JE VOUS AIME
Diana Anselmo is a Deaf visual artist and performer, activist and improviser. Bilingual in LIS (Italian Sign Language) and Italian, she made her debut with thefirst performance “Autoritratto in 3 atti” (2021), which is still presented in various Italian and foreign festivals (Serbia, Switzerland, Portugal, Germany). Abroad, she has performed in Berlin with the likes of Xavier Le Roy in “Le Sacre du Printemps (2022).” Diana is among the founders of Al.Di.Qua. Artists, Europe’s first professional association of and for disabled artists, for which she has participated as a speaker at various European festivals.
She is also an accessibility manager and, among other things, the youngest member of the Cultural Advisory Board of the British Council.
This is the story of an artistic research project around the technological birth of Cinema and the history of oppression of the Deaf Community. The research traverses the scenario of the late 19th century, a historical period governed by the fields of medical psychology, evolutionary anthropology and the pathologisation of non-normative bodies in binary opposition to the healthy, normal body. The following topics of interest have been transformed into the artistic medium of lecture-performance and the visual art exhibition.
DEAF ART IS ALWAYS POLITICAL / DEAF RAGE IS ALWAYS POLITICAL
© Illustration by Denise Cavallini – Courtesy Diana Anselmo
The act of speaking has always been so viscerally united with the very essence of being human that its absence is more perturbing than anything else. Before being called deaf, we are called mute.
I remember a summer in Sicily where, after playing all day with a kid from the buildings further away, at the moment of saying goodbye he told me, “Don’t go there, there live the mutes”. He was referring to my house. Such was the phonocentric obsession with instilling speech, that the fervour of physiological research and late 19th century technomania contributed to the creation of all kinds of devices focused on capturing speech, including François Dussaud’s Microphonograph (1896) and Georges Demenÿ’s Phonoscope (1891) both of which were designed to ‘cure’ deafness. For both researchers, the aim was to see speech – so elusive and fleeting – finally caught on a support; be it a sheet veiled in lampblack, or a series of photographs put close together – such as is the case with Je Vous Aime: the first short film ever projected.
“Je Vous Aime” is the title of a short film, so short that it lasts barely a second. It is 1891, four years before the Lumière première, Georges Demenÿ built the Phonoscope, an instrument to give successive shots the sense of motion. For the first time a faint moving image was projected, uncertain and shaky, capturing a human face. What is seen is Demenÿ himself saying “Je Vous Aime”.
On a technical level Demenÿ uses the chronophotography of his master and colleague Étienne-Jules Marey to obtain shots at a very short time interval (16 frames per second) and invents an apparatus capable of both capturing and synthethising movement.
The Phonoscope would prove to be a fundamental inspiration for the subsequent development of the Cinematograph by Lumière. Although the results were imperfect, it was in the lap of Marey and his pupil’s experiments that the technical principles of early cinematography were established. The very patent for the Cinematograph, registered by Lumière on 13 February 1895, is entitled “apparatus for obtaining and displaying chronophotographic prints”. In the same year, the Phonoscope and its innovative mechanism for intermittent movement of film were sold to Léon Gaumont, founder of Gaumont Film, the oldest working film studio in the world. And that’s the story. But in contrast to what the meshes of major historiography, which are tightly wrapped around power structures to prevent them from collapsing, may wish, there is something else. Not ‘minor history’ (which exists within the same system), but – as the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze says – anti-history: those whom history does not consider.
The first moving image projection was the result of a commission by Hector Marichelle, a teacher at the Institution National des Sourd-Muets de Paris (since 1960 called Institut National des Jeunes Sourds), who had the precise intention of finding an experimental and instrumental method that would teach his pupils to lip-read faster. This followed the oralist turn of the late 19th century that had banned sign languages all over Europe – putting an end to generations of Deaf teachers, poets, artists and literary figures.
Such was the verdict of the “International Congress for the Improvement of the Education of Deaf-mutes”, known as the Milan Congress, declared by hearing people on 11 September 1880. In 1889, the French Ministry of the Interior formalised the use of the pure oral method as the only method suitable for teaching deaf youngsters at school, excluding at all sign language – under the influence of the resounding first line of John’s gospel: IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD.
The Phonoscope was commissioned in 1890, and it found its reason to exist due to the phonocentric aim of a technocratic oralism, the linguistic desire to eradicate sign languages and the audist goal to remove the possibility that Deafness could be a culture, an identity, an artistic and poetic flourishing.
Despite any possible romantic reading, the phrases chosen by Marichelle were what every child must learn to pronounce: “Bonjour madame”, “Vive la France”, “Je vous aime.” It was Marichelle who requested that the projections take place by bringing the camera closer to the human face, effectively anticipating the first approaches beyond the “Great Glass”. None of lunar wishes à la Méliès; it was only necessary that the movement of the lips was as visible as possible. The unconscious first ‘close-up’ in the History of Cinema was projected inside a classroom of the Institut National des Jeunes Sourds. It was not the Lumiere’s audience. It was three Deaf children.
But Phonocentrism, Linguicism and Audism are not bites that have left marks. They are bites with still with their all teeth. After Milan’s verdict, sign languages were relegated to the underground, and the Congress “was the main cause, more serious than hearing loss, of the limited educational achievements of the deaf today” (Harlan Lane, Past and Present,1995).
In France, it was possible to use LSF (Langue des Signes Française) in schools only from 1991. In Italy, LIS (Lingua dei Segni Italiana) was recognised by the Government as real language in 2021, but it still does not include any direct teaching in LIS.
Historically so much blossoming has been denied, that today it’s only right that cultural and artistic spaces (perhaps among the first places of resistance) have begun to integrate sign languages into their programming.
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