Spectatorship and alternative portrayals of blindness

Brylla’s practice-led research aims to generate alternative portrayals of blindness that deviate from common media stereotypes that are inscribed in a film’s narrative and aesthetics, and that operate through the emphasis of binaries, such as blindness-vision, deviant-normal and them-us. Reflecting an ableist ideology, the formation and maintenance of these stereotypes inform, and are informed by, the sociocultural knowledge shared by filmmakers and spectators. His film practice attempts to reconfigure such preconceived knowledge in the spectator by filming blind people’s ordinary and subjective experiences. Analysing a range of filmic techniques in his films, the chapter proposes that ordinariness and subjectivity can be effectively mediated to the spectator through mapping corporeal relationships to everyday objects and domestic spaces