Beyond cut,copy and paste: How editors stitch Bollywood’s disability affect

Editing is multitasking across disability production cultures

Most editors introduced their significance in disability production cultures by asserting that their intuitions functioned as the key to making disability representation reflexive, which meant they momentarily embodied its character arc to feel disability personhood. Apart from this being a common narrative across my interviews, such implicit demands and expectations placed on editors of disability genres by production houses suggested that an editor’s role is not limited to an editing room or the edit table. At first, Monisha Baldawa, editor of Margarita With a Straw (2014), remarked that it was a ‘bold and impulsive decision’ to debut in a film that revolved around Laila, a college-going Indian middle-class woman with cerebral palsy (a role played by Kalki Koechlin), who confronted her sexual urges, faced rejections by able-bodied men and came out as a bisexual to her family after briefly living and being open to the possibilities of queer intimacy in New York. In describing how editing disability and queer representation was an ambiguous, complex and convergent production practice with screen ideation, screenwriting and directing happening almost simultaneously, Baldawa exclaimed,

The feedback I sent for the script’s first draft, followed by comments on multiple drafts and . . . over time, being diligently present on the shoot every single day so I could get a grasp of Kalki’s character, her complexities and TRUTH . . . and there’s quite a bit of a difference structurally and even in emphasis of scenes. . . . Disability and sex or even sexuality: the two concepts have never been shown in conversation with each other so sensitively. I had to absolutely get into its skin. (Personal Communication, February 12, 2023)

Apart from demonstrating that editing a disability genre is a distinct interplay of disability making and unmaking built over complex processual assemblages, creative negotiations and interconnected production practices that require sustained immersion of multiple creative media workers in deciphering the narratological sentiments of the lived experiences of a person with a disability, Baldawa insisted that editors navigate its production as the affect and sensory moderators. She also explicitly indicated that an editor’s significance intensifies for storylines featuring the stigmatization, shunning, assumed asexuality and dejection of an Indian woman with a disability (Ghai, 2001; Ghosh, 2010). In such ways, she communicated that contemporary editors of disability genres and women-centric cinemas like Margarita with a Straw are most often brought onboard due to an assumption that they can relatively easily embody the sensibilities of women’s disability ‘beyond a cripping culture that treats disability and sexuality as incongruent’ (McRuer, 2006). This also results into an implicit expectation from editors to be involved across scripting, storyboarding and shooting of disability while determining how its relatively unconventional narrative arc can be commercialized as a distinct genre featuring ‘Bollywood’s New Indian Woman’ who feels liberated and empowered in transnational, multiracial and diasporic communities (Anwer and Arora, 2021). In terms of editorial techniques, Baldawa indicated that editors address how dialogical processes of pre- and post-production of mainstreaming disability representation are collaborated and streamlined in determining the narrative, spatial and figurative typicality of a disability genre. It also denotes that disability production cultures are contingent on relationalities and interdependencies that blur the normative divides between scripting, directing and editing while suggesting that editors are not limited to editing rooms or even editing.

Such involvement of editors across various stages of disability production also denotes that editing is heavily dependent on decoding and concretizing screen language and summarizing ‘juxtaposed points of view of protagonist and antagonist (in this case, their association and interaction with Laila), or even more abstract entities such as location, theme or – breaking the fourth wall – audience’ (Böhm and Batty, 2022: 352). To do so, an editor rewrites and reorients the screenwriter and director’s ways of framing disability and clarifies the ‘disabled character’s truth’ through scripting, storyboarding and shooting Laila’s disability and her multiple worlds (familial, national and transnational) shown onscreen. As Baldawa also suggested, an editor makes tactical interventions in fixing heteronormative and ableist understandings of women’s disability across various stages of disability production in efforts to mainstream a shift in Bollywood’s narratives that can be contested by its increasing ‘disability media publics’ (Ginsburg and Rapp, 2024). Adding to what informed her judgments in tackling the complexities of such a screenplay by offering changes like dim or bright lighting, omission and zooming in and out, Baldawa remarked,

