This list represents our selection of films dealing with disability.

Cyrano de Bergerac (1925), D: Augusto Genina

Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), D: Michael Gordon (music: Dimitri Tiomkin)

Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), D: Jean-Paul Rappeneau (music: Jean-Claude Petit)

Roxanne (1987), D: Fred Schepisi (music: Bruce Smeaton)

The Elephant Man (1980), D: David Lynch (music: Samuel Barber)

My Left Foot  (1989), D: Jim Sheridan (music: Elmer Bernstein)

Helen Keller in her Story (1955), D: Nancy Hamilton

The Miracle Worker (1962), D: Arthur Penn (music: Laurence Rosenthal)

Frida: Naturaleza Viva  (1985), D: Paul Leduc (music: Camille Saint-Saens)

Frida (2002), D: Julie Taymor (music: Elliot Goldenthal)

Frida Kahlo: Portrait Of An Artist

Freaks [Nakaze] (1932), D: Tod Browning

Freakshow  (1995), D: Paul Talbot, William Cooke

Island of Lost Souls  (1933), D: Erie C. Kenton

The Island of Dr. Moreau  (1977), D: Don Taylor (music: Laurence Rosenthal)

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), D: John Frankenheimer (music:Gary Chang)

Mask (1985), D: Peter Bogdanovich (music: Dennis Ricotta)

The Man in the Iron Mask (1939), D: James Whale (music: Lucien Moraweck)

Shine (1996), D: Scott Hicks (music: David Hirschfelder)

Rain Man (1988), D: Barry Levinson (music: Hans Zimmer)

Charly (1968), D: Ralph Nelson (music: Ravi Shankar)

Awakenings (1990), D: Penny Marshall (music: Randy Newman)

Sybil (1976), D: Daniel Petrie (music: Leonard Rosenman)

Dominick & Eugene (1988), D: Robert M. Young (music: Trevor Jones)

A Beautiful Mind (2001), D: Ron Howard (music: James Horner)

The Hours (2002), D: Stephen Daldry (music: Philip Glass)

Mrs. Dalloway (1997), D: Marleen Gorris (music: Ilona Sekacz)

Moulin Rouge (1952), D: John Huston (music: Georges Auric)

Moulin Rouge (2001), D: Baz Luhrmann (music: Craig Armstrong)

Children of a Lesser God (1986), D: Randa Haines (music:Michael Convertino)

Scent of a Woman (Profumo di donna) (1975), D: Dino Risi (music: Armando

Trovajoli )

Scent of a Woman  (1992), D: Martin Brest (music: Thomas Newman)

Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1981), D: John Badham(music: Arthur B.  Rubenstein)

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), D: Milos Forman (music: Jack Nitzsche)

The Waterdance (1991), D: Neal Jimenez, Michael Steinberg (music: Michael Convertino)

The Other Side of the Mountain (1975), D: Larry Peerce (music: Charles Fox)

Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), D: John D. Han*censored* (music: Stephen Lawrence)

Prefontaine (1997), D: Steve James (music: Mason Daring)

Regarding Henry (1991), D: Mike Nichols (music: Hans Zimmer)

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968), D: Robert Ellis Miller (music: Dave Grusin)

The Lawnmower Man (1992), D: Brett Leonard (music: Dan Wyman)

Forrest Gump (1994), D: Robert Zemeckis (music: Alan Silvestri)

Immortal Beloved (1994), D: Bernard Rose (music: Ludwig Van

Beethoven)

Farinelli: Il Castrato (1995), D: Gerard Corbiau (music: Marc David, David Miller)

Breaking the Waves (1996), D: Lars von Trier (music: Joachim Holbek)

Frances (1983), D: Graeme Clifford (music: John Barry)

An Angel at My Table (1990), D: Jane Campion (music: Don McGlashan)

Suddenly, Last Summer  (1959), D: Joseph L. Mankiewicz (music: Malcolm Arnold, Buxton Orr)

The Bell Jar (1979), D: Larry Peerce (music: Gerald Fried)

The Snake Pit (1948), D: Anatole Litvak (music: Alfred Newman)

