Gallaudet University Video Library

Mary Williamson in The Death of Minnehaha (1913), from http://videolibrary.gallaudet.edu

A while ago I told you about the digitised series of the American journal for the deaf, The Silent Worker, which had such fascinating material on the relationship of the deaf community to silent cinema. The journal has been digitised by Gallaudet University, Washington, which specialises in education for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. The remarkable range of work it does includes a commitment to film, which leads us to the excellent Gallaudet University Video Library.

This is a model database with video streams in Windows Media and QuickTime, and first-rate associated metadata. And among the many titles available on the site are silent films, including - astonishingly - the first surviving film using American Sign Language, from 1910, and nine titles from 1913 made for the National Associaition of the Deaf. The films are known about by historians of deafness, but has anyone written about these from the film history angle?

Gallaudet provides this cataloguing data for the films:

The Lorna Doone Country of Devenshire England
(12 min., B & W, silent, signed 1910)
The earliest surviving film in sign language. Dr. Edward Miner Gallaudet, prominent educator of the deaf and founder of Gallaudet University, lectures on his visit to England. [The Video Library gives the date of 1913, but this seems to be an error]

Dom Pedro’s Visit to Gallaudet College
(6 min., B&W, silent signed: 1913)
E.A Fay relates the story of the Emperor of Brazil’s visit to Gallaudet and his American Travels, in 1876.

Memories of Old Hartford
(16 min., B & W, silent, signed: 1913)
Dr. John B. Hotchkiss talks of his youth in Hartford, Connecticut in the “good old days” of the mid-1800s.

An Address at the Tomb of Garfield
(6 min., B & W, silent, signed: 1913)
Willis Hubbard leads a delegation of deaf persons who have come to Washington for a memorial service at the tomb of the late President James A. Garfield. Hubbard summarizes Garfield’s life and achievements and speaks on Garfield’s deep interest in Gallaudet University (then called the Columbia Institution) and his role in defending the fledgling college against Congressional opponents and budget-cutters.

Discovery of Chloroform
(8 min. B&W, silent, signed: 1913)
Dr. George T. Dougherty, a leading chemist in the industrial world and leader among the deaf, lectures on the chloroform in one of the world’s first educational films.

The Death of Minnehaha
(16 min., B&W, silent, signed: 1913)
Mary Williamson relates Longfellow’s famous poem in costume and sign language. [Illustrated above]

A Lay Sermon
(16 min., B& W, silent, signed: 1913)
A sermon by the Rev. Robert McGregor about the universal brotherhood of man and the Fatherhood of God.

A Plea for a Statue of De l’Epee in America
(6 min., B&W, silent, signed: 1913)
An address read by Rev. McCarthy and interpreted in sign language by Dr. James H. Cloud. The Abbe de’l Epee was a French cleric who invented the French (and indirectly, the American) sign language in the late 1700’s.

The Preservation of Sign Language
(16 min., B & W, silent, signed: 1913)
An address by George William Veditz in which he deplores the debasing of the “pure” sign language and urges its preservation.

Yankee Doodle, The Irishman’s Flea, and the Lady and the Cake
(6 min., B&W, silent, signed: 1920)
Three humorous short tales in sign language.

The films are mostly lectures in sign language form, so comprehension is going to be a bit limited for those not conversant with ASL, but I recommend the performance by Mary Williamson of the death of Minnehaha from Longfellow’s Hiawatha and the lecture on chloroform. They are well produced (the titles are later additions) - the person behind most of them was George Veditz, president of the National Association of the Deaf, and there’s an account of their production on the PBS site. In part it seems they were made to help preserve the art of sign language by demonstrating the work of its finest practitioners (Veditz appears on one dedicated to just this theme).

To view the films, go to the Video Library site, click on the public access link at the bottom of the page, then from the menu on the left choose ‘Deaf History’. There are other films extant not included here, but there is more than enough to provide a fascinating window on this world, and to show us once again that the early cinema was such an exciting and creative time. More, much more, was going on that the history books have yet been able to tell us.

There’s a history of deaf people and cinema, John S. Schuchman’s Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry. My copy’s on order.

The Silent Worker

While preparing a post on the digitisation of newspaper collections (which you’ll receive some other time), I came across one journal of such particular interest that it had to have a post to itself.

