La Pays des sourds aka land of the deaf
Director: Nicolas Philibert, France, 1993, 99 minutes Nicolas Philibert's remarkable cinema verite film draws the viewer into the silent world of the deaf, a world in which people communicate with the poetic language of signs. The subjects range from a blond, saucer-eyed moppet on the verge of tears from the grueling work of learning to say 'hello', to a wise and witty sign-language teacher (himself deaf) who has much to 'say' about life. One woman tells of being sent to a filthy asylum because a doctor thought she was retarded. Another says her own parents didn't notice she was deaf till she began school at the age of five. But rather than sentimentalise, In the Land of the Deaf leads a piquant discussion of how society should relate to people with special needs. Prepare to have some of your assumptions about the deaf turned upside-down. Learning to talk to hearing people is fine, but what the subjects get really excited about is that great epiphanic moment in their lives when they first realised they were not alone and shared contact with other deaf people. As one disgusted man says, he doesn't even wear his hearing aid anymore. The world is too full of noise: he prefers the soothing silence of deafness. During the shooting, I realized myself the importance of their grammatical functions when, following an impulse, I suddenly closed up the frame just focusing on the character's hand. It was a big mistake because not only did I deprive him, without his knowledge, of a part of the needed space for his expression, but I found it impossible to interpret what he was saying.... Signs don't constitute a static succession of paralysed symbols. They rather work by the combination in space of simultaneous movements overlapping each other in a dynamic rhythm based on accelerations, slowing down and breaks. It is in this way then, more than through their iconical dimension, that the signs evoke the idea of an edited film and not so much the idea of a written narration. Nicolas Philibert Internet Movie Database listing
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