for many people. In the absence of much authentic contact with PWD, movies and other media may "teach" many people what they think they know about disability.

When films are critiqued using the manner in which they represent disability as the single foremost criterion many laudatory reviews are controverted. Few things beat a good "crip" yarn like Shine or The Piano for vaulting a film to multiple Oscars. But making fairness and honesty about disability a priority reverses one's opinions about such films entirely.

(On the other hand, Amadeus, a film we admire, which students enjoy and which we feel is very interesting from a disability perspective, is also a multiple-Oscar winner.)

What constitutes appropriate representation of disability and impairment in film? In many of these films, a character's impairment looms larger-than-life in their portrayal. It is the biggest thing, perhaps all that matters, in a disabled person's existence, obscuring the totality of their humanity behind their problem bodies. Impairment as tragedy is a failsafe formula for melodrama, but an inherently flawed means to convey the messiness and mundane aspect of the lives of Joan and Joe Average PWD.

The big screen, with its need for big, dramatics gestures sometimes requires big lies to create big films with big box office. Shine's filmic virtuosity so captivated some students in our "Classical Music, Disability & Film" course that, despite my emotional rendering of its "controversies," I was informed by one student that a really well-made film justifies every moral lapse, no matter how obscene.

The films we rate most highly from Disability/Deaf perspectives are unabashedly fictitious. Mr. Holland's Opus, Beyond Silence, and Immortal Beloved effectively portray the intricacies and pain of relations between Deaf and hearing people. The Piano is the exception. Its protagonist Ada is not deaf, but mute and, at the film's climax, also has a finger brutally amputated by her angry, cuckolded husband -- unable to play, she is doubly silenced. Ada's helplessness as a colonial woman is conflated with her muteness, her sign language understood only by daughter Flora. One cannot be sure whether this is a film about misogyny or a misogynistic film, a controversial question in every I've ever shown it, and one that is intrinsically connected to Ada's impairments, which are certainly intended to amplify the idea of her weak position as a woman.

Ada's situation is artfully paralleled by the portrayal of the indigenous Maori's helplessness against encroaching British settlement and their language's translation; not into sign language in this case, but into subtitles. (One colonist, Ada's lover, Baines, understands Maori, and has assimilated indigenous customs, notably facial tattooing, an accoutrement of his "savage" masculinity). Although sexual and racial oppression are intended to be projected as analogous manifestations of colonialism, critic bell hooks reads The Piano as (unsuccessfully) feminist and racist.

Hilary and Jackie was also controversial for its treatment of Du Pré's and Barenboim's sex lives and its rendering of Du Pré's MS. Though Emily Watson performs the physical symptoms of MS realistically, the portrayal is problematic. One is permitted, perhaps even encouraged, to associate Du Pré's sociopathies, sexual and otherwise, with her illness; her outbursts before and after her MS "shows" are similar. Her husband, pinaist/conductor Daniel Barenboim's alleged infidelity is also associated with her disease; when she can no longer function sexually and is homebound, he takes a lover in Paris who bears a child whom Du Pré overhears crying over the phone.

It is harder to ascertain the veracities and falsehoods of this docudrama than Shine, perhaps because its rumor-mongering is more personal than political. There has been less critical hue and cry about inaccuracies from clinical professionals. Even if the rumors about Du Pré's and Barenboim's conduct are true, one must ask whether such disclosure is appropriate, even for such luminati as celebrated virtuosi, particularly when living people may be hurt, including surviving friends and relatives, but also people with MS and other similarly-manifesting conditions. For example, a scene in which Du Pré is depicted as seeing but not feeling her incontinence prior to a concert is an invasion of privacy typically reserved for PWD; it is transgressive, but hardly socially edifying.

IH: Privacy is an important issue for PWD. Those who have complex motor disabilities often require Personal Care Assistants for help with the activities of daily living -- dressing, toileting, eating -- consequently depriving them of the privacy able-bodied people take for granted. The situation is similar for Deaf people using interpreters; their need for such an aid to communication reduces their privacy dramatically.

Wherefore art thou art?

AL: Our next parsing was a continuum of "artfulness." One end of our spectrum was termed "art," its opposite "Hollywood." Midway lie films "artfully made." Our criteria are not as subjective as they might initially seem.

