This fall brought a treasure trove of workshops that introduced us to oral history projects telling the histories of marginalized communities in their own words - from Rikers’ Island inmates to New York City’s Trans community. A new documentary seeks to do the same, directed by a collaborative team that partners subject with producer. OHMA student Lisa R. Cohen spoke to the team about their very special relationship.

By: Lisa R. Cohen

In a wildly popular, recently released documentary a group of teenagers gather at a hippy-dippy summer camp in upstate New York. It’s the early seventies; the infamous Woodstock music festival is happening sometime around now, somewhere nearby, and the scenes recall that moment in history. There’s an amateur film crew capturing shaky footage of the teens laughing and goofing around, making snarky comments into the mike, and flirting with each other with the whiff of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll in the air. In a memorable scene, we see them all being “fumigated” after a campwide attack of crabs. In voiceover, we hear the middle-aged adults they’ve become describe that time in their lives, telling stories of teenage angst, overcoming personal demons, and most of all finding community that will go on to turn them into a force for change. 

The camp was called Jened, but it was lovingly dubbed Crip Camp, also the film’s title. The teens were on crutches, in wheelchairs, or unable to speak or move on their own, and for most this was the first chance they’d had to fit in, to feel “normal,” to not be ostracized for their differences.  It’s a frank, no-holds, heartbreaking series of recollections that are also filled with a sense of both humor and raunchiness that activates common ground with horny, insecure, bewildered adolescents (and former adolescents) everywhere.  It’s the beauty of the film’s very deliberate move to focus on this part of the story and to spend the first 40 minutes of the film at Camp Jened. This structure helps mainstream viewers to get past whatever uncomfortable sense of “other” they might feel, to identify with the narrators, and to celebrate their ensuing struggle for an equal place at the table.

The film’s tagline reads, “No one at Camp Jened could’ve imagined that those summers in the woods together would be the beginnings of a revolution.” Once viewers come to know and care for these kids, the film goes on to follow their adult journeys as they blossom into an unstoppable movement, ultimately credited with the hard won passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act  (ADA). 

The film was the first to screen at Sundance this past year,  the second  to partner with Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground production company,  currently airs on Netflix, and will almost certainly be in line for an Oscar nomination in the coming weeks.

Crip Camp shares the mission of many of our workshop guests this year, whose work opens space for marginalized communities with voices struggling to be heard and lets those voices speak for themselves. But in taking those voices and crafting them into a powerful documentary, the film also engages a core tension with traditional oral history canon that champions narrators as their own - and only - experts.  That it is risky, perhaps even immoral, for historians, or in this case filmmakers, to shape, extract, and analyze the words in the service of a bigger narrative whole. This is especially sensitive when the narrators are marginalized, misunderstood, or othered,  and their perspectives arguably cannot be authentically “translated” to a general public if that translation is being done by an outsider.  This raises a central question in Oral History - is the goal to witness, document and preserve a history, perhaps to help a group know and understand its own heritage? Or is it to find a way to bring a history to a wider audience, to create greater cultural understanding and possibly foster a climate for change?  

Crip Camp illustrates the delicacy of these issues but it also mitigates them, and offers the best of those two goals through the unique partnership of its directing team. The documentary was also just named a finalist for this year’s Alfred I duPont-Columbia University Awards for outstanding audio and video journalism, an award I administer, so I recently had the good fortune to interview that team, Nicole Newnham and James LeBrecht. Before the Zoom conversation began, I felt that I had already encountered LeBrecht, as a young man, because he is a central character in the film, himself a Camp Jened camper. 

LeBrecht was born with spina bifida and like the others at Jened, he blossomed there, discovering himself (along with his first girlfriend). Now he is an acclaimed sound designer and disability activist.  He created sound design on Newnham’s previous films, and this six-year project grew out of their deep conversations about disability rights. The pair were able to come at the film with a two-pronged approach. In our conversation, they made the case both for inclusion of narrators in the entire production process, and for collaboration beyond the narrators, to create a work that both honors the narrators and brings the story to a wider audience. 

The film traces the disability activist movement, with a main focus on Judy Huemann, a fellow Jened camper, then counselor, who went on to spearhead the movement. 

See and hear Directors Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht introduce themselves with image descriptions:

Newnham and LeBrecht talked about the challenge of structuring the film, whether to set the stage by defining and documenting the disability movement, or to start by immersing the audience at Camp Jened. Their instinct was to start with the perspective of the disabled community, one that also showed what these campers had in common with a more mainstream audience, as a way to bring the two communities together.

See Nicole Newnham explain the approach they both fought for: 

COHEN:  Can you talk a little bit about the structure of this? You know, the first 40 minutes of it being about one thing in which you met these kids. And you saw the world through their eyes and you and you got to know them, you being one of them, Jim and then you sort of took a turn. Is that something that evolved over time? What, how intentional was that?

