Access as Carceral Accessory: Documentary Ethics and Disability Justice

Abstract

This essay argues that documentary’s longstanding investment in “access” has obscured the transactions with power that make access possible. Prompted by recent controversies surrounding films such as Retrograde (Matthew Heineman 2022) and Jihad Rehab (Meg Smaker 2022), I examine how access has come to function as an ethical virtue and a form of documentary capital. Tracing this logic through the history of carceral access in U.S. social-issue documentary, I revisit Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967) and the landmark legal battle restricting its release. Rather than treating the film primarily as an exposé of state violence, I focus on the bureaucratic negotiations and legal obstacles structuring its production and circulation. I argue that Commonwealth v. Wiseman helped consolidate a neoliberal framework for documentary ethics preoccupied with liability and risk management, while transforming access into a form of property granted and regulated by the state. Documentary access emerges in this light not as a challenge to carceral power but as its accessory. I turn to disability justice for an abolitionist understanding of access, drawing on the movement for deinstitutionalization and psychiatric survivor activism. Through analyses of formerly incarcerated filmmaker Rahsaan Thomas’s Friendly Signs (2023) and Jordan Lord’s Documentary Participation Agreement (2024), I explore how access is relocated from privileged entry into sites of confinement to collective relations of interdependence and shared responsibility. These projects suggest how documentary might move beyond a compromised ethics of carceral access toward a liberatory politics oriented not merely toward exposing captivity but toward ending it.