In the Land of the Deaf remains a water­shed for sign lan­guage cinema

In the ear­ly 1990s, Nico­las Philib­ert was com­mis­sioned to make a train­ing film for par­ents learn­ing sign lan­guage. Yet the result, In the Land of the Deaf, could hard­ly be con­sid­ered a train­ing film. Far from being a didac­tic doc­u­men­tary, it instead teach­es a tac­it atten­tive­ness. For Philib­ert, feel­ings are facts; this sen­si­tive and curi­ous film feels rather than tells.

Pri­mar­i­ly cen­tred in and around a school, the doc­u­men­tary fol­lows the lives of D/​deaf chil­dren, ado­les­cents and adults. The pro­tag­o­nists nav­i­gate sign and oral­ism, make friends and fall in love, con­fess lone­li­ness, frus­tra­tion and joy. We are plunged into their ​‘land’, a ter­ri­to­ry of lib­er­at­ing expres­sion but also one increas­ing­ly alien­at­ed from the land of the hearing.

We encounter young peo­ple strug­gling through speech for the sake of their hear­ing fam­i­lies. The favour is rarely returned: par­ents nev­er learn sign, speak too fast, for­get to explain the joke. Philib­ert, who learnt to sign before shoot­ing, does not cas­ti­gate the hear­ing but sim­ply expos­es the arbi­trary rules that divide the hear­ing and D/​deaf; the roles the D/​deaf must per­form, the spaces they inhab­it, and those they are for­bid­den to join.

The space clos­est to Philibert’s heart – what he hopes to (re)open – is cin­e­ma. Cin­e­ma (aka ​‘motion pic­tures’ or sim­ply ​‘the movies’) is an emphat­i­cal­ly visu­al medi­um. Philib­ert repeat­ed­ly makes self-aware ref­er­ences to cin­e­ma as ocu­lar. In one scene the charm­ing Flo­rent looks into the cam­era in order to lipread what his moth­er is whis­per­ing in his ear.

The first sign mono­logue comes from a man, Lev­ent Beskardes, who grew up enam­oured by film ​“because it was very visu­al”. He yearned to be an actor and one day approached his neigh­bour, a film direc­tor, to ask if he could act in one of his films. The direc­tor thought him absurd: ​“It’s impos­si­ble, to be an actor you must be hearing”.

But why should his want be so unthink­able? It’s hard to imag­ine a con­tem­po­rary box-office film with­out spo­ken dia­logue, but we need only recall cinema’s birth as a silent medi­um where­in expres­sive ges­tur­ing was the prin­ci­ple nar­ra­tive instru­ment. In the silent age the hear­ing and D/​deaf shared the same space. The 1918 film A Dog’s Life saw Deaf actor Granville Red­mond act­ing along­side Char­lie Chap­lin. The two were good friends; Red­mond taught Chap­lin ASL, and it is said that Chaplin’s Dance of the Oceana Rolls was inspired by Redmond.

Lat­er in Philibert’s film we re-encounter Beskardes, now under a spot­light; he’s star­ring in a signed stage pro­duc­tion. Beskardes’ pur­pose­ful ges­tures oscil­late between poise and pas­sion. He is both actor and dancer, fit for a role in Pina Bausch’s Tanzthe­ater. Indeed, the Ger­man chore­o­g­ra­ph­er includ­ed ele­ments of sign in her work, notably a signed ren­di­tion of Gershwin’s ​‘The Man I Love’ per­formed by Lutz Förster (whose part­ner at the time taught sign lan­guage). Bausch was no doubt attract­ed to the elo­quence and exact­ness of the ges­tures. (Upon fur­ther research I was pleased to learn that Beskardes has also worked suc­cess­ful­ly as a direc­tor and choreographer.)

Philibert’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy is itself chore­o­graph­ic, reject­ing filmic tools and tech­niques that frag­ment the body. He does not use facial close-ups when some­one is com­mu­ni­cat­ing, as this would remove their hands from the frame. He doesn’t employ cut­aways that would sep­a­rate voice and action and impede lipread­ing, nor does he cast an exter­nal nar­ra­tor to explain and claim author­i­ty. Philib­ert instead encour­ages us to engage with the film through close-look­ing, embod­ied intu­ition and son­ic con­scious­ness. Ambi­ent back­ground sounds are manip­u­lat­ed to make them more dis­tant but not entire­ly absent. This allows him to fur­ther dis­tort sim­plis­tic dichotomies that pit silence against noise, them against us, to empath­i­cal­ly move between worlds and prompt a more acces­si­ble cin­e­ma culture.

Regard­ing acces­si­bil­i­ty, I recent­ly came across LUX D/​deaf Artists’ Film Com­mis­sions, a bril­liant plat­form and pro­gramme that takes access and inclu­sion as the moti­va­tion for new works. Jen­ny Brady’s Receiv­er, Nina Thomas’ Silence and Louise Hick­man and Shan­non Finnegan’s Cap­tion­ing on Cap­tion­ing are some of the films select­ed. A bit more dig­ging led me to an archived event page for an exhi­bi­tion at Lux by Cinen­o­va and Col­lec­tive Text which addressed the ostracism of the D/​deaf com­mu­ni­ty that occurs, delib­er­ate­ly or unin­ten­tion­al­ly, in the pro­duc­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion and exhi­bi­tion of films (a film by Car­olyn Lazard fea­tured in the show can be viewed here).

Decades after In the Land of the Deaf was made, films and ini­tia­tives that shed light on the resilience and cre­ativ­i­ty of the D/​deaf are regret­tably still few and far between. The cin­e­ma is a space that has long been claimed by the land of the hear­ing, and it is about time that exclu­siv­i­ty is relin­quished. When cinema’s do reopen, they should (re)open for all.