Film explores deaf life, culture

Presented through UNM’s Media Arts Department at the Guild Cinema Monday night was the Academy Award-nominated documentary by Josh Aronson, “Sound and Fury.” Though only two screenings of the film were shown, the theatre was filled to capacity, while Aronson, who was present for both showings, answered questions for the audience afterward.

The film follows the Artinians of Glen Cove, Long Island, — a deaf family faced with the struggle over a controversial new medical technique called the cochlear implant. The cochlear implant is a surgical procedure where a device is implanted on the side of the patient’s head, underneath the skin, which gives deaf people the ability to hear.

Peter and Nita Artinian have been long-time advocates against the use of the implant, with the fear that it will ultimately eliminate the presence of deaf culture and the deaf way of life. When their 5-year-old deaf daughter, the precocious Heather, asks for a cochlear implant, they are immediately thrown into turmoil and forced to begrudgingly pursue the effects the cochlear implant would have on their daughter. Added to this, Peter’s brother, Chris and his wife, Mari, find out that their newborn son is deaf and decide to pursue the operation.

What ensues is a gripping narrative on a relatively unknown battle between deaf and hearing culture where familial ties are strained and also embraced.

“Sound and Fury” is a complicated film. While for some, the cochlear implant seems like a given procedure to alleviate deafness, many people within the deaf community vehemently oppose it. Members of the deaf community feel that the cochlear implant will eliminate deaf culture as they know it, while others, primarily hearing people, feel that it would be cruel not to allow a child the opportunity to hear.

Aronson expressed his original surprise of learning about the intensity of deaf people’s opposition after the first screening.

“When deaf people have children, they celebrate that they’re deaf,” Aronson said. “But as typical of all hearing people I thought of deafness as a handicap. And I immersed myself in it four years ago, and started reading and I learned what deaf culture was; I learned what it was to be deaf, and their struggle to educate their children, and I understood both sides of the picture.”

And what the film does so dexterously is delineate both sides of the argument — it opens a hearing person’s eyes to an indelible cultural foundation deaf people have created through their language and physical state. But it also recognizes that deafness has a profound alienating effect, and shows some of the limitations deaf people may have when put in context with the majority hearing world. And at the heart of the film is the passion of deaf culture and its potential evanescence with the presence of the cochlear implant.

In the end, “Sound and Fury” may have barely scratched the surface of an unconventional, but heated, cultural debate that has extremely severe undercurrents.