Disabled Cinematic Technologies or the Crisis of the Image’s Register in Pedro Almodóvar’s <i>Los abrazos rotos</i> (2009)

The human body – and, by extension, the social corpus – has been the main subject of the critical apparatus of Disability Studies. However, I explore here how a ‘disabled technology’ might impact the works of memory and even the constitution of such bodies in Pedro Almodóvar’s film Los abrazos rotos (2009). Although the development of filmmaking technologies has traditionally been thought to serve the enhancement of the image’s readability, theorists such as Jean-Louis Comolli and Lev Manovich have pointed out the way in which these accomplishments reveal the medium’s flawed nature. Thus, this paper analyses the precarity of works of memory as resulting from the coalescence of the protagonist’s sensorial disability and from visual technologies’ impaired rendition of reality. I argue that the notion of disabled technologies not only expresses the crisis of the image’s legibility in the film but, furthermore, it entails a posthuman conception of the body itself as a (disabled?) technology.