A movie about the deaf, but not for the deaf

September 12, 2005 11:36 AM

A movie about the deaf, but not for the deaf Thought-provoking piece in the LAVoice: "Since I am deaf myself and require subtitles in order to watch films, we contacted the Nuart to make sure that the film was subtitled; I couldn't find anything on either the theater’s website or the distributor's website that indicated the film was subtitled. Much to our dismay, we were shocked to learn that the film - a movie about a deaf person - would not be subtitled ..."
posted by mantid (12 comments total)

....Doh! (the link ain't workin for me, btw)
posted by tula at 11:49 AM on September 12, 2005

Wow, this is massively stupid of them.

So... maybe someone can get a copy of the film, digitize it, slap some fansubs on there and release a torrent.

Idiots.

Link worked for me, btw.
posted by Talanvor at 11:57 AM on September 12, 2005

Of course, when she says “subtitled” she means “captioned.” And indeed the distributor did not have to go with open captioning, which they claim would mar their precious film æsthetics. They admit closed captioning works fine, but only for DVD. I guess they are ignorant of movie-captioning technology.

However, if they went for Rear Window captioning (using which system I've seen over 60 movies), it wouldn't run with captions at the Nuart, which doesn't have the system installed.

So yeah, the distributor and director are total arses and prima donnas, but there is a bit of a technical conundrum involved.

Also, somewhat off-topic: I have harboured strong suspicions for years that Evelyn Glennie really isn't deaf. But that's just me.
posted by joeclark at 12:15 PM on September 12, 2005

Arses and prima donnas with bad business sense, too. I bet they're losing a lot of potential ticket sales.

joeclark, do you have any tips for using rear window captioning? My dad says it's crap, but I wonder if he's not positioning the reflector correctly. Are you supposed to look through it, or position it so the captions are underneath your view of the movie screen? Does it seem to work better based on where you're sitting in the theater? I've read the FAQ at mopix.org, but it didn't help much.
posted by amarynth at 12:48 PM on September 12, 2005

Oh, c'mon, everyone knows that deaf people can't read.
posted by klangklangston at 1:43 PM on September 12, 2005

I have harboured strong suspicions for years that Evelyn Glennie really isn't deaf

Hmmm. From her webpage:
"
With no other sound interfering, Evelyn can usually hear someone speaking although she cannot understand them without the additional input of lip-reading. In Evelyn's case the amount of volume is reduced compared with normal hearing but more importantly the quality of the sound is very poor. For instance when a phone rings Evelyn hears a kind of crackle. However, it is a distinctive type of crackle that Evelyn associates with a phone so she knows when the phone rings. This is basically the same as how normally hearing people detect a phone, the phone has a distinctive type of ring which we associate with a phone."

Define deaf. Does she have a total absense of hearing? No. Does she hear in the "average" range - nope, probably not.
posted by anastasiav at 6:23 PM on September 12, 2005

amarynth, I usually position a rear window captioner so that things show up on the screen rather than underneath it. I prefer open captioned movies rather than rear window ones personally, so can see why your dad might think it's crap, but have gotten used to using rear window since there's three theaters in my town that have that and the closest open caption screen is 90 minutes away.

Basically, best tips I've got for it is show up early enough to get the screen positioned decently and try not to move around too much to keep it from moving out of position. That and hope like hell that you don't get people walking around behind you in the middle of the movie that might block out the projection.
posted by syrcharles at 6:29 PM on September 12, 2005

When did the rear window captioning come into popularity? In college, I used to interpret films for a friend of mine. We'd usually die laughing at an inopportune moment because I'd use the totally wrong sign for a word, which resulted in a translation that either made no sense at all, remote sense (and he knew my signing faults, so could follow anyway), weird sense, crazy sense, or sick sense. If it was somehow comically charged (usually in a sexual sense, since I was new to ASL and didn't know all of the innuendos), he'd make a crack about my mistake, then I'd start laughing, then we'd both be lost as to the original film. It was usually a better time than the movie itself warranted.
posted by fionab at 7:41 PM on September 12, 2005

There's another discussion about this here.
posted by cactus at 9:59 PM on September 12, 2005

If they are so concerned about the visual, why not make subtitles part of the design of the film?
posted by jb at 8:22 AM on September 13, 2005

I thought that this is why the National Center for Accessible Media developed Rear Window Captioning.
posted by basilwhite at 2:09 PM on September 13, 2005

Thanks, syrcharles. I'll see if I can talk him into trying again.
posted by amarynth at 1:52 PM on September 15, 2005