I had to edit intimate sex scenes and queer romance too, so it doesn’t look obscene. . . . make sure how the blurs were on point and lighting looked tasteful for its largely urban liberal audiences that still can’t digest and process a woman on a wheelchair having sex with another woman! (Personal Communication, February 12, 2023)

While suggesting that editors deploy self-reflexive tactics to ensure that disability is not represented as asexuality, Baldawa clarified that she was expected to sensitively infer, absorb, momentarily embody and objectively reevaluate the ways in which the representation of disabilities had been dealt with by the screenwriters, directors and cinematographers and eventually performed by the stars. She also distinctly pointed out that disability and queer representation requires a tactful understanding of how queerness and disability have been embraced in characterizing Bollywood’s new woman. This meant mainstreaming a narrative featuring one who journeys through her lack of sexual self-esteem, sexual disillusionment and dejection in urban India, and eventually commands her sexual agency as a bisexual in a transnational space. Even though cultural workers of South Asian media that include directors, cinematographers, light men and even art directions pin down the interplay of hard lighting and strong shadows in constructing intimate scenes and women’s bodies (Hoek, 2014; Mini, 2024: 44), Baldawa insisted that responsibility lies with editors, and especially, for editors of disability genres, in ensuring that the radical framing of women’s disability and sexuality is not represented as immoral, obscene and vulgar. On the one hand, she explained that characterizing ‘crip feelings in conversation with intersectional identities around race, class, structural inequalities and assumed able-bodiedness’ (Chen et al., 2023) is gaining traction across contemporary production cultures. On the other hand, she suggested that disability production can be heavily criticized and contested for misappropriation, misrepresentation and stereotypical characterization (Friedner, 2017; Rauchberg, 2022). Quoting such expectations, Baldawa, among others, asserted that editors of disability genres are overly cautious, immersed, precise and strategic in rewriting, recharacterizing, reorienting and reframing the representation of women’s disability. Hence, an editor’s role becomes fluid, dynamic and changes in expectations along the processes of disability production that are geared towards circulating a contemporary refashioning of disability film genres in India.

In describing the nuances of editing disability production cultures, Baldawa also divulged editors’ significance as moderators and regulators of visual configuration, suspense building and narrative sequencing to create an impact on audiences. Scholars like Massumi (2002) and Ahmed (2004) argue that emotions are built over inconsistencies of reactions generated that take time and also intensify/produce different reactions with the passing of time. Although this sentiment and proposition seemed pivotal in deciding how the representation of disabilities is imagined as screen ideas, storyboarding and shooting, my sustained interaction with editors suggested that their cognition, evaluation and approach towards mainstreaming the particularities of disability genres are based on numerous stages of decision-making and negotiations over their perceptions of disability. In doing so, Baldawa testified her urge to feel and integrate the emotions circulated about disability during the film’s shooting and provide instantaneous feedback. In addition, she suggested that if her editorial inputs would be introduced as an afterthought on an edit table they could lose meaning, essence and relevance in communicating a disability affect. In other words, she clarified that editors are keying in the lighting, framing and bodily configurations within spatial settings of film shooting to foreground disability embodiment of the actor in ways that do not merely rely on abstracting, deducing, subtracting and adjusting an affective rhythm from filmed shots of their performance. To explain the compositional reflexivity and intuition-building production practices unique to editing disability films, Irene Dhar Malik (2006), editor of Bas Ek Pal (transl. Just One Moment), a multi-starred revenge drama that featured a character arc of a person with a disability, asserted,

Disability was the gamechanger in the multiplot and I had to ensure that the audience felt how becoming disabled after an accident can change the ways in which they [an able-bodied person who becomes a wheelchair user] interacts, feels about the world and operates in their everyday lives. So, I cut, designed and selected shots accordingly. (Personal Communication, November 21, 2022)

