“We resisted neurotypical ways of making films”: how The Stimming Pool creates space for an autistic cinema
Steven Eastwood and Georgia Bradburn of the Neurocultures Collective tell us about their bold experiments with an ’autistic camera’ on The Stimming Pool, and why they resisted explaining autistic behaviour on screen.
What does an autistic film look like? The Wellcome Trust-funded project Autism Through Cinema at Queen Mary, University of London aimed to answer that question, spawning a number of art pieces, essays, a podcast and a feature film. This film, The Stimming Pool, is the work of Sam Chown-Ahern, Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Robin Elliott-Knowles, Lucy Walker and Steven Eastwood, billed together as the Neurocultures Collective. The film is paired with a multiscreen gallery installation, Stim Cinema, which breaks further out of the restrictions of typical filmmaking and viewing.
The film is having its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, while the installation is available through the LFF Expanded strand at Bargehouse. Ready to discuss the more nuanced aspects of the project, I caught up with Steven Eastwood and Georgia Bradburn at BFI Southbank to get into the actual process of making a film which defies neurotypical conventions.
“The whole process has been quite unconventional, because we’ve been resisting these neurotypical ways of making films and neurotypical ways of understanding films,” Bradburn says. It is quite a daunting task to completely rewrite the practice of filmmaking, however. The Autism Through Cinema project allowed Bradburn and other writers and academics to explore whether there might be an ‘autistic aesthetic’ within pre-existing cinema. “I’ve always been drawn to films which are very nonlinear and have these different puzzle pieces that come together,” Bradburn reflects. “That’s just how my brain works, and I think it was the same for the other collective members as well.”
There was resistance to this by early test audiences of The Stimming Pool. Some suggested signposting in the film which sequences were made by which member of the collective, and even to define ‘autism’ and ‘stimming’ at the start. Eastwood recalls pushing back against these critiques, saying, “I don’t think explanations or narrations were ever a part of our thinking. It was about images and patterns and how we can flow between environments. We never talked about explanations.”
So often autistic people are made to feel they need to explain themselves and their behaviour, but the film is a way to avoid needing to justify neurodivergent thinking and behaviour. “I love the idea of resisting films having a binary answer to what the film means,” Bradburn says. “Everyone’s experience is very different. It’s a film that can resonate with you in a sensory, bodily way.”
The lack of a need to explain or enforce a logic to the film is played with at the start, with Elliott-Knowles and his father getting ready to screen a film at their real-life B-Movie Fan Club at the Electric Palace cinema in Hastings. “We’d always intended to start the film with John and Robin because we wanted to do a bit of a misdirect by setting that up like a documentary,” Bradburn reflects. “Then we created this idea of the ‘autistic camera’, this embodied character of the camera which introduced autism into its sensibility.”
Bradburn created a manifesto for how this ‘autistic camera’ would work in practice, which she shared with DP Greg Oke. “If the camera is ‘masking’, that’s like traditional documentary set-up. Then what I call ‘shifting’ is when it’s restrained to those positions, but it feels like the gaze of the camera is drawn to something that’s not necessarily the focus of the scene.”
Bradburn wanted to reflect the stimming of the characters in the movement of the camera itself. “There’s a scene where the Shapeshifter is in their house and they’re away from the public where they feel they have to mask,” she explains. “In the home they can do what they want, and the camera follows them around as they stim. Gradually this choreography emerges with the camera, and it learns from the Shapeshifter’s stimming to stim as well, and they end up stimming alongside each other. I could see Greg swaying when the character was swaying on the floor and spinning around with them, and they created this beautiful relationship where they were stimming with each other, the camera and the character.”
The filmmakers are keen to not limit The Stimming Pool only to autistic experience. They have had feedback from other neurodivergent people, such as ADHD audiences, saying that they identified with many aspects of the film. As have those who identify as neurotypical, such as people who connect the idea of ‘masking’ to concealing themselves in social situations when they are anxious.
The film challenges the idea of there being a defined binary between those who are neurodivergent, and those who aren’t. “It’s important to make the distinction, because I think being neurodivergent is defined by the societal oppressions placed on neurodivergent people,” Bradburn observes. “But when it comes to filmmaking, I think it would be wrong to say, ‘You’re not autistic, so you can’t do this,’ because then we go back to the original structure of not having accessibility. We are an autistic collective, and I think that’s quite a cool and radical thing, but you get into some trouble when you start diagnosing people in these things.”
This false disambiguation extended to the filmmakers themselves, and Eastwood’s relationship to the five autistic members of the collective. “I don’t identify as neurotypical because I don’t really understand what that even means,” Eastwood responds. However, I recognise that politically if everybody stopped recognising themselves as neurotypical and everybody wants to jump on to the diversity bandwagon, that really doesn’t help in a lot of spaces. We had a common language, which was our arts practice and our love of experimental film. I think that’s one of the things that closed down those ideas of who’s neurotypical and who isn’t.”
Bradburn is keen to make it clear that Eastwood’s role in the collective was not to handhold or chaperone the autistic filmmakers, and she has been frustrated by the ways some people have tried to frame the film. “I really don’t want people to see the film as this really ‘fascinating insight’ into these strange creatures,” Bradburn says. “We’re not specimens being tested. The film is kind of entertaining the idea of testing but flipping it on its head. We’re now testing the audience.”
The Stimming Pool refuses to be forced into typical filmmaking structures, and the same is being reflected on release. Cinemas and galleries are being encouraged to screen the film in ‘relaxed’ environments designed to be less sensorily overwhelming. There are many neurotypical structures in place across filmmaking and exhibition, but The Stimming Pool demonstrates that a neurodivergent cinema is possible.
Stim Cinema is part of the free exhibition Playing with Reality at LFF Expanded.