LISTENING IN CRIP TIME: TOWARD A COUNTERTHEORY OF DOCUMENTARY ACCESS

Abstract

Jordan Lord's Shared Resources (2021) uses access features - namely, open captions and burned-in audio description - as a medium of crip creativity. A meditation on debilitation, debt, disability, and bankruptcy, Lord's film asks what it means to listen from the perspective of the out-of-synch temporal experiences that disability scholars call "crip time." To listen in crip time, Lord shows, is to rethink the temporality of access, turning it from an afterthought into a building block of documentary language. By reframing access as a collective responsibility, Shared Resources moves away from transactional and adversarial interpretations of documentary access as risk mitigation into a more powerful framework of accountability.