Unlike the previous claims where the character arc of a person with a disability was treated as central to narrative sequencing, Malik insisted that characterizing the drastic shift and sharp contrast in the everyday life and self-esteem of an able-bodied man who acquires a disability post an accident was crucial to her role. She explained her responsibility in timing the release of new information like an accident that changed the direction of the storyline that inevitably spotlights the fear of reductionism as a man with a disability due to an underlying notion of compulsory able-bodiedness (Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2006). Malik’s comparative standpoint demonstrates an editor’s significance in shot formation and scene moderation by intensifying or toning down the shift towards disability embodiment to facilitate an audience’s radical departure into feeling its constructed universe. In terms of editorial technicalities, she exclaimed,

I used intercutting shots to show that contrast . . . and placed them all in sync along with the music so the difference becomes prominent! (Personal Communication, November 21, 2022)

Malik elaborates on the use of intercutting shots compiled with sound in building narrative tension, suspense and cliffhangers to denote the construction of the stark contrast in everyday life after an abled-bodied heterosexual man becomes disabled. By semiotically encoding disability aesthetics and materialities of sonic elements an editor serves as the mediator of ‘picture, text, information and specific forms of interaction’ (Ellcessor, 2016: 76). While addressing the media technology in producing disability sounds and camouflaging it with filmed shots on an edit table, another editor remarked,

I brought a foley artist on-board while editing. He gave us sounds of waterfall, heavy rains and birds chirping. It helped us show a blind and deaf woman. (Personal Communication, December 11, 2022)

In such ways, she explained the material and multisensorial experiences of characterizing deaf worlds and deaf ways of knowing the world (Kerschbaum, 2022). She elaborated on a foley artist’s importance and their creative labour in piecing together a disability genre with filmed shots and independent audio-visual recordings. More specifically, she indicated that editors introduce foley artists to synchronize non-diegetic music in narrative cinema in ways that the aural closeups of the nature’s sounds signalled a sophisticated form of visual-spatial language-detailing in denoting deafness. She also added that even though foley artists are given creative autonomy in reconfiguring the continuity and discontinuity of sonic elements and gestural cues while reconstructing the aurality and visuality of deaf worlds, an editor serves as the decision-maker throughout the process of disability production in an editing room. Although scholars like Billinge (2017) note, ‘an editor finds the most effective way of creating impact through imaginative use of pictures, sound and music, regulating the ebb and flow of the story is told in creating an impact on audiences’ (p. 12), as suggested, such preconditions and mandates become more pronounced for editors when disability genres are commercialized as unprecedented and revolutionary in strategizing affective engagement techniques and introducing various categories of creative media workers. In such ways, producing disability genres through newer articulations of bodies, materialities and technologies in mainstreaming differences in visuality, aurality and narratologies go beyond generic identity markers and symbolic understandings of disability representation.

Pulling these strands together, symbolizes that editors rely on interdependent creative media work and socio-material configurations that posit disability as central to affect production through sonic, visual and narrative convergences of multimedia industries and diverse ecologies of cultural workers. More broadly, it foregrounds that circulating a disability affect does not follow neatly sequential, compartmentalized and linear processes of production cultures based on bound scripts, storyboards and previsualization of screenwriters and directors. Within it, an editor establishes their omnipresence as the builder, operator, organizer and sensory moderator through ‘convergent processes of aesthetic and aural detailing’ (Oldham, 2012: 70) to cut with a definitive purpose in piecing together an affective rhythm scene-by-scene and shot-by-shot across its non-linear stages of scripting and shooting disability as a narrative and spectacle. In doing so, an editor attempts at packaging the disability affect in ways to ensure that the film affectively circulates as a believable, immersive and uniquely self-reflexive representation of disability. Such claims also suggest that editors of disability genres are purpose-driven embodied voices in contesting, which can most often emerge from feminist thoughts and understandings of disability personhood that are neither credited nor acknowledged for the multiple roles they play. The next section spotlights the complexities and ambivalences of editing in disability production cultures by detailing how gender and feminist sensibility have been considered a key to producing disability genres.