We defined art films as those that do not convey linear narrative, a chronologically coherent story. Telling a story in purely chronological order is not a requirement for a film or any other kind of storytelling to convey a linear narrative.. If viewers may relatively easily re-assemble chronologically a story that, for example, relies extensively on flashbacks, the film does not meet our "art" criterion.

Films whose timelines do not pose an overwhelming challenge to viewers but whose idiomatic filmic niceties such as complex cinematography, slow or accelerated motion, or other special effects, exhibit an aesthetic life that transcends narrative, we deem "artfully made."

Films that are unselfconsciously narrative, all about storytelling and not in any self-conscious way about the medium of film itself as an art form, those in which "the play's the thing," we deem "Hollywood" (regardless of where they were made). These categories concern narrative strategy only; they are not ratings. where "art" beats "Hollywood."

Among the films we taught, only Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould is an art film. It is indeed comprised of 32 short films, modeled on a keyboard work Johann Sebastian Bach, his Goldberg Variations, comprised of 32 short pieces each of which reworks a single theme. British critic Tom Shakespeare characterizes its portrayal of the brilliant and eccentric classical pianist Glenn Gould as depicting its PWD protagonist as a "tormented genius" (168).

Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould is notable for two aspects of its approach to sound. The soundtrack is largely comprised of Gould's recorded piano performances, notorious in their day for his loud, distracting humming along with his playing. Despite the possibility of using the recordings au naturale. humming included, this has been "cleaned up", via digital editing. The reasons are unclear, but there is no doubt that something of the authentic Glenn Gould has been eliminated. While humming would certainly enhance the intended portrayal of Gould as eccentric, the producers may have found such erratic vocalization too much "noise" for moviegoers to bear in the Digital Age, when high production values are pro forma.

(In this context, it is worth noting that Shine claims to use Helfgott's playing in its score. Given that serious critical assessments of his playing cast serious doubt upon the pianist's current skills, this score, too, likely required state-of-the-art digital editing. The credits of The Piano states that its star, Holly Hunter, performs on the featured instrument. Ms. Hunter was not heretofore nor subsequently known as a pianist. While it is possible that she plays wonderfully, she may also have been well-served by editors.)

That Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould is the only one of these films issued without closed captions is difficult to second-guess. Deaf and hard-of-hearing people often enjoy music (typically relying on tactile vibrations, residual hearing, amplification, and visuals) and film. If it were feared captions might spoil the film's look, why does it employ foreign language subtitles? To be cynical, lack of concern for that audience which uses captioning calls into question, at least here, high art's pretensions to idealism, at least regarding PWD. Interestingly, many "deaf" films lack closed captions.

The "artfully made" films, Shine and The Piano, are among those most celebrated of those we taught. Shine is distinguished by some manipulation of the timeline, slow motion/stills, and the elaborately clever and charming–if also impairment-driven -- performance poetry of much of David Helfgott's dialogue. The Piano is remarkable for exquisite, surrealistically yet emotionally compelling use of the color blue in the cinematography and the imaginative use of Michael Nyman's exceptional musical score. Ironically, among these films about classical music, only The Piano and Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould actually make use of music very creatively. Most of these films depend on standard classical repertoire, used in conventional ways, for their scores.

Shine and The Piano are superficially different in a way that nonetheless binds them conceptually. Numerous observers, notably David Helfgott's sister Margaret, assert that Shine seethes with untruths. The Piano, a film that is (to me) ultimately about little more than copulation, requires immense suspension of disbelief, owing to the bizarrely transgressive sexual and sexually-inspired behavior of its principal characters. Shine's Helfgott, too, is a sexual sociopath, albeit one depicted as harmless and lovable, with great difficulty keeping his clothes on and his hands off women's breasts (Stone,1997).

Of the "Hollywood" films -- Mr. Holland's Opus, Amadeus, Hilary and Jackie, Immortal Beloved, and Beyond Silence -- only Amadeus and Beyond Silence -- unabashedly serious, if not filmically experimental -- have received wide critical acclaim. Immortal Beloved has similar aspirations, but less depth and imagination, and a less stunning, though worthy, cast.