The Silent Worker was a popular American journal for the deaf, published between 1888 and 1929. Most of the articles were written by hearing-impaired authors. The entire run of the journal has been digitised by Gallaudet University Library. If you go to the search options, and click on subjects, you will find 70 articles on ‘Movies and Deaf’.

I don’t know if there has been much in the way of studies made of the relationship between deafness and silent cinema, though the Chicago Institute for the Moving Image has a Festival for Cinema of the Deaf which has included silent films, and in 1891 the pre-cinema pioneer Georges Demenÿ famously used a proto-moving image camera to show someone mouthing the words ‘Je vous aime’ as a demonstration of how moving images might aid deaf mutes in learning to speak. And there are many anecdotes of deaf lip-readers discovering the fruity language spoken in films like What Price Glory? which had escaped the eye of the censors. And it has been argued that Lon Chaney’s particular acting gifts came in part through both his parents being deaf.

The Silent Worker reveals a rich world where deaf audiences, and deaf creative talents, engage with the silent picture. For example, an article entitled ‘Cinema and “Signs”‘ (October 1916) compares the art of pantomime with that of the silent screen, with particular reference to Billy Merson and Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin gets many mentions, and there is an engrossing piece, ‘Moving Pictures and the Deaf’ (June 1918) by Alice T. Terry (not the actress Alice Terry), who describes a visit to Hollywood and the Chaplin Studios, where she encounters Granville Redmond (illustrated above with Chaplin), a painter and deaf-mute, who acted in A Dog’s Life and The Kid. Chaplin is revealed to have been notably accommodating towards the deaf (has anyone written on this?). Her opinions are full of interest:

Unlike the spoken drama, the deaf can enjoy moving pictures as much as the hearing do. Some may say that the deaf lose, as they do not hear the music that acompanies the pictures. But I do not think we lose; there are various ways in which we are compensated but the hearing would hardly understand if we tried to explain. For myself I hate the noisy show, that is where some struggle or a battle is going on with its accompanying loud imitation battle din. To me the vibrations are a continuous, growling thunder - or worse than that - which sickens me soul and body. In fact most all musical vibrations irritate me. But by many of the deaf I know that the vibrations are enjoyed, especially by those with some remnant of hearing.

She also has trenchant opinions on D.W. Griffith, whose The Birth of a Nation “worked a great injury to the colored race”. Elsewhere, there are reports on the production of films for the deaf, including a Professor G.W. Jones who filmed speeches from Shakespeare.

One article, ‘Preserving a Famous Film’ sounds remarkably archival for April 1912, though its subject is actually the preservation on film of notable practitioners of sign language. The are also reports on Helen Keller, who starred as herself in a dramatised film of her life in 1919, entitled Deliverance (her teacher Annie Sullivan also appeared in the film).

That’s what I’ve gleaned through a quick inspection, and clearly there much more that could be unearthed. Here’s some last words, written by Alexander L. Pach, for the October 1919 issue:

We deaf people must thank the screen-art for the one biggest offset to our infirmity. Good pictures and by good pictures I mean the kind that educate and elevate, are the levers that lift us from the deadly dullness and monotony of total deafness, to the highest pinnacles of delight. They restore our hearing as nothing else does. We know every word that is spoken as well as the hearing do, for they are all projected on the screen. We only miss the music, and this is such a slight loss it doesn’t count … All the best plays of the spoken stage that have delighted millions of hearing people find their way to “Screenland”, and such big hits as “Common Clay”, “Daddy Long-legs”, “The Thirteenth Chair”, “Secret Service” etc. etc., are ours through this media. An evening at a good picture house now means one of those hits of the drama; a News-Weekly that has the whole world for its field … a more or less “funny” picture that makes us laugh whether we want to or not and then Burton Holmes shows us the people, the customs and the homes of some far away denizens of the other side of the earth. After an evening of delightful entertainment of this order one may go home utterly forgetful of the fact that an important sense is missing. He has come away refreshed. The tedium of the every day work of store, office of factory has been relieved in great measure, and we feel it’s a bully good little world after all …

There are such treasures to be found on the web. Let’s all keep on looking.