Gendered editing of disability genres

It is perhaps noteworthy that women dominated departments in films mainstreaming disability representation. Apart from the inclination of production houses to hire female editors, they too suggested their ability to better adapt and execute their vision in storylines mainstreaming disabilities. Among others, Antara Lahiri recalled her debut in Bollywood as the second editor of Ghajini (2008), a film that featured Aamir Khan, a mainstream star, as its lead protagonist in a revenge drama. In the larger part of the narrative, Khan performed hypermasculine action sequences and anterograde amnesia after witnessing the murder of his beloved partner. While explaining her editorial significance and the gendered classification of cultural work in New Bollywood, she asserts,

Women are usually given the high emotional intensity drama film. Disability is one of them . . . For Ghajini I was brought to enhance how they could do justice in putting together shots that could indicate Aamir Khan’s performance as a man with anterograde amnesia. Like jumpcutting into those small sticky notes and tattoos. . . Not just make it about action sequences and the way they shot it. (Personal Communication, December 22, 2022)

Lahiri outlined that the previsualized understanding of disability of its producer, director and screenwriter is given meaning, rhythm, form and structure by the editor. As first, her debut as an editor explicitly relied on how she could reorient, rewrite and reframe the disability point of view of its director and producer. Beginning with a gendered expectation of them having ‘soft touches’ (Ahmed, 2004: 3), she asserted that an editor of disability genres is not merely assisting or supporting disability perspectives as imagined, pitched, framed and shot by the director. To prove it, she explained that her tactful integration by the production house of Ghajini was much after the film’s shooting. Further, she clarified that editing a disability genre involved a complete immersion in thinking and feeling like a person with a disability, which was inadvertently categorized as women’s work. Moreover, her insights demonstrated that production houses assume women to have feminist sensibility that equips them to embody, empathize and sensitively tackle the characterization of disabilities and strengthen its projected media worlds as public cultures.

Much has been written about the strategic commodification of racial stereotyping by integrating cultural workers like screenwriters, directors and even actors from minority South Asian communities for global media (Gray and Gershon, 2024; Havens, 2007) while determining how cultures of production operate (Negus, 1997). As Saha (2012) also notes, ‘the demand placed on British Asian filmmakers to tailor their stories of Asian lives for the so-called mainstream audience has certain reductive consequences for their narratives and the politics of representation’ (p. 430). However, their scholarship has mostly addressed how mainstreaming diversity in media production cultures is based on who can be given the centre stage across post-production marketing for boosting the sellability of integrating minorities. This study offers another perspective by highlighting the stratification principles in production practices and presumed capabilities of editors, most being women, who are prioritized for disability genres and still rarely given the limelight. Addressing such concerns, Lahiri, among others, suggest that women are considered better suited by big production houses to be handling and editing storylines that feature disabilities. Her sweeping remark also conveyed that women dominate film editing departments due to the blatant disregard of them as authorial creative decision makers (Mehta, 2023; Sanchez Lozoya, 2022). So, although there is an underlying expectation of editors across most film genres to craft an affective rhythm by determining ‘which emotion is being conveyed, for how long, and at what level of strength or intensity’ (Pearlman, 2009: 113), Lahiri suggests that editors of disability genres are pressurized into intuitively deciphering how ‘lived experiences of gender and disability enables sensing oppression unique to bodily performativity’ (Garland-Thomson, 2005; Hall, 2011; Meekosha, 1998). This also implies an editor’s need to build an intimate relation with the key ingredients of disability production in the storyline and character development, which further denotes that editors often exert their prominence as authorial figures in film shootings. In addition, it meant editors offer multiple iterations of how disability was previsualized as a script while being present on film shootings almost every day.

