James LeBrecht, Nicole Newnham (2020)
This documentary premiered at Sundance in January and is now streaming on Netflix. The first part consists of archive footage of an early 1970s summer camp for youngsters with disabilities, and recollections by some of those who participated. James LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham then describe, again through a combination of news film and interviews, the disability rights campaign that culminated in the passing, in 1990, of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Several Camp Jened alumnae/i became activists in the long-term national campaign. Crip Camp‘s narrative comprises, then, two largely distinct parts but LeBrecht and Newnham never lose the thread connecting them.
LeBrecht, born with spina bifida, was himself a ‘Jenedian’. A native New Yorker, now based in Oakland, California, he’s had a successful career as a sound designer (first in theatre, then in film) beside his activist work. He and the Emmy-winning documentarian Nicole Newnham (who is not disabled) have collaborated before. LeBrecht’s own journey from East to West Coast reflects Crip Camp’s. Camp Jened was located in the Catskills. By the mid-1970s, the Center for Independent Living at Berkeley was a nerve centre of American disabled rights activity; people who first got to know each other at Jened had converged there. In the spring of 1977, the San Francisco Office of the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare was the site of the 28-day ‘504 Sit-in’, which LeBrecht and Newnham cover extensively. It was led by Judy Heumann, a wheelchair user as the result of polio in childhood and another Jenedian. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, although it made provision for disabled access to public buildings and other spaces, wasn’t actually being implemented. The 504 Sit-in changed that.
The black-and-white film of the summer camp was shot by what LeBrecht has described to the Guardian as a ‘”radical, early video coalition of hippies’” who stopped by the camp in the summer of 1971, strapped a camera to his wheelchair, and directed him to film’. The collective called themselves the People’s Video Theater. LeBrecht and Newnham managed to track down one of its members, who happened to be ‘in the process of digitizing the group’s five and a half hours of footage from the camp, which now composes most of Crip Camp’s first third’. The television news and other footage at the heart of the subsequent two thirds makes for an absorbing narrative but it’s the People’s Video Theater archive material that is Crip Camp’s USP. It’s amazing to watch although the understandable focus on it has consequences for other aspects of the documentary.
Summary text on the screen near the end of the film records that Camp Jened ran annually from 1951 to 1977, when it folded because of financial difficulties. I’d have liked LeBrecht and Newnham to tell us more than they do about the camp’s inception They make very clear that an out-of-sight-out-of-mind attitude towards disability was distressingly prevalent in the early 1970s: that’s why the unconstrained atmosphere and routines of Camp Jened made the place, for those recalling it now, extraordinarily liberating. The isolation/institutionalisation of disabled children had presumably been even more acute twenty years previously. The creation in 1951 of a summer camp where disability was normal must have been, at the time, quite exceptionally progressive. The film-makers are keen to emphasise the influence of the 1960s counterculture on the Jened ethos: by 1971, marijuana and making-out sessions were available to campers. This bolsters the film’s portrait of the camp as a kind of mini-Woodstock (the actual Woodstock took place geographically close to Camp Jened) but this comes at the expense of information about its founders[1]. You assume, from what a couple of contributors say about how they looked forward to returning to Jened, that campers went there repeatedly; but LeBrecht and Newnham might have said a bit more on this too[2].
The film takes its title from Jened’s affectionate name among campers and their counsellors – and Crip Camp is at its strongest in capturing the experience of disabled life. It illustrates how the camp allowed teenagers with different forms of disability to appreciate disorders other than their own, gave them a larger sense of camaraderie. Among a collection of formidable characters, Judy Heumann and Denise Sherer Jacobson stand out. The latter and her husband Neil, who both have cerebral palsy, are as amusing as they’re incisive. They describe the contemporary hierarchy of disability: those with polio, who sounded normal, were at the top, CP sufferers at the bottom. Neil Jacobson recalls his mother telling him she understood his wanting to ‘marry a handicapped girl but why not a polio?’
Crip Camp also conveys its subjects’ appetite for self-assertion – even self-justification – by doing things assumed to be out of bounds to them. Soon after enrolling as a student at the University of California at San Diego, James LeBrecht rode and crashed a friend’s motorbike. Denise Sherer first had sex because ‘I didn’t want to die a virgin’. Not long afterwards, she suffered acute stomach pains and was taken to hospital with suspected appendicitis. When Denise came to, she learned that her appendix had been removed but found to be healthy. An astonished doctor diagnosed gonorrhoea: Denise remembers the momentary excitement she felt at being told she had a sexually transmitted disease. The film’s most impressive able-bodied contributor is the journalist Evan White, who covered the 504 Sit-in like no one else. He describes how a strike by TV technicians and consequent shortage of news material proved a godsend for the sitters-in. It resulted in White’s reports from San Francisco, which had previously aired only locally, suddenly being used by news stations across the country.
Watching the Jenedians still around today, now in their sixties or early seventies, has a powerful effect because of what it conveys about a lifetime of disability. It’s humbling for two main reasons. You’re awed by how much Judy Heumann has achieved in close to half a century of work with governments, non-profit organisations and so on, in developing human rights legislation and policies benefiting the disabled. Denise Scherer Jacobson expresses more intensely a sense of sustained, undaunted struggle. A colossal effort is needed for this woman to form and produce every word she speaks. You wonder at the strength of will and sheer stamina she has needed to keep on speaking – year after year, decade after decade. Yet she’s evidently loved life. When Denise laughs, which she does plenty, she seems to be telling us she’s well aware what she sounds like. She seems to be laughing at her disability too.
5 April 2020
[1] The Wikipedia article on Camp Jened – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Jened – is more informative.
[2] Wikipedia helps here also. The entry for James LeBrecht says that he ‘began to attend Camp Jened’ when he was fourteen years old. According to her entry, Judy Heumann attended ‘every summer from ages 9 to 18’.
