Entangled Stories:
Hearing and Cinema
By Zahra Tavassoli Zea

Just like an “all seeing” audience cannot understand blindness simply by closing or covering their eyes, “all hearing” people will not understand the everyday and long-term intricacies of not hearing through the simple plugging of one’s ears. The classical and representational language we use to communicate with each other shortcuts any subtle reflection as to what we do hear with, for instance, non-normative ear bone structures. We designate the “hearing” as a fully abled person and contrast it with the “hearing impaired”, a person whose abilities have been partially removed, according to language gaps. Our educational indifference to disability has normalised the assumption that hard of hearing people hear “nothing” or “next to nothing”, when in fact this is far from the truth. We do not hear nothing when we no longer hear. The oversimplification of the concept of audition extends to all corners of the vast and stigmatised world of disability. “Missing” something, or being “without” something, are negative statements that have infiltrated discourses on art, and that continue to strengthen the foundations of a fundamentally ableist society. Let me explain.

What is left of the silent era – however ingenious and influential silent cinema has been –, are the remnants of a distant and confusing moment in our world’s storytelling history. Since the introduction of sound, we started associating talkies with the most complete and evolved form of cinema, and silent films, with the absence of the auditory aspects that make up “total” cinema. But silent cinema was everything but silent. Take the preparation at the start of the film. Today as yesterday, murmurs are enhanced by sharp bursts of laughter, – which I find startling at first, but dissipate quickly as the projectionist initiates the session. Do you hear the mechanical hum of the projector, spinning in the background? Living with hearing loss has something to do with that experience, except it lasts forever. To sustain this extended metaphor, let’s move on to the screening itself. In the 1920s, not only was the music reproduced phonographically, but pianists and entire orchestras also played live music to accompany the mood and rhythm of the films. 

These non-normative codes of audiovision gathered a diverse and varied audience, among whom immigrants and illiterates, who found it to be a form of enjoyment and respite. Nickelodeons became cultural centres that provided inclusion to lower social groups due to their affordable prices and non-spoken modes of communication (ironically, the film theatre experience, more than a century later, has become less inclusive with exorbitant prices and a deafening sound system). Despite this, silent cinema’s status as primitive and experimental was heightened when compared with Hollywood’s Golden Age and its demand for realism. Even in Europe, André Bazin and the film critics from Cahiers du cinéma were looking for universalism, and sound cinema turned out to be the (w)holiest form of cinema. Just as living without disability has become the most “complete" form of being.

Synchronised sound consolidated ideas about realism and cinema’s unrivaled capacity to objectively represent ordinary experiences “as they are”. But we easily overlook the fact that sound recording is a process of selection, analysis, intensification and, ultimately, construction of an ableist perspective of human experience. One only has to think about the iconic scene in Mars Attacks! (Tim Burton, 1996), where the martians’ heads burst while listening to high-pitched yodeling music, to understand what the normal “human” hearing is able to hear. The deaf or the hard of hearing, unable to hear acute sounds, would struggle to partake in the general hilarity created by this comical situation. While deafness is an uncommon theme in cinema history, denying that directors staged stories that revolve around it would be incorrect. I say “revolving around”, because deafness is rarely addressed head on. A brief illustration is needed here. 
In The Miracle Worker (Arthur Penn, 1962), we primarily focus on the life of Helen Keller’s teacher and caregiver, Anne Sullivan, rather than Helen Keller’s complex character (her determination, intellect and self-reliance). 
By undermining Keller’s full-fledged personality, the narrative mainly serves the able-bodied audience’s need for reassurance and inspiration. A decade later, Johnny Got His Gun (Dalton Trumbo, 1971) paints an unusual portrait of war casualty, Joe Bonham, an American soldier who lost his arms, legs and face, including his ability to hear, speak, see and smell. In order to explore Joe’s consciousness (trauma, memories and dreams), Trumbo divided the narrative into past and present sequences. Along with the occasional absence of sound, Joe’s first-person voice-over powerfully contrast with the diegetic dialogues between medical staff and other secondary characters. Certainly, this film’s sound design made significant strides if compared with Penn’s. But Trumbo’s pacifist and anti-war message remains the main appeal, not its immersive experience with disability. 

For indeed, what does the sound look like for those who hear the sound partially or who do not hear it at all? There are very few films that delve into this question from a formalistic perspective. Auditory trauma, for instance, is usually represented by a very acute but temporary sound similar to the tinnitus with which I experience life daily. Explosions in war films like Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) and Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, 2001) are the ones that come to mind.

And yet, never have we had a society that spoke so much of inclusion, a concept that remains misunderstood, flown over, and requires to be deepened, studied and taught since childhood. To me, inclusion is not a question of quantity, where we count how many deaf-mute characters are included in a story. It is not a matter of sympathy, where we feel grateful for our privileges by seeing the on-screen representations of other people’s difficulties. Inclusion is about asking the appropriate questions and, above all, leaving room for minorities to express themselves without taking the platform away from them. As I recover from ear surgery, I wish people would have replaced dismissive remarks with more self-awareness and a desire to ask about my own feelings of comfort and discomfort. I realise that even the most educated people fail in swapping out the “oh never mind, I’ll tell you later” with the “am I speaking at the right volume so you can hear me?” This might sound insignificant, but I believe we must be critical of this blind pursuit of self-reassurance, imposed by the vacuous values of our consumer societies, especially in times of war, when physical or psychological disabilities multiply at a dizzying speed. Comfort-seeking behaviours prevent us from developing the empathy necessary to save our societies’ last glimmers of humanism. 

As a hard-of-hearing person, I'd like to be able to share more of the magic that has become the connector between my senses and my brain. I'd like people to be more interested in the analogies, metaphors and other associations that result from a sound heard differently or from a misinterpreted sentence. I'd like to bring out the comedy and poetry of what we call disabilities to halt condescension and open up our language. I’d like our lives to be more inspired by the comedies of Buster Keaton, by his ingenuity to play with narrative codes and to integrate an extraordinary amount of dreams, melancholy and humor into everyday life. From him, and from the “Silent” Era, we must learn that to be revolutionary, we must seek the extraordinary.