Lahiri demonstrated that Aamir Khan, a mainstream star with numerous commercially successful films, was initially characterized as a ‘spectacle of attraction in narrative organization’ (Gunning, 1993). However, she added that his transfiguration in the screenplay was built over multiple mutations in his appearance that wrestled between flashbacks of his able-bodiedness and enactment of short-term memory loss. As suggested, during the scripting and shooting stages, Khan’s market value in an action film genre heavily relied on the closeup shots of his V-shaped muscularity, chiseled abs, bald look, bulging biceps and veins while he arched his arms by hanging down a barbell geared towards catering to urban India’s ‘mushrooming trend of investing in fitness centers and workout regimes based on star appearances’ (Brosius, 2010: 261). Even though Lahiri acknowledged such pre- and post-production practices of commodifying a star’s constructed hypermasculinity as quintessential to mainstreaming narrative cinema, she described her significance in redirecting the spectacle-building and visual affect markers of disability figuration embodied by Aamir Khan to attract audiences. In doing so, she explained that her primary responsibility as a strategic interventionist entailed toning down the overpowering sentiments symbolizing, iconizing and commercializing Khan in an action film genre. Instead, she focused on reframing his starring presence as a character performing a disability through suggestive visual markers and symbolic cues. The psychological characterization of action sequences was accompanied by an editor singularly focusing on intensifying ‘disability aesthetics and signposts denoting the integration of modernist principles of creative media work and innovative technology’ (Siebers, 2010) that included zooming into sticky notes pasted on the mirror and jumpcutting into closeup shots of bold tattoos imprinted across Khan’s shirtless body.

Lahiri’s remarks also demonstrate that editing a disability genre meant rewriting, redirecting and repackaging filmed shots with jumpcuts and closeups that denote the distinct taxonomy of body-space-movement in symbolizing an invisible disability like short-term memory loss. This made editors the moderators of reconfiguring camera movements and angles to capture the actor’s transfigured and corporeal choreography as a person with a disability in determining how spectators make sense of his projected character arc. By making such forceful assertions she suggested that editors lead characterizing disability as a spectacle while not distracting audiences into thinking that it is merely an action film genre. As she testified, earmarking her debut as an editor of disability films explicitly relied on how she narratively, figuratively and spatially transfigured and reorganized filmed shots of a star as a disability performing character in an editing room. Regardless of Lahiri’s cogent articulation on how editors cut to ‘shift emphasis’ (Hullfish, 2017: 75) and ‘breathe life into the material’ (Crittenden, 2012: 7), she explicitly pointed towards singularly focusing on Khan’s embodiment of an invisible disability while treating his hypermasculine construction as a distraction in narrative sequencing and spatial framing. In suggesting that editors are the mediators of embodying a disability and challenging screenwriters and directors over what they perceived as disabilities, most editors testified that packaging a narrative undertone and disability spectacle on an edit table could significantly differ from its nascent narrative, spatial and figurative imagination.

Although scholars like Brennan and Pearlman (2023: 241) note ‘editors shape perceptions of characters by choosing sections from different takes; mixing shot sizes and angles; repeating or deleting movements, looks and postures; and extending or shortening pauses’ (p. 241), I further such arguments in explaining that female editors of disability genres are over reliant on their intuition in rewriting and reorienting a star’s performance of a disability. Among many self-reflexive tactics that editor Arunaraje Patil described while editing Bhairavi (1996), a film featuring a blind female singer and her inability to find a suitable match in a village, she insisted that editing meant,

Being a lot more brutal and feeling her pain. So, I blindfolded myself again and again to capture what I don’t need and could chop it off! (Personal Communication, February 21, 2022)

In this quote, Patil distinguished the nuances of editing disability genres that began by momentarily transcending into thinking and feeling blindness. It is noteworthy that her vast filmography as an editor ranged from melodrama, action, thrillers, disability and women-centric genres over a span of three decades, but she insisted that editing a disability genre required a lot more precision in deciphering the core causal affect by gaining clarity over what Russell (2003: 150) notes is ‘the perception of affective quality and then attributing affect’. She highlighted that editors embody a disability to feel the cut while configuring the most optimal and intuitive approach to capture narrative rhetorics that hold the possibilities of making its representation sensational, unprecedented and revolutionary. Hence, the temporality and sensoriality in determining how the disability affect is constructed and distinguished from other body genres becomes an editor’s prerogative.

