The Mentally Ill: Oft-Invisible Artists

I have been blogging about my feature-length documentary on my friend Sam who is battling bipolar disorder, also know as manic depressive illness. The documentary extends in many interesting directions, but one theme I want to explore further is the marginalized voices of mentally ill artists. While making this film, I saw many artists like Sam whose creativity was ignored or marginalized by a public that doesn't recognize the potential contributions of artists living with mental illnesses.

A Summer in the Cage is about my friend Sam's battle with bipolar disorder -- a mental illness that causes unusual shifts in a person's mood that are marked by manic highs and depressive lows. A Summer in the Cage began with a chance meeting between Sam and me in the summer of 2000. I had come to the courts to make a film about the street basketball scene at the legendary NYC basketball court called "the Cage." One of the people I met while I was there was Sam. It turned out he had left his finance job that very day to explore his love of photography. Sam had amazing pictures of the players at the court so I decided to bring Sam on as a collaborator and use his photographs as a storytelling device. Later that summer, our work on the basketball project became unhinged when Sam had his first manic episode and we decided to shift the focus of my film to Sam's battle with bipolar illness.

One of the reasons that I decided to refocus the film on Sam's mental illness was that I am fascinated by the intersection of art, madness and genius. This topic is certainly an age-old theme, one that has been sophisticatedly explored by world-renown author and clinician Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in her book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. In her book, Dr. Jamison researched the biographies and texts of the major 19th and 20th-century English and Irish writers and poets (as well as other composers and painters) in regards to their experiences with mania and depression. She found that many of the artists whose works line our schools, bookshelves and inhabit our record collections were produced by people suffering from bipolar disorder (manic depressive illness). Her book made me think of Sam as a perfect model of someone battling a mental illness and whose artistic work was a powerful self-expression of the moods he was acutely experiencing.

My romantic notion, and one that Sam reservedly shared, was that the new tale be told through both his artwork and the verité footage of his life. I used many of Sam's brilliant photographs in the film -- photos of life at "the Cage" and photos from a trip we took to Joshua Tree National Park. People who have seen the film are often impressed by his work. Sam took photos throughout the years that I was filming him, including a set from 2003 to 2004 that, for me, truly illustrate the excruciating isolation he felt both from his accomplished "old self" as well as from his friends, family and lovers. Sam photographed a series of long shots of the Santa Monica piers at night, an empty Venice beach playground at dusk, and the vacant stares of mannequins at a wig shop. The images are lonely, beautiful, poignant, and hauntingly illustrative of the pain of his illness.

In the last several years, Sam's photography has been put aside by his day-to-day struggles to get his life back on track. Unfortunately, the time and energy for the creation of art feels like an indulgence to Sam (though maybe it is a therapy he has under-explored). But like the ebb and flow of moods, I am confident that he will re-discover his love for his work. I know specifically that the battle of Sam's mental illness has limited his voice. I wonder how many more like him are out there--musicians, painters, writers, filmmakers - battling not only mood disorders (like bipolar disorder), but thought disorders (like schizophrenia) and clinical depressions. In a world of war, stress and conflict, perhaps a re-examination of our priorities towards the care of society's mental health should be imperative if we want to help support the potential contributions of people suffering from mental illnesses to our vast cultural landscape.

My feature-length documentary A Summer in the Cage will have encore airings on Sundance Channel at 3:30 p.m. EST Saturday, October 27, 2007 and Tuesday, October 30, 2007 check local listings http://www.sundancechannel.com/films/500252338. More information about bipolar disorder and the film can be found at http://www.cagethemovie.com.

Comments

[RaisingAwareness]

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[larry278]

Off thread: Ms Huffington & her editors have mastered the technique of salting each section of HP with some stories which demand reading & are rewarding to a wide audience. Good newspapers developed the technique & still use it. This could be one reason the the publishers & editors of FINANCIAL TIMES admire HP & say so every whip stitch.