Equalized

What’s your first choice: a Hollywood smash ’em up summer blockbuster or a tender, slow-paced foreign film? If you’re a person who is deaf or hard of hearing, it’s no contest. The foreign film comes with subtitles, while the Hollywood action flick won’t likely offer them until the film is released months later on DVD. But now comes a new genre of filmmaking aimed at widening the options. That’s the focus of Cinema for Everyone, a film festival March 3-6 at the Palace Theatre in Seguin that aims to expose audiences to this recent twist in the film scene – deaf cinema.

“We stress that film story lines should be told visually with less reliance on sound,” says David H. Pierce of Seguin-based Davideo Productions, which is co-sponsoring the event with the Chicago Institute for the Moving Image and InSight Cinema. “If the film is completely reliant on sound, it may as well be a radio program and not waste good money on 35mm film stock.” Many people who are deaf find more enjoyment in a silent classic like the Douglas Fairbanks-starring The Thief of Baghdad, which is on the Seguin bill. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is the only legislation requiring captions and it only applies to television, Pierce says. Captioning in theatres remains voluntary and even subtitles can fail to clue audience members who are deaf into ambient, unspoken sounds on the screen.

Plus, for many people who are deaf, English is a second language; sign language is their preference, and it’s as different from English as, say, Japanese is. Which makes one of the films showing all the more interesting. I Love You, told in Japanese sign language with English subtitles, is director Yutaka Osawa’s tale of a deaf mother who joins a theatre group with her daughter. Along the way, the hearing and deaf cast members must figure out how to work with each other. The film is accompanied by a series of international shorts produced by filmmakers who are deaf. “In this new venue, visual language in cinema, absent since the silent era ended, has returned,” Pierce says. “Deaf filmmakers are referring to the techniques used during the silent era and picking up where it left off in order to redefine cinema as we know it.”

For Pierce, this is the next stage in a lifelong fascination with film. In 1970, at age 5, he got a Kenner Easy Show movie projector, which was silent and included subtitled cartridges. It was his first access to the film world that had previously shut him out. By 8, he was shooting his own films. He formed Davideo with a partner and worked for Silent Network, a national deaf cable TV network in Hollywood, which moved in 1990 to San Antonio, added America’s Disability Channel in response to the Americans With Disabilities Act, and eventually became Kaleidoscope Television. Pierce was vice-president of programming and operations until the network shut down in 2000. His Seguin home is crowded with 3,000 films and videos that he and visitors can enjoy from Thunder Seats, specially designed to 200-watt woofers underneath to let viewers experience the full experience of the sound. Bring on the Hollywood blockbusters.

I LOVE YOU (Japan)

Sign language, open captioned

(plus five international short films)

Admission $6

THIEF OF BAGHDAD

Friday March 4, 7-9:30pm

Admission $2

THE INCREDIBLES

Open captioned

Saturday March 5, 1-3pm

Sunday March 6, 4-6pm

Admission $6

This article appears in February 25 • 2005.