To materialize such goals of production houses, editors attempt at merging the reel and their intuition-led real worlds of people with disabilities in ways that disability perspectives pertaining to social, experiential, narrative and phenomenological experiences reflect in constructing mediatized notions of disability representation. Apart from suggesting that such intimate interaction of editors with disability not just as a cinematic subject but also as an embodied and experiential construction denotes that editing disability genres goes beyond a reductionist understanding of editing as a technical department and production process, especially in the production of disability genres. Although editing disability genres operate within multiple ‘media culture convergences where multiple departments cook up a film’ (Caldwell, 2008: 183; Jenkins, 2006: 243), this study exemplifies how an editor informs, interacts, intersects, intervenes and even interferes with the affective engagement strategies adopted by many other departments of disability production. In the next section, I discuss the unique sensemaking practices, sensory orientation and strategies of timing shots that editors adopt in producing disability film genres.

It’s all about sensing and timing for audiences

Editing a disability genre is a continuous process of disability making and unmaking that precedes and even follows film shooting with editors determining and negotiating the fundamentals of mainstreaming it. In describing the strategies of mainstreaming disability genres while remarking on the reducing attention span of audiences, most of them inclined towards explaining a production house’s overreliance on casting stars as performers of disabilities (Sinha, 2024). While centring how networked star power serve as attractions that commercialize the fundamental shift in sensations of cinema (Rai, 2009: 24, 2024), which now includes mainstreaming the representation of disabilities, they explained the explicit framing of their body-space-movement vocabulary, content curation, corporeal construction, choreography and post-production marketing. However, Ballu Saluja, an editor who debuted with Lagaan (transl. Agricultural tax, 2001), provided a different insight by clarifying that the politics of disability production was not always limited to stars performing as disabled. Addressing what editors prioritize while commodifying disability performativity through supporting characters, he remarked,

It is a sensemaking process of time management. . . . I had to understand the vision through which the director wanted me to think and feel like Kachra, a man with a disability from the lower caste while building suspense . . . keep the audience engaged. (Personal Communication, December 12, 2022)

In addressing ‘what to cut’ and ‘what to keep’, Saluja pointed towards a need to sensing and sensemaking disability by attending to ‘individual and collective dispositions to emotions, attitudes, and feelings’ (Corker 2001: 36) while inferring the lived experiences of people with disabilities. Through such claims, he indicated that an editor serves like an authoritative middle-man of disability production, over multiple rounds of brainstorming storyboards and backstories, to determine the tactics of affective and sensory engagement while featuring disabilities. Saluja also insisted that even though Lagaan’s storyline featured anti-colonial struggles in a multi-character sports film genre based in small-town India, he explicitly attended to the character arc development of Kachra (transl. Garbage). It is critical to note that Kachra was neither the lead character nor the star seen as quintessential in mainstreaming and commercializing the film. Hence, such a character arc could be easily represented as a hero’s sidekick. However, Saluja was particular in not downplaying the reframing and marketing strategies he adopted in making Kachra prominent while expressing that sensemaking, intuitively thinking and attending to the production of Kachra as a spectacle was central to editing the film. More so, since Kachra’s endorsement as a selling point relied on his intersectional status as a poor and lower caste man with polio in India, which was projected as a gamechanger in the storyline as his bowling skills freed the harassed Indian villagers in Champaran from colonial oppression. While explaining the uniqueness of disability production practices, Saluja indicated that representing the character arc of Kachra needed precision and clarity over its body-space-movement vocabulary. First, he suggested that the director envisioned Kachra’s character arc and soon corrected himself by explaining that the crux of it was rewritten on the edit table. In his words,

I had to keep asking questions. Perhaps the right questions to get a sense of disability. . . Eventually, it was my sense of judgment about how Kachra creates an impact on audiences. . . I integrated so many closeups, still shots and high angle shots of his hand! (Personal Communication, December 12, 2022)

Even though Saluja initially suggested that directors are acknowledged as the visionaries of glocalising and localizing body genres and spatial configurations, he soon clarified that the extent of his involvement, nature of creative labour and technical inputs differed in storylines featuring disabilities. He indicated that directors provide raw material for disability genres that editors need to make sense of as and when they are brought onboard, which could differ based on the director’s need for creative inputs in choregraphing movement vocabularies. To do so, he indicated that editors are often grappling with questions like ‘What will make the character with a disability unique visually, aurally and narratively?’ and ‘How can they commercialise the production of a film representing disabilities, whether as mainstream or even as a sidekick?’. Editors like Saluja acknowledged that directors, cinematographers, music composers, art directors and screenwriters are also relying on relationally and individually adopting embodied and cognitive sensemaking techniques (Cunliffe and Coupland, 2012) to infer the disabled body and its constructed intersectionality in small-town India, and his insights indicated that an editor’s judgement about its affective, figurative and spatial construction is heavily dependent on intuitively gauging if its audiences will comprehend with the narrative’s complexity. In doing so, an editor is a constant mediator and moderator of disability affect by rearranging the techno-material practices in producing the cine-corporeal attractions of the disabled body and its distinguishable body-space-movement vocabulary. This meant integrating slowed down closeup shots of Kachra’s hand and its movement as he bowled.

Saluja also indicated that the editor is often asking questions to directors, cinematographers, art directors, producers, choreographers and screenwriters to determine the cuts, pace, flow, pause, transitions and erasures. Adopting a disability-centred analysis while using Kachra’s example also prompted me to think of an editor’s keenness in making the character arc of disability distinct. While Saluja suggested that multiple labour networks, organizations and bodies constitute the many iterations of making and unmaking disability performativity, his comment signalled that an editor’s perspectives can result in the production of an entirely new body of work. In a way, it can vastly differ from how disability was previsualized across screen ideation, storyboarding and shooting. He also added that his sensemaking approach had to be altered when it came to characterizing disability in comedy genres like Tom, Dick and Harry (2006), a film that featured three lead characters performing blindness, deafness and muteness. In his words,

Editing disability in comedy required precision of comic timing. It can look fake instantly. (Personal Communication, December 12, 2022)

Unlike the aforementioned film genres that revolved around action and melodrama, this film prioritized comic interludes while treating disability as a tool for inducing satirical humour, laughter and subsequent commerciality. However, Saluja’s passing remark spotlights a shift in approach adopted by editors, which meant adapting and acclimatizing to a director’s vision of configuring disability in streamlining a distinct affective rhythm that can attract, immerse and engage its audiences by making them laugh on the representation of disabilities. In this context, the focus of attention was to turn away from building affect that appropriated disability with revenge, action and melodrama and gear it towards comedy genres. As critical media industries scholars, Reisz and Millar (2009) note, ‘The funniest films are often those in which the editor has been absolutely ruthless in his disregard for reality and concentrated solely on extracting the maximum of humour out of every situation’ (p. 79), Saluja also implied that editing disability character arcs was divorced from the other editorial techniques of embodying and sensemaking disability personhood. He insisted that plots of comedy genres mobilizing disabilities as spectacles of attraction are built over the enigma of exoticizing its narrative and figurative framing as awkward, slyly, mischievous, stuttering and clumsily disoriented anomalies that create chaos and suspense.

As is clear from Saluja’s insights, in order to institute the narrative framework of a disability comedy genre, he needed to free himself from the editorial tactics of thinking and feeling the life of a person with a disability. Among factors that distinguished the framing of character arcs featuring disabilities in comedy genres, he asserted that developing a sense of comic timing is the focus of an editor. More specifically, to contrive disability as comic content meant ‘mainstream programming of production cultures’ that operate within the embeddedness of the ‘politics of representation and politics of production cultures’ (Havens 2007; Saha, 2018) by producing humor through ‘reductive stereotypes’ of disability. This meant editors intervene by creating time stamps, cliffhangers and punches that can excite audiences to immerse and laugh on the representation of disability as comic interludes. In such ways, he exemplified that editing disability genres is not a simple case of applying the same reflexive principles in narrative organization like the other disability genres discussed thus far. More broadly, such insights suggest that disability film production practices are dynamic, relational, complex, interdependent and convergent in efforts to make it mainstream, which leads to the involvement of editors across various stages of disability making.