"Are you deaf?" seems to be part of the vernacular, used as a jiving joke, when deaf people are conversing. Or maybe it's just among deaf entertainers, or maybe only among deaf entertainers participating in "See What I'm Saying: the Deaf Entertainers Documentary," a moving, sometimes depressing but usually uplifting movie that opens here today.
Filmmaker Hilari Scarl focuses on four entertainers and two events where they seek recognition, battling against a variety of prejudices, with one another. There are "degrees" of deafness in that insular world, as there are "degrees" of blackness in its equally insular one, and that's a particular problem to T. L. Forsberg, who wants to be a rock star, but is partially hearing and feels downgraded by both the hearing and the deaf communities. Her frustration is a constant as she struggles to break into the world of music. "I hear too well and sign too poorly," she says at one point.
And there's Bob Hilterman, drummer for a rock band of deaf musicians who whimsically call themselves "Beethoven's Nightmare." (For the few who need to be reminded, the composer Ludwig van Beethoven was very deaf.) Hilterman realizes his group is no threat to the Who, or the Modern Jazz Quartet, but he loves it, even though they have not played together for two years. He's just having a good time.
The mood is darker for C. J. Jones, a comic who is both deaf and black ("Double whammy!" he quips), and for Robert de Mayo, an actor with considerable talent who also is H.I.V.-positive because of a real-life tragedy. Jones works at a Deaf Theater Festival and the audience is pitifully small, which Scarl shows just in passing, but less than a minute of visuals, and no commentary, says all that is necessary about the position of deaf actors in a hearing world. De Mayo, one of 10 children, also was crippled by his mother, who refused to learn to sign, and thus cut the most basic communication with her son. Even when she is in her final illness, and he brings an interpreter to the hospital, she says things like, "Why are you looking at her?" Ultimate cruelty.
Scarl does excellent work. She makes her points, carefully and quietly, but without belaboring them. It's a joy to watch the actors work, but understanding the reality makes it a tragedy.
See What I'm Saying opens today at the Des Peres Cinema.
–Joe