Down the Tubes Productions

Welcome to movie month! All February, we’re going to be watching DHH-related movies and sharing our thoughts.. Now, on with the show….

We recently took some time out of our incessant writing, talking, meetings, and scheming to sit down for an afternoon and watch a movie that was unknown to us – and maybe to many of you readers – the significant film, “Deafula”, released in 1975. 

Deafula was groundbreaking due it being the first film in which all characters spoke American Sign Language (ASL). There was no spoken English at all, though the concession was made to caption the movie using written English for viewers that did not speak ASL. 

There were so many things that struck me while watching this film, that to piece them together in flowing, organized paragraphs is rendered almost impossible. In an attempt to gather my impressions for this blog post I am going to reduce them to a collection of lists.

Here we go: 

The Astounding: 

• That it was the first film to be recorded entirely in ASL
• The director, writer, and producer Peter Wechsberg, (using the name Peter Wolf), was deaf* (caveat: I do not know how he identified, so I opted for the lowercase “d” for deaf as opposed to the uppercase “D” which indicates culturally Deaf)
• The director also played the main character 
• Peter Wechsberg graduated from Gallaudet and was a member of the National Theater of the Deaf 
• The film was independently produced for the Deaf community, and the original cut of the film was completely silent 
• The actors were very expressive with their facial expressions and body movements. What would have looked like “overacting” in a typical hearing film, made sense within this context. I did not find it as distracting as I may have otherwise. 
• Symbolism was woven in throughout, with the most striking being that one of the characters – reminiscent of “Igor” from the movie, “Young Frankenstein” – was missing his hands, representing his mutism and inability to communicate using sign. 

The Questionable: 

• There was music piped into the background which seemed an unusual choice, from my perspective, for a film made completely in ASL.
• Not all actors were deaf/hard of hearing which took away a little bit of the intention and authenticity for me, but it is noted which actors were hearing or hard of hearing in the credits.
• It is a retelling of the classic “Dracula” by Bram Stoker, but the plot holes are immense even as a retelling of a tale where the creator can have some creative license.
• It was challenging to determine if following the plot was nearly impossible at points because we were missing nuances of ASL that were not able to be directly translated to written English or if the story itself was a bit disjointed. 
• The disclaimer about captions being available in the film format were…not captioned. Whoops. 
• There were camera angles that made being able to see the complete hand signs challenging. As a non-ASL speaker, I do not know if that would have impacted the viewer’s ability to understand sign, but it was frequent enough that it struck me as unusual. 

The Things I Noticed That Don’t Fit Anywhere Else: 

• Main character Steve had the whitest of white pants I have ever seen in any film – black and white or color – and the cleanliness of said pants was impressive
• You didn’t have to go so hard with the dog. I will leave it at that. Not cool, Deafula. 
• Deafula was able to romp around in broad daylight, bright sunshine, and admire himself in mirrors so that took a little bit away from the classic Vampire trope. 
• The handless character had prosthetics that looked like cans of tuna. It was tough to get past that one, and it was so distracting that it definitely impacted my ability to pay attention to that portion of the storyline.

My final thoughts? It was…interