In her documentary in regards to the groundbreaking Deaf actor Marlee Matlin, director Shoshannah Stern realized that sound was all the things. “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore” is an intimate account of the performer and activist’s triumphs and struggles, which embody her 1987 Oscar win as lead actress in “Children of a Lesser God,” a primary for a Deaf actor. (She additionally holds the document for youngest individual to win within the class, at 21.) Approaching the venture as a Deaf actor herself, Stern discovered revolutionary methods to assist viewers join with Matlin’s notion of the sound round her.
“Everyone thinks, ‘Oh, this is a celebrity doc, very traditional.’ But then slowly the film does shift,” Stern says through her interpreter, Karri Aiken, on a current video name. “You’re realizing that you do see things more from Marlee’s perspective.”
Most clearly, Stern presents her conversations with Matlin — the ladies curled up reverse one another on a comfortable couch — solely in American Signal Language, utilizing captions somewhat than a verbal interpreter or voice-over, which allowed for extra correct translation. “Sometimes, interpreters don’t get everything right in the moment,” Stern says. The soundtrack captures the delicate smack of lips shifting and the flutter of expressive fingers shifting by way of air, in addition to extraneous sound just like the hum of a jet passing overhead. On a routine set, the interview would pause in the course of the distraction. However Stern felt no want. “I wanted this to be an immersive experience for audience members.”
That thought additionally utilized to the design and use of captions all through the movie, which begins with witty wordplay in the course of the title sequence.
“For a long time, captions have been made by hearing people,” says Stern, who collaborated with d/Deaf/hard-of-hearing artist and filmmaker Alison O’Daniel, whose 2023 documentary “The Tuba Thieves” reimagined closed captioning as a descriptive playground. “People always feel like it’s a burden to add captions … [but] it’s a place where you can enhance a film.” The creativity underscores Matlin’s advocacy earlier than Congress, whose passage of the 1990 Tv Decoder Circuitry Act mandated closed-captioning expertise for televisions offered in america.
Amongst different particulars, the captions can pop up wherever within the body and are even coded to suit the character of the individual talking. “We were trying to use certain colors to meet peoples’ aura,” Stern says.
Stern, left, and Matlin photographed earlier this yr on the Los Angeles Instances Studio on the Sundance Movie Pageant.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Instances)
To plunge viewers into Matlin’s world, the filmmaker labored intently with sound designer Bonnie Wild as an example the customarily complicated sonic free-for-all that Deaf individuals can expertise by way of listening to aids (which each Matlin and Stern use). The scene is a household dinner by which extraordinary family noises — the scrapes, plunks and clatter — and speech are pitched at irregular volumes and lack directional focus. At one level, Matlin’s brother Marc takes a second to interpret a dialogue she struggles to piece collectively.
“As hearing-aid users we can ‘read lips,’ but because we ‘read lips,’ people assume that I understand everything that’s being said,” Stern explains. “Really, there’s a huge amount of work on our end to catch one word. I’m like: noise, noise, noise, oh, word. I can catch one word, but then I have to figure out what were the noises that I missed, and then try to put them all together.”
Wild, who works as a supervising sound editor at Skywalker Sound, borrowed a listening to help from the mom of a pal to get an concept. “I was taken aback by how the high end is so boosted,” she says. “Things don’t have the same depth of field. When my friend was tying her shoelaces behind me, it was just so loud. Things spatially were being thrown. It was disorienting.” Because of a Dolby Creator Lab Grant, Stern was in a position to work with Wild to form a purposefully incoherent soundscape, utilizing Dolby Atmos to fling sounds throughout.
“A lot of times as a Deaf person in real life, you’re exhausted trying to go to an event like that. Everything becomes so muddy, sound-wise,” Stern says. “A lot of times we give up trying to understand sound. That’s what we tried to portray in that scene.”
Maybe most resonant was one other second within the movie, shot throughout an interview whereas the venture was nonetheless in growth. The scene finds Matlin studying a caption from a studio publicity nonetheless for “Lesser God.” It alludes to her being “sensually lost in her own silent world.” The digicam tracks her response. “She’s shocked and then she’s laughing. And she says, ‘It’s not silent in here,’” and he or she’s pointing to her mind. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, yes,’” says Stern, who knew then that she had her thesis for the movie. “I come from the fourth generation of being in a Deaf family and our Deaf family is so loud always.”
