Audism and the Origins of Cinema

BF: Ciao Diana! I would like to explore the relationship between the history of cinema and audist policies with you. But before we get into that, let’s start with the terminology. In Italy, an authoritative and normative body like the Accademia della Crusca has only recently officially recognized the term “audism,” defined as “discrimination based on the ability or inability to hear, prejudice or marginalization against deaf people,” with its first mention in Italy in 2010. Your work often addresses ableist epistemologies and the pervasiveness of audism. How widespread do you think awareness of this issue is today, and, more importantly, is there real collective and institutional effort to dismantle this system?

DA: Ciao B! You know, if you even try to type words such as “ableism” or “audism,” you’ll see a small red dotted line gently suggesting you might actually be thinking about something else entirely. And I won’t even get started with how many times the iPhone spell checker changes “I’m Deaf” into “I’m dead”!

Joking aside, this is just one example of the topic of awareness that you asked about. And to answer your question about whether there is an effort around this matter, I would say yes—but it is directed in the opposite direction: towards keeping the problem unnoticed.

If there are no words to express the problem, there is no problem. Or rather, it surely exists but has no linguistic form within which to address it. With my work, I try to counter this, not by inventing new words, but by unraveling what the French philosopher Deleuze called “anti-history”¹: not that of the defeated, but that of those whom History does not take into account.

BF: Returning to our historical focus, I think that if we were to address the issue of the relationship between audism and cinema in different contexts, we would easily be directed toward silent cinema (1895–1927), but we know that this relationship dates much further back. The central theme of “Je Vous Aime,” your exhibition at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (March 19, 2024–October 13, 2024), was precisely the relationship between the oppression of the deaf community and the history of pre-cinema. How does this story begin?

DA: The history of oppression of the deaf community took a systematic turn when in 1880 (exactly on September 11!) the Milan Congress concluded. The congress debated the most appropriate methodology for the education of the Deaf: to use the so-called manual method (sign language) versus the oral method (speech and lip-reading). Ça va sans dire that the approach—like any violent power approach—was binary: either one or the other. The decision fell on the second method: sign languages were abolished throughout Europe, and the institutions for the Deaf were converted into veritable speech laboratories.

The audist desire to eradicate sign languages and the technocratic oralism of the period gave rise to Je Vous Aime, the first ever movie projection, technologically conceived and designed as a teaching tool for lip-reading. It depicted a man in the act of uttering a sentence. The film by Demenÿ, which we have chosen not to use in the exhibition, can easily be viewed on YouTube. This was in 1891, four years before the Lumière brothers’ first public screening in Paris in 1985, who used the technique of chronophotography perfected by Demenÿ to create the cinematograph, which marked the transition from film as an educational tool to a medium of entertainment.

BF: Demenÿ’s “Je Vous Aime” does mark a key technological milestone in the birth of cinema, but beyond this aspect, I find the question of its audience relevant. Your research makes a particularly interesting point in this regard. You suggest shifting our perspective on what we consider to be the first cinema audience—not the famous large group of Parisian bourgeois fleeing the screening of the Lumière brothers’ L'arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895), but rather three deaf children who were forced to sit in front of Demenÿ’s projection four years earlier.

DA: That’s definitely what I meant by the aforementioned anti-history. The first unconscious “close-up” in the history of cinema was projected in a classroom of what is now the Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris, and its audience was not the one of Lumière. Moreover, here’s a direct quote from Demenÿ in the journal La Nature in 1892: “When I slowed down the rotation (the handle of the machine), the child slowed down; when I stopped, it stopped. In short, I played the deaf-mute like one plays an organ. I made the bad joke of turning the crank backward, and lip-reading was impossible.”The unsettling atmosphere of the actual first projection seems far removed from the audience you usually have in mind.

BF: In the exhibition, you also developed another reference to the history of cinema, starting from François Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (1970). Reflecting on this film gives us an opportunity to understand how the issue was addressed in the 1970s, especially within the advanced left-wing circles.

DA: Truffaut’s film, shot at the Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris itself, takes as its starting point a 1798 case in which the INJS’s doctor, Jean-Marc Itard, attempts to educate a boy found in the woods and described as a savage. The boy is not accustomed to social norms, but above all, he doesn’t speak. The film deals with the doctor’s mission to educate Victor and restore him to civilized society by means of a strenuous and indefatigable education in the spoken word. The entire film is, in fact, one long logopaedic attempt.

A closer look into the Deaf archives reveals how the historical figure was actually obsessed with ‘curing’ deafness (not Victor’s, who was hearing), even through surgical practices that included the use of hot irons, injections, and electric shocks. None of these experimental practices are mentioned in the film, which from an audist and phonocentric perspective, portrays Itard as he is considered today: the father of Special Pedagogy.

BF: Your research started with cinema but is now expanding into other fields that show the pervasiveness of historical audist policies. What role do sound recording and playback devices play in this new chapter of your investigation?

DA: Starting with inventions that have made their fortunes elsewhere in History, driven, however, by a radically audist and phonocentric motivation, if not ill-concealed eugenic intention, the next chapter of my research will focus on the anti-historical origins of these early sound devices. And it seeks to do so by starting with the first device capable of recording sound and reproducing it: Edison’s phonograph (1877)—later known under the name of the gramophone, and, today, as the record player that plays music. What is anti-historical is that Edison was deaf. And that the first playable recording ever made was not music. Not the sound of a piano, nor any other melody.

The first playable recorded sound was a spoken sentence.