I Didn’t See You There: Doc About Life with a Disability Offers Viewers a First-Person View

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B+

Reid Davenport’s affecting first-person documentary I Didn’t See You There puts the viewer in the seat of a wheelchair, to be gawked at, ignored, or treated as an inconvenience in daily interactions. A winner of the U.S. documentary directing award at Sundance in 2022, the film is just now coming to video-on-demand after a long festival run.

Davenport, who has cerebral palsy, has made a series of short films over the past decade about disability before this first feature, which blends autobiographical, experimental, and historical elements in a casual film diary format.

The filmmaker never appears directly on camera, though his shadow or reflection are occasionally seen. From the vantage of his wheelchair seat, we see both the pleasure of his movement through his Oakland neighbourhood, as well as the challenges created by other people.

The wheelchair serves as a camera dolly, allowing for long tracking shots, accompanied by the rattle of the wheels and a percussive action-movie score. The moving camera reveals patterns on walls and pavement, graffiti-splattered hoardings along construction sites, store windows and occasional flashes of sky.

Socially, things don’t go so smoothly. Uncomfortable interactions range from the irritating, including unwanted offers of assistance or patronizing neighbour who declares him an “inspiration,” to more aggressive encounters, including with an awkward and officious transit employee who orders him about or flight attendants who attempt to handle him like oversized luggage.

As the film progresses, a third thematic element is sifted into the recipe — America’s history of disability.

One day Davenport notices the appearance of a big orange and yellow circus tent on a vacant lot in his neighbourhood. Davenport originally came from Bethel, New York, the birthplace of the 19th century circus showman P.T. Barnum (played by Hugh Jackson in The Greatest Show on Earth), whose travelling circus exhibited people with disabilities as “human curiosities” including those with microcephaly (small heads) and conjoined twins.

Over the course of the film, Davenport takes two flights back to New York to visit his mother, who makes it clear she would prefer him to live close to home and extended family. They talk, off-camera, about his work, and increasingly political quality of his films and allude to his decision to move to Oakland from Bethel “to become an artist after failing at more conventional career paths.”

At another point, while staring at the tent across the street, he speculates: “I wonder how many job attempts it would have taken for me to join the freak show. But a cynical part of me wonders if I have joined the show. I’ve made a career out of putting myself in front of the camera.”

In juggling the beforementioned autobiographical, experimental, and historical elements, I Didn’t See You There can feel scattered and somewhat distant, no doubt due to Davenport’s disinclination toward treating his disability as a commodity. But the thematic strands resolve effectively in two climactic moments, one loud and one quietly ironic.

Back home in Oakland, Davenport has a frustrating argument with a workman when he finds an electrical cord preventing him from taking the wheelchair ramp to his apartment. After Davenport finally enters his ground floor apartment, and closes the door behind him, the screen goes dark before we hear him yell, “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!” followed by a moment silence as he takes a deep breath. A beat later, he adds a short punctuation: “Fuck!”

In a second conclusion, in his hometown of Bethel, Davenport leaves his chair and walks, awkwardly (we see his shadow holding the camera) to the town square to confront a statue of P.T. Barnum. He says he finds the statue unimpressively “bleak” though he notes Barnum is still “on a pedestal.”

What’s also bleak is that the monument was erected, not in the distant unenlightened past, but in 2010, the 200th anniversary of the showman’s birth.

I Didn’t See You There. Directed by Reid Davenport. Now available on all video on demand sources, including Apple TV.