Klarinet Archive - Posting 000152.txt from 2007/05

From: "dnleeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
Subj: RE: [kl] Beyond Silence
Date: Sat, 19 May 2007 17:34:10 -0400

Rarely does one ask a question on this list and get a response so
thorough, so complete, and so clear as Lelia Loban's response to
my question about "Beyond Silence." I thank her for her writing
such a clear picture. Only at the end did she mention that she
liked it, which means that everything before that point speaks of
objectivity.

Lelia, you are a sweetheart!!

Dan Leeson
DNLeeson@-----.net

-----Original Message-----
From: Lelia Loban [mailto:lelialoban@-----.net]
Sent: Saturday, May 19, 2007 10:12 AM
To: klarinet@-----.org
Subject: [kl] Beyond Silence

Dan Leeson wrote,
> Can anyone comment on the film, "Beyond Silence"
>which is about a young girl given a clarinet by her
>aunt and she proves so talented that she goes to study
>in Berlin??

"Beyond Silence" opened in Germany in 1996 as "Jensiets der
Stille," in
German and sign language, and was released in the USA with
English
subtitles in 1998. Caroline Link, the director, co-authored the
screenplay
with Beth Serlin. Niki Reiser wrote the original music for the
soundtrack.
The movie is a coming-of-age story about an eight-year-old
hearing girl,
Lara, living in rural Germany with her deaf-mute parents. When
her aunt
gives the child a clarinet, Lara begins taking lessons and learns
she has
ability.

Lara's parents use her as their translator with the hearing
world, to the
point where their demands interfere with her schooling. Like
many
deaf-mute people completely dependent on sign language, they
don't
appreciate the importance of reading the local spoken language.
The
father, embittered and self-absorbed, lacks empathy with the
child's love
of music--the moreso because of unresolved sibling rivalry
between him and
his hearing sister, whose motives in introducing Lara to music
include
spite against Martin. The movie jumps forward ten years to the
girl's
difficult decision: whether or not to leave home to try to gain
admission
to a prestigious music school in Berlin, despite her father's
opposition.

The movie stars Tatjana Trieb as Lara in childhood and Sylvie
Testud as
Lara at eighteen, with Howie Seago as Martin (Lara's father),
Emmanuelle
Laborit as Kai (Lara's mother), Selestina Stanissavijevic as
Clarissa in
childhood (Lara's aunt and Martin's sister), Sibylle Canonica as
adult
Clarissa, Matthias Habich as Gregor (Clarissa's husband) and
Hansa
Czypionka as Tom (Lara's boyfriend, a teacher for the deaf).
Seago and
Laborit are both deaf: wise casting, because they need to look
convincing
in sign language. I'd be curious what deaf people think of the
four
hearing actors who also need to look convincing using sign.

Since my German is elementary and I rely heavily on the
subtitles, perhaps
I shouldn't try to comment on the acting, but I do want to point
out that
most of the *characters* behave theatrically, as deaf people do
behave in
real life. The deaf communicate far more vividly with facial
expressions
and body language than hearing people do. Similarly, people who
work
intensively with the deaf pick up these habits. Thus it's
difficult for me
to be sure where "actor at work" shows through a
performance--but,
nonetheless, some of the line-readings between actors playing
hearing
characters, particularly in the scenes between Testud and
Czypionka, sound
a bit mannered ("actressy") to me.

Margaret Thornhill wrote,
>>If this is the film I think it is, the promotional
>>advertising showed the actress holding the
>>clarinet with the right hand on top.

Yes. The photo is printed in reverse. Unfortunately, that error
signals a
general problem with the movie for viewers who play the clarinet.
Clarissa
and Lara (both as children and as adults) look totally
unconvincing as
clarinet players, although the producers hired three clarinet
instructors,
Annabel Dashwood, Natascha Eickmeier and Maximilian Geller, to
coach the
actors. Claudio Pantin and Michael Heitzler play the clarinet
for Lara and
Clarissa on the soundtrack. (The Internet Movie Database gives
the
spelling "Hetzler," but, based on past experience with the IMDb,
I'd guess
the screen credit spelling, Heitzler, is more likely correct and
the IMDb
credit is misspelled.) Klezmer clarinet player Giora Feidman has
a cameo
as himself, when Lara attends a concert at the school where she's
working
up the nerve to audition for admission.

The soundtrack strikes me as appropriate rather than good. If
the little
kids in the atrocious beginner band sounded like a pack of little
Mozarts
(looped by professionals), then the movie would set off my crap
detectors.
Unlike danyel, I'm not bothered by Clarissa's and Lara's
amateurish
music-making. Clarissa's not supposed to be a brilliant jazz and
salsa
musician. She's grown up from just another pampered kid playing
duets with
her dad into just another local at an open-mic jam. (I'll leave
it up to
someone who lives in Germany to dispute in detail danyel's
assertion that
African Americans are an improbable sight in a German jazz club.)
By the
end of the movie, Lara's an 18-year-old student with a deficient
musical
education so far, not some sophisticated virtuoso. She's
auditioning to
get into a school, not to graduate from it. I wish the actors
looked at
least a little bit convincing with their clarinets, but if Lara
and
Clarissa *sounded* much better, I'd be sitting there thinking,
"baloney."

For me, the strength of this movie is that, unlike most writers
and
directors of movies about the disabled, Caroline Link doesn't
patronize her
deaf characters and their helpers by making saints of them.
They're
humans, some more flawed than others. Link does a particularly
good job of
presenting the political and social issues of the deaf community,
much in
the news here in the Washington, D. C. area, where turmoil
continues at
Gallaudet University over the decades- old dispute between deaf
activists
who think the deaf should cling to their own community and stick
to sign
language and equally committed deaf activists who think the deaf
should
learn to lip-read, to read the spoken language and to speak
aloud.

"Beyond Silence" was a box office disaster in the USA, with a
domestic
gross of only US$171,334 in limited release, despite strong
reviews and an
Oscar nomination for best foreign film. (Internationally, the
movie won a
number of other awards.) The movie did get publicity from
influential
reviewers here. Stephen Holden, in "The New York Times" (June 5,
1998),
gave a nuanced review, mostly favorable. He criticized the
movie's ending
for sentimentality. I somewhat agree, but I don't think it's a
happy
ending so much as a moment of reconciliation offering hope for
the future.
However, that hope looks fragile to me, since the ending leaves
nearly all
of the basic issues unresolved.

Aside from the vaunted reluctance of US audiences to attend
subtitled
movies, several important critics, including Roger Ebert in "The
Chicago
Sun-Times" (June 12, 1998, widely read because his column was
syndicated),
may have helped doom "Beyond Silence," by praising it to the
skies with
smug reviews that insulted the prospective audience. In effect,
these
critics shook their fingers in the public's face, shamed us for
liking
trash better than art films (Ebert singled out "Godzilla"
remakes) and told
us to go see this movie because it's good for us. My instinctive
reaction
to that sort of pep talk is antagonism: "Hey, you snob, I *like*
Godzilla
movies. What's it to ya?" But I like this movie, too, and I
think other
clarinet players also will enjoy it, although the clarinet is not
the focus
of the movie.

Lelia Loban
Impeach Cheney first.

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