As Immortal Beloved is a transparent sequel/clone of Amadeus, in its fantasy treatment of a great composer, Hilary and Jackie mimics Shine. It treats its protagonist as a sexual sociopath, and attempts to elevate a late Romantic ultra-virtuosic (if not particularly profound) concerto for soloist and symphony orchestra to iconic status -- "Rach 3" (The third concerto for piano and orchestra by Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff) in Shine, the Cello Concerto by Englishman Edward Elgar in Hilary and Jackie).

The videocassette of Oscar-nominated (for Best Foreign Film) Beyond Silence declares it "This year's Shine", the (dubious) analogy based upon -- quite different -- disability themes. German, with an international cast, it is a lighter, "Hollywood" film, admirable for outstanding Deaf actors, realistic portrayal of deaf line in Germany and exceptional captioning, not only of dialogue, but with admirable audio description of its musical score and soundscape.

Mr. Holland's Opus, pure Hollywood, was enthusiastically touted by the Music Educators National Conference for its advocacy of school music programs. Atypically, Mr. Holland's son Cole's deafness is only a subplot. Disability only occasionallly appears in a film whose story it does not dominate, consuming the life force not only of the disabled person, but of everyone in her path. (Music of the Heart, which we did not use in this class, has an even smaller disability subplot, but it is a fine film and its cameo by violinist Itzhak Perlman is a rare example of an actual non-deaf PWD — in this case, playing himself -- appearing in a major film.)

Rendering gender?

Any serious study of film must contemplate issues of gender. The old equation "feminine" equals "weaker," the idea of disability as emasculating, and the reasonable presumption that female characters will conform to stereotype, mandates particular consideration of depictions of femininity in these films.

Gender, of course, is not only female. In these films, male protagonists outnumber female five to three The constructions of disabled masculinity are varied, but overwhelmingly sociopathic. Of males with disabilities, only Cole Holland, deaf son of Mr. Holland and a supporting role, has fully functional social skills. It is his father who has relationship problems, as he struggles to accept Cole's deafness.

The female protagonists of The Piano, Hilary and Jackie, and Beyond Silence initially seem quite varied in both their characterizations and disability histories. Ada is mute, Jacqueline Du Pré has MS. Lara is the child of deaf parents. Hers is a unique relationship among these films, a non-disabled protagonist whose difficulty related to disability, not those of her deaf parents, — her conflict between her role in Deaf Culture and her passion for music -- is focal.

All of these female protagonists are instrumentalists; Ada on piano, "Jackie" on cello, Lara on clarinet. Their instrumental virtuosity correlates with other shared traits: desire for autonomy, wildness, sexual abandon. While Ada and Lara — both composers as well as performers–receive a sense of deliverance through music, Jacqueline Du Pré, the only non-fictional member of this trio, seeks deliverance from music, rejecting her gift, even attempting to destroy her priceless cello by exposing it to the elements. None of these women are easy to like: Ada is a chimera, Du Pré is loathsome and solipsistic, Lara a selfish adolescent.

Although these women have much in common, these personality traits are not associable — and should not be associated -- with impairment. Disability does little or nothing to transform or even stimulate the viewer's thinking about femininity. These women are young, conventionally lovely, and ardently sexual. (Lara's deaf mother Kai is also beautiful and an unabashed romantic.)

Importantly, none of these women are impaired in ways that challenge "normal" notions of physical beauty (although Ada's amputation scene in The Piano is appropriately horrific). A line has been drawn here; between contemplating a female problem body -- with an "invisible" disability -- and actually having to look at a woman with an obvious impairment. The number of films-- Love Story is perhaps the archetype-- in which a young heroine dies of lingering, wasting illness without even smearing her makeup -- is staggering. Any hope that disability might change the rules of the filmic gender game should be abandoned, at least in these films. This, however, is an important reason they should be taught, for what can be learned about societal attitudes, however disappointing, toward women and disability.

A Final Solution?

AL: The last parsing is only preliminary; a complex theme intended for future development. Three of these films include Jewish themes. In two cases, they concern the Holocaust. In Shine, these themes have been noted by a number of authors (Shakespeare, 1999; Weissbard, 1998; Rufus, 1998; Fishkoff, 1996).

