Deaf Cinema

Deaf cinema has been an important part of the Deaf experience, as American Sign Language (ASL) is the first known language, predating any spoken language, to have been recorded on film. Natural sign languages also employ cinematic features in their storytelling techniques. Advances in filmmaking and editing, in addition to Deaf film festivals and broad bandwidth for disseminating films via the Internet, have been instrumental in the growth of Deaf cinema.

The first known filmed recording of ASL is Deaf Mute Girl Reciting the Star Spangled Banner, shot in 1902. Shortly after that, George W. Veditz, two-time president of the National Association of the Deaf, collected $5,000 in funds to set up a Moving Picture Project to film prominent Deaf and hearing leaders using ASL. The films feature lectures, sermons, performances, storytelling, and jokes showcasing the artistry and power of ASL as well as resisting the onslaught of pure oralism, the system that prohibited ASL in schools and on playgrounds across the United States.

The advent of sound technology for film and the rise of the “talkies” in the mid-1920s meant that Deaf audience members could no longer enjoy nights out at movie theaters, and Deaf actors like Granville Redmond lost the opportunity to perform in films. At this time, ASL itself was under threat, as Veditz had warned in his priceless 1913 film The Preservation of Sign Language. Some Deaf people did purchase their own movie cameras to record everyday Deaf lives and/or create narrative films. Charles Krauel was a prolific filmmaker, using his camera wherever he traveled. He documented Deaf schools, Deaf conventions and gatherings, and Deaf business owners in his effort to share Deaf Americana. Krauel’s “home movies” were very much loved by Deaf audiences and give us a glimpse today of Deaf life where ASL survived among the grassroots Deaf community. Ernest Marshall produced many short and narrative feature films and starred in some of them. Marshall experimented with adding handwritten text and a bouncing ball to his films to help audiences follow a signed-song, a common device for sing-along films for hearing audiences that began with the Fleischer brothers films in 1925. Marshall also worked with Cuban-born Emerson Romero, who had worked in silent films in his native Cuba and the United States and is considered to be a pioneer in captioning. Romero purchased featured films and documentaries, spliced in subtitles, and then rented them to Deaf schools and clubs so that Deaf people could finally enjoy and benefit from moving pictures again.

Several other Deaf people produced home movies and narrative films that were shown at conventions and other events in an effort to preserve ASL and show Deaf people accurately, as opposed to the few times Deaf characters were used in mainstream films. Many of these films have been lost to posterity due to family members not knowing the value of what they had or having been recorded in a format no longer commonly in use. As with literature or theater, Hollywood films tended to use Deaf characters as vehicles to inspire pity, awe, sexuality, or mystic insight. Rarely has Hollywood incorporated Deaf representations as normal and desirable.

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