Nuts  (1987), D: Martin Ritt (music: Barbra Streisand)

Shock Corridor (1963), D: Samuel Fuller (music: Paul Dunlap)

Bedlam (1945), D: Mark Robson (music: Roy Webb)

Crazy People (1990), D: Tony Bill (music: Cliff Eidelman)

A Clockwork Orange (1971), D: Stanley Kubrick (music: Walter Carlos)

Marat/Sade (1966), D: Peter Brook (music: Richard Peaslee)

Marquis [Markiz] (1989), D: Henri Xhonneux (music: Reinhardt Wagner)

Quills (2000), D: Philip Kaufman (music: Stephen Warbec)

Justine (1968), D: Jesus Franco

What About Bob? (1991), D: Frank Oz (music: Miles Goodman)

The Music Lovers (1971), D: Ken Russell (music: Andre Previn)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), D: Wallace Worsley

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), D: William Dieterle (music:Alfred Newman)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame  (1957), D: Jean Delannoy (music:Georges Auric)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame  (1977), D: Al Cooke (music:

Wilfred Josephs)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame  (1982), D: Michael Tuchner (music: Ken Thorne)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame  (1996), D: Gary Trousdale (music:Alan Menken)

Beauty and the Beast (1946), D: Jean Cocteau (music: Georges Auric)

Sixth Happiness (1997), D: Waris Hussein (music: John Marchbank)

In the Name of the Father (1993), D: Jim Sheridan (music: Gavin Friday,

Trevor Jones)

Gaby: A True Story (1987), D: Luis Mandoki (music: Maurice Jarre)

Message in a Bottle (1999), D: Luis Mandoki (music: Sarah

McLachlan, Diane Warren, Gabriel Yared)

White Palace (1990), D: Luis Mandoki, (music: George Fenton)

The Magdalen Sisters (2002), D: Peter Mullan (music: Craig Armstrong)

Born on the Fourth of July (1989), D: Oliver Stone, (music: John T. Williams)

The Crying game  (1992), D: Nail Jordan, (music: Anne Dudley)

M. Butterfly (1993), D: David Cronenberg, (music: Howard Shore)

Psycho [Psiho] (1960), D: Alfred Hitch*censored*, (music: Bernard Herrmann)

Seven [Sedem] (1995), D: David Fincher, (music David Bowie, Howard Shore)

Malena (2000), D: Giuseppe Tornatore, (music: Ennio Morricone)

Amadeus (1984), D: Miloš Forman, (music: Neville Marriner)

The Mission, D: Roland Joffe, (music: Ennio Morricone)

What about disability and who is disabled? Let us briefly examine the protagonists of the films we have selected:

·      Cyrano de Bergerac had an extremely large nose;

·      Joseph Carey Merrick's head was heavily deformed;

·      Christy Brown had cerebral palsy;

·      Helen Keller was blind and deaf and was unable to speak;

·      Frida Kahlo had poliomyelitis and broke her spine in a car collision;

·      David Helfgott was mentally ill for more than ten years;

·      John Forbes Nash was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia;

·      Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec  was only five feet tall and physically disabled;

·      Ludwig van Beethoven was deaf;

·      Mozart's disability was Salieri;

·      Carlo Broschi was a castrato;

·        Francis Farmer was declared mentally incompetent by her own mother;

          Virginia Woolf was mentally unstable;

·        Marquiz de Sade was proclaimed a sexual maniac;

·        Gabriela Brimmer had an extremely bad case of cerebral palsy;

·        The Magdalene Sisters as they were called, were "sinful" and of low moral virtue;

·        Ron Kovic is a paralysed U.S. marine, who fought in Vietnam.

A thesis we wish to advance henceforth is this: disability is not a physical or mental shortcoming, obstruction or a defect. It is a social and symbolic status of any human being. Any spiritual, mental, symbolic or social property of one's being can become an anchor of disability, recognised by others as congenital.

Sources:

Mitja Raichenberg: Film o hendikepu: pripovedi o filmski glasbi

Dušan Rutar: Film o hendikepu: pripovedi o hendikepu. Ljubljana. Umco, 2003