Janet Harbord’s Autism Plays Itself is an ambitious documentary which superposes footage of autistic children committed to London’s Maudsley Hospital in 1957 with commentary from Sophie Broadgate, Ash Loydon, and Ethan Lyon, three autistic adults.

The original footage used in the short film was collected as part of another film by the hospital, entitled Aspects of Childhood Psychosis.

This was a collection of visual examples of the behavioural criteria for “childhood psychosis,” an obsolete psychiatric diagnosis which roughly stands in for what we now understand to be autism.

Though Aspects of Childhood Psychosis is one of the first instances of the word “autism” used in film, it is ultimately a product of its time and milieu. The film pathologizes the behavior of its subjects as “defective,” “regressive,” “retarded,” and, of course, “psychotic.”

With Autism Plays Itself, Harbord and her collaborators take on an artefact of the stigmatizing, often violent history of psychiatric treatment of autistic people. The film tasks itself with offering a new, autistic perspective on the children’s behavior.

Aspects of Childhood Psychosis alternates between images of babies and foreboding title cards, warning that some of them may be “destined to psychosis” because of their negative home environments, genetic makeups, or “organic factors” such as cerebral Syphilis.

In contrast, the voices of Autism Plays Itself speak at length about “the freeness of being autistic.” This freeness, they warn, “frightens people.”

The film never misses an occasion to highlight the unique talents of autistic children. One clip shows a young girl lifting up the edges of her skirt in order to carry her toys with it, while Broadgate praises her “clever” problem-solving.

For psychiatrists observing autistic youth, however, Broadgate explains that this kind of behavior fails to meet developmental targets. Preconceived notions of how clothes ought to be used preclude researchers from appreciating the unique transportation method which this girl has just discovered.

Breaking with the 1957 film’s authoritative discussion of the people it portrayed, the cast of Autism Plays Itself plays along with the children.

Over footage of a little boy manipulating large sheets of paper, one speaker speculates that the sheets may in fact be plans for a fully-functional time machine. 

In tender moments like this one, the film breaks from the stern and analytical tendencies of medical professionals, taking interest in what its subjects might be thinking, or imagining.

The contrast between Autism Plays Itself and its predecessor could not be stronger than in the multiple clips of boys staring at their reflections in mirrors, windows, and camera lenses.

For the doctors of Maudsley hospital, each boy is a “young Narcissus,” fascinated with himself because of a fundamental misarrangement of his ego.

For the participants of Harbord’s film, this is a “visual stim,” Over the image of a boy bounces his head back and forth before a window, they explain the kind of visual titillation that accompanies the movement of one’s own reflection.

Despite the light-hearted tone the film often takes, it remains an attempt to subvert a seriously violent history. 

Maudsley Hospital was the cadre of eugenicists. Its namesake and subsequent higher-ups had a history of involvement in the English Eugenics Society, and its early research into autism is difficult to separate from the field, with its constant allusions to the “deficiency” of autistic children.

To this day, the hospital practices Applied Behavioural Analysis (ABA), a form of therapy for autistic youth which leaves participants 86% more likely to meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD, and has been widely condemned as abusive.

The Maudsley’s research on autistic children is paramount to the most violent histories of autism, as the diagnosis of a retardation to be rectified through profoundly traumatizing therapies.

Autism Plays Itself infiltrates this history of autism, presenting it instead as a means by which to better understand one another.