Deaf President Now! (dir. Nyle DiMarco, Davis Guggenheim)
In the first of two documentaries featured at SpringFest which cover deaf stories, Deaf President Now! chronicles the week-long protest movement by students at Gallaudet University which began when the board of trustees elected a hearing woman to be the school’s next president. After 124 years of hearing presidents, and the fact that the latest selection overlooked two highly qualified deaf nominees, the students of the world’s only deaf university had enough. The way they see it, there’s simply no good reason that the leader of their school should not come their own community — a hearing person, as empathetic as they may wish to be, can never fully understand the deaf experience.
The film unspools at a breathless pace, featuring a remarkable amount of footage from the protests. Title cards appear for each day of the week, and almost every time one appears it comes as a shock. So much ground is covered by the film (and gained by the protests) over any isolated 24 hour period that it feels like weeks have passed before the film pauses to remind us that it’s only Tuesday.
The film takes a clever angle in how it depicts deafness as giving the protestors an edge over the system. The powers that be don’t have a working grasp of ASL, which allows for the students to organize out in the open without fear of being infiltrated. In one particularly telling scene, one of the trustees attempts to speak over the boisterous and noisy crowd of students. She begs for them to lower their voices so that she can hear herself think, and in doing so, highlights just how different her world is from the students she presides over. The moment was worth a laugh during the screening, but proves to be one of the film’s most effective purveyors of its themes.
By telling the story through the eyes and voices of the students, the film quite effectively dissolves the notion that the deaf community is monolithic. Each and every talking head has their take on the events, and most are in some level of disagreement about whose methods of protest ended up being the right one. It’s clear in hindsight that a multi-tiered approach did the job, but none of the activists interviewed mince words about any of the others’ perceived shortcomings.
Ultimately, this excellent film proves essential for contemporary audiences, deaf or not, because it shows just how effective a population can be in changing the system as long as they’re willing to stand up to it.
Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore (dir. Shoshannah Stern)
Everybody knows Marlee Matlin as the first deaf person to ever win an Oscar (a record only recently altered by Troy Kotsur in CODA, a film that featured Matlin), but what Not Alone Anymore posits is that its subject, as well as many other deaf artists and craftspeople, needn’t be treated as a novelty. Through her remarkable career on stage and screen (and behind the camera), Matlin has shown that she’s just as talented and skilled as anyone else in the business, and the fact that she can’t hear, and prefers to speak sign language, is a distinction hardly worth making.
This sunny documentary is far from lighthearted, as it takes a frank approach to some of the darker areas of Matlin’s life. She’s dealt with spousal abuse, addiction disorders, and plenty of garden variety Hollywood sexism and oppression, yet she has emerged from it all with dignity intact, and continues to be both an advocate for the deaf, as well as a tremendous artist (and mother, daughter, grandmother, wife, and sister) in her own right.
A large portion of the talking heads do their interviews in ASL, and unlike in Deaf President Now!, their words are subtitled, not dubbed. This allows for a wonderfully disarming view of ASL in action, which drives home one of the film’s most dominant themes: being deaf is not a disability, just a different way of being. Remarkable that, even as someone with no knowledge of ASL, I started to absorb the cadence and emotion of it by osmosis (the same way that one almost forgets they’re reading subtitles while watching a Kurosawa film). And when non-ASL speakers are brought into the mix, the conversations prove seamless.
One of the talking heads is Aaron Sorkin, who wrote a character for Matlin on The West Wing. He drives home the point that Matlin’s use of sign was not a hindrance to the writing process of the show, nor did it prove difficult for viewers to follow.
Oddly enough, this film featured some of the same footage from Deaf President Now!, and it was interesting seeing the two films back to back. From a filmmaking sense, it highlighted how real world footage can be editorialized to different thematic ends. From an activism sense, it showed how the fight for deaf inclusion (and really, for any marginalized inclusion) is a never ending battle.
But my biggest takeaway from Not Alone Anymore might be that Henry Winkler, one of Matlin’s best friends, is an angel. He’s the polar opposite of William Hurt.
