SchspIN

An Actress's Thoughts

Signs for Film Productions

Signs for Film Productions

A lot can be said in favour of teaching the basics of Sign Language to filmmakers: some important technical terms, numbers and the alphabet. As it is, some sort of signing is used quite frequently on most film sets, so why not use proper hand signs of the official Sign Languages.
Finger_FILM

Some weeks ago I read the (German) text Deaf People, the Cochlear Implant and Genocide in the German blog die ennomane. The author wrote (translated into English by SchspIN):

Deaf Culture differs considerably in one aspect from other subcultures: it is nearly hermetically sealed. A migrant in Germany can make an effort to learn German and is then able to communicate and integrate, a deaf person is unable to do so, since he or she cannot hear and has to rely on hand signing or written language. On the other hand hardly anyone will learn sign language without a cause.

I don’t agree.

For one the author himself states that deaf people are able to communicate by „hand signing or written language“, so using the term „nearly hermetically sealed“ is exaggerated. DGS / Deutsche Gebärdensprache – German Sign Language – was formally recognized as an independent language as late as in 2002. In this aspect Germany is lagging behind a number of northern European states, New Zealand and the USA for example, where the national sign languages were made official much earlier, and are also being taught as a foreign language at some schools, and NZSL (New Zealand Sign Language) has been declared official language in 2006, alongside English and Te Reo Maori).
Hearing people or the hearing impaired who don’t know hand signing are able to communicate with deafs via improvised gestures. That’s how we do it when we go abroad and don’t speak the local language – „speaking with hands and feet“, mit Händen und Füßen sprechen, as we say in German. The same situation occurs when we talk to tourists or other persons in Germany that don’t understand German speech. Of course with these signs we are not able to discuss poststructuralism or the latest tax laws, but being in a hermetically sealed situation is something else.

Furthermore, in the digital age we don’t communicate mainly by speech any more.  Emails, text messages, social media, blogs and the likes merely require a certain knowledge of the written language.

Turnig to the quote from die enommane once more: migrants who haven’t learned German yet can only communicate digitally with people who understand their mother tongue or go via a third language. I for example am not able to participate in a turkish internet platform since I don’t understand a word. That’s different when I go and visit a platform run by deaf people. But above all it works the other way as well: Deaf people that only communicate via Sign Language can go about things digitally in a ,normal way’. It does not matter for a discussion on twitter or facebook, for a blog or email correspondence if the writing and reading people are able to hear or not.  No language barriers, and in this case no frontiers between (sub-)cultures.

But let’s get back to the Real Life. It is quite remarkable that we master chunks of a foreign language from childhood on without even knowing it. Hearing persons use quite a large amount of hand sign vocabulary when they communicate via gestures. We sign food and drink, telephone, sleep and driving, we can sign orders like come to me or be quiet / shush!, we ask what’s the time and how much does it cost, we say after you, please or you’re crazy or that makes me sick; even I love you can be expressed with both hands and a matching facial expression. With the movement of one hand (thumb rubbing index finger) we express money and expensive, we show big and small, thick/fat and thin, we sign the numbers from 1 to 10 – yes, this sort of signing is familiar to most of us, when we want to convey something in a noisy environment or to someone who is standing a bit further away from us or is talking to somebody else. From the world of sport we know these clever hand signals to indicate time-out or studies moves in handball, baseball or beach volleyball.

Many signs are common (gesture) vocabulary, they have made their entry into every day language and quite often are shorter and more concise than speech. Thumb pointing up or down combined with elevated or downward corners of the mouth, yes everybody knows what that means, and these gestures have become icons on the internet.

From my school days I remember notes being passed on secretly to communicate with class-mates. Also we used some sort of finger alphabet for the same purpose. I don’t know where it came from but everybody knew it. Each letter was signed with one or two hands. The letter H for example was done with both index fingers vertically on either side of the mouth. (By the way: do they still these sort of finger alphabets in schools in the digital age of today or are they texting and so on?)

I really deplore the fact that primary school children of today learn to read and wrote, get to know the letters, their writing and pronounciation, without at the same time learning the one-handed finger alphabet and that when they start with maths they don’t learn the really very practical sign numbers (e.g. in German Sign Language the number 50 is a simple sign by one hand, and not the showing of all 10 fingers 5 times in a row). That would really be useful.

Anyway, let’s look at the world of film at last. On film sets all over the world unofficial sign languages (i.e. not the proper hand signing languages) are being used, for example when the cameraperson signals the border of the image to the sound assistant with the microphone boom, when a director gives non-verbal direction to an actress, or the camera assistant shows the result of a gatecheck, and of course when crew members from different countries communicate in international production.

We use a lot of English expressions on German film sets – action, cut, slow-mo, close-up, green screen, repetiton, soundcheck, set and more – so nothing really can be said against incorporating expressions from another foreign language. It makes a lot of sense to have Sign Language for this because of its nature: it tells stories in pictures not in speech, it is visual, expressive and very very quiet, which destines it for communicating in the world of film. Also of course basic knowledge of Sing Language among hearing filmmakers will ensure better working conditions for deaf colleagues.

So should Sign Language be compulsory at film schools? No, of course not, there is no need for formalization. But how about organizing courses by choice for those who are interested? Hello and good-bye, please and thank you, counting and spelling, on top of that technical terms of the film industry and some grammar – and plenty of natural vocabulary that signs verbs, adjectives and nouns by sort of describing them manually – that is a lot of fun and leads to solid basic knowledge.

And of course, introducing Sign Language to actors and acting students would be  very enriching. Visual cognition, precision of movements, repeatable gestures and facial expressiveness are stimulated by learning Sign Language. The lip movement is part of a sign (the expression is being pronounced silently) and very often the whole facial expression as well, especially the position and movements of the eye brows. And it can’t be bad to train those, so that maybe one day we will be able to use them as beautifully as Sha Rukh Khan does. But that is a topic for another day.

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