NEWNHAM: It was very intentional, but we didn’t always know if we were going to be able to pull it off. From the very beginning, we really wanted to kind of craft this whole first act that was very immersive and didn't actually tip its hand very much to where it was going to head, because we knew that if we let people watch the story of the disability rights movement from the point of view that people usually come to disability with, they wouldn't see it the way we wanted them to see it.

We needed to be able to shift the way people view disability - and people with disabilities - pretty drastically, in order for them to hold the story in the way we wanted them to hold it. And so the camp gave us the opportunity to do that. But in order to do it well, we had to really create kind of an experience for the viewer where you feel like you're coming into the camp. You're not too sure if you're comfortable. You overcome your discomfort. You make friends. You end up kind of feeling like you're a part of the community. So then when you move outside the camp and you start seeing the campers viewed through news cameras, really, and other journalism, you feel like you're watching your friends and you don't feel like you're watching people who are ‘other.’ And that was, that was really important to us.

And for a while, you know, we were getting advice like, “Oh, maybe you should actually start with the idea and then flash back so people know why they should care about this camp. And we sort of stuck to our guns because we said, you know, we really are sort of thinking of this as a nontraditional documentary structure. But the structure in our hearts was the camp is like a stone thrown in the water and the movement is kind of rippling outward from that.

The key? Two directors working in tandem from different perspectives to bring the insider perspective to an outside audience. Both LeBrecht and Newnham also talked about the strong sense of purpose - to inspire and effect change - that motivated both of them, and about the critical, collaborative relationship that permitted the candor and intimacy that made this film so compelling.

See James LeBrecht talk about the unique partnership and its magic sauce - trust:

LEBRECHT: Personally, speaking for myself, you can't go on this kind of quest or journey without the people you're working with, and who they are.  Fortunately, Nicole and I have known each other for a long time. And there is a friendship. But we have never been this close. And there was a trust that we had with each other that was essential, and it is something that happened with our editors and the other people on this film.

You can’t - look this is an experience that other people said to me and to Nicole also - you can't talk about things like the fact that I wore diapers until I was 15, unless you have faith that that is useful and that it'll be portrayed in a way that is going to move your story forward and underline the experience of disability. And I had that opportunity here, and it's very, I mean, I don't think that happens every day.

COHEN: It’s that trust.

LEBRECHT: And Corbin O’Toole, who’s in our film said, “You know, Jim, I wouldn't be talking if it wasn't that you were a member of our community, who is one of the filmmakers here. Because I trust that you'll know what to do with this and not blow it - not turn it into what we often talk about, like, inspiration porn.”

This collaborative practice is a part of a growing trend, and a welcome one.

James LeBrecht talks about the importance of inclusion:

COHEN: This notion of representation in storytelling, you know, nowadays there is a lot more inclusion in the process. How important was it for you, Jim, to co-direct this film and how important is it for there to be this kind of intermingled process?

LEBRECHT: I mean, it's a, it's actually a question for both of us very deeply, because it is both of our experiences, because I, Nicole asked me to direct with her, “Please! I just, I love you as a filmmaker, please do this!” And so it was that key decision that I think made a huge, I know, made a huge difference.

But the disabled community suffers to this day, under the pain and dismissal of stigma that is perpetrated by what we see in the media. It does great harm. It does great harm, when you're, you're seeing people in wheelchairs being applauded for simply showing up. And it’s not going to change until we are really, part of the media. That we are the people writing the stories and we have the outlets to do that. The questions around representations with our lived authentic experience are not only important and will counteract these negative stereotypes and stigma, but it adds to the breadth of variety of the kind of stories people are reading about.

You know, if we're a missing color in the landscape of journalism, it's just a little grayer without us.

I didn’t put the specific question to Newnham and LeBrecht - should narrators be the last word on their histories? Or is there a greater purpose to be had in shaping them into a bigger, interpretative work? But given the care these two filmmakers took to balance the moral imperatives, Newnham offered what I see as a conclusive argument - the inspiration their film is providing in reaching its big audience.

Voiceover Crip Camp - file footage: “But in the end, it was the disabled themselves who made it happen.”

NEWNHAM: Basically, seeing the success, the actual political success that was achieved in Crip Camp was really heartening to people and inspiring them. And people were saying things to each other like, “I don't know, does people getting out in the street ever make a difference?”

And people would say, “Well, you should watch Crip Camp, you know?” (laughs)

And I think that's why, revisiting these stories out of history is so, so important. And I think often movement stories don't get remembered or lifted up as much as they should. And so, you know, the next generations of activists are sort of reinventing the wheel. So to that extent, it felt really good to be able to be any kind of inspiration for the movement that was happening today.

See the film on Netflix here: https://www.netflix.com/title/81001496. Watch for an expanded podcast episode of this conversation coming soon at http://www.OnAssignmentpodcast.com