I really enjoyed the film. I am not familiar with deaf culture so it was great to get different perspectives on it. It was interesting to see how the people who are deaf are portrayed. I do not know how else I would have them communicate other than silently signing or having voice overs but it was something that stuck out to me. Although it is exactly the words that they were signing, it makes a huge difference in how it is spoken, therefore, I feel that the film makers had to be very careful about how they portrayed each character with their voice overs.
I also noticed the difference in communication between people who are deaf and the hearing. I feel that you could get a good sense of the speaking's emotions through how they said something. In contrast, I feel that when you watched someone sign, there is a lot of emotion portrayed in their movements and facial expressions. When someone is angry, you hear them yelling but when someone signs, you see more quick and forceful signing. It was very interesting in how the documentary portrayed a different type of communication. (i.e. close up shots of people's hands signing while hearing others yell in the background). All in all, i feel the documentary is successful because it blends elements like sound and visual to explain two different worlds; the speaking and the deaf.
Vi
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I also am not very familiar with deaf culture, so I found this documentary to be very informative overall. I think Aronson did a great job in portraying a very compelling story with characters who are very real. You can immediately tell the level of trust between the filmmaker and the subjects in this film, and that perhaps alone compensated for the less impressive cinematic quality of the piece. Only a few shots were lighted nicely but stood out a little awkwardly from the rest of the film. Camera movement was pretty simple as well. However, I began to lose attention of those attributes the longer I watched the documentary...I just became absorbed into the story, and for me at least, it was very interesting.
ReplyDeleteI have somewhat mixed feelings when it comes to the choice of voice-overs. On one hand, I felt at some points it was biasing our views of the deaf characters, especially the father of Heather (who's voice was pretty loud and aggressive often). It even made me forget at some points that these characters were actually deaf and do not speak in those voices. On the other hand, it helped me relate a lot more to them, maybe because I am hearing myself. It makes me wonder whether I would have related to them as well had Aronson decided to go with subtitles instead.
I wondered a lot about the choice of voiceovers on top of the deaf characters' signing instead of subtitles, but I realized that had there been subtitles, we would have been paying more attention to reading the words at the bottom of the screen than focusing on the facial expressions and motions of those signing. For deaf people, eye contact, facial expressions, fluidity of motions, etc. characterize their language and bring meaning to the hand signs. If the audience had concentrated on other areas of the screen, the emotion inherent in the character's signs would have been lost. However misleading or strange the voices themselves may have seemed, they did not take away from the intensity (or lack of) the communicator.
ReplyDeleteAs for the documentary as a whole, Aronson had an incredible story to work with. It makes me really wonder how he found out about the family in the first place, and how I can ever find myself with access to such stories and people. I typically do not favor documentaries that rely so heavily on sit-down interviews, but so much of the substance of what Heather's father and others had to say came from these interviews. It was in these set-ups that the characters revealed the most about how they felt, and these emotions were later supplemented with the less direct footage of their interactions with family and friends. This method proved to be effective for the subject matter since I did find myself becoming very interested in finding out about both sides of the familial debate and eventually choosing one over the other.