Hilary and Jackie foregrounds her husband Daniel Barenboim's Jewishness and Du Pré's own conversion to Judaism prior to their marriage. Her family is uncomfortable with her choice. While Barenboim is demonized and their marriage problematized, Jackie's sister Hilary, co-author of the book A Genius in the Family, on which the film is based, married conductor Kiffer Finzi, son of well-known English composer Gerald Finzi, well-known as a converted Jew of Italian descent. The Jewish heritage of Kiffer, a domesticated but handsome good guy and husband /father, is never mentioned, although it would almost certainly have likewise rankled the bourgeois British bigots the Du Pré's are depicted to be.

Beyond Silence is more complicated in its depiction of Jewishness. That Lara plays clarinet seems curious initially. More likely in a film about classical virtuosi would be a typical solo instrument: piano, violin, cello. The reason for Lara's choice is clear when she becomes enraptured with klezmer, Eastern European Jewish dance music, where clarinet is (as the music is played now) the typical melodic lead. (Renowned Argentinean-Israeli klezmer clarinetist and long-time resident in Germany Giora Feidman portrays himself in an important cameo in this film.) Klezmer's fascination for Lara is emblematic of the Jewish essentialism, reduction to stereotype, and philo-Semitism, enthusiasm for things Jewish, currently sweeping post-Holocaust Europe, especially Poland and Germany. (Lara's wildly curly mane also makes her appear "Jewish;" at least that is my perception of the intent.) Although klezmer music is named as a genre, Jews and Jewish culture go unmentioned, further problematizing this cultural appropriation and ethnic stereotyping that is painfully musically and visually obvious, especially in Feidman's performance. There is more to unpack about this film's serious "Jewish problem," but not in an essay on disability. (This film's unpardonably insensitive rendering of Jewish issues is the subject of a recent essay by Ingrid, C. Annett Richter, and I.) Beyond Silence is much admired in the Deaf Culture community and beyond and, despite its flaws, which I personally find very troubling, it deserves to be taught, both for its merits and defects.

Unlike our other taxonomies, our distinguishing of films with Jewish subplots has no binary or scale. While "Jewish" is a useful category of analysis here, for three of these films, "Gentile" is not. A possible innocent explanation for the disproportionately large number of classical music/disability films with Jewish themes -- the easily-demonstrable fact of there being many Jewish classical musicians — fails to account for their use of Jewish demonization and essentialism. The Jew as Other is a nearly ubiquitous theme of culture and conversation, even in places with insignificant Jewish histories, likely exceeded in its pervasiveness only by the "Othering" of women and PWD.

Concluding Thoughts

Through this process, disability was found invariably to be associated with social isolation, thus deafness and psychiatric conditions prevailed. In Amadeus, Shine, Thirty-two, and (as behavioral manifestation of Du Pré's MS) Hilary and Jackie, "invisible" social pathologies go unnamed. Manifesting impairment principally as public performance, these films argue persuasively for the socially constructed nature of disability.

The prominence of deafness/muteness -- in Mr. Holland's Opus, The Piano, Beyond Silence, and Immortal Beloved -- demonstrates both their kinship with "mental illness" films -- both portray disability as conflated with social isolation -- and that Western narrative art such as cinema literally reflects -- that is, it inverts -- "real life." If deafness and classical music actually intersect infrequently, their common pairing in these classical music films is nonetheless a failsafe recipe for tragedy.

If deafness and music are opposites attracting, in another sense disability and classical music are doppelgangers, each other's shadows. Freud regarded PWD as inherently, inescapably narcissistic. Popular culture regards classical (non-popular) music as an esoteric concern. Together, disability and classical music represent a form of internal exile -- from social norms and acceptance.

IH: The portrayal of the marginalization of deaf people is heightened in these films by their association with music. Music's pivotal role -- as a profession, calling, identity and talent — dramatizes the condition of silence.

AL: If it appears my contribution to this essay is larger than yours, that is illusory. The foundation of my criticism is your teaching. The devil in these films is in details only your expertise could detect.

If you are kinder to these films than I, that may be disciplinary; critic versus nurturer of children. A synthesis of our analyses yields gratitude for those films that give voice to PWD, an admonition to do better, and prescriptions for how that might be accomplished.

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NOTES

¹ Asperger's was identified in Germany in the 1940s, but only entered common medical parlance in 1981. Gould died in 1982.

² The culturally Deaf do not generally identify as disabled, but are typically thus identified by others.

³ Intimate Deaf communities develop private "home signs." "Sign names" replace fingerspelling among friends and colleagues. Neither justifies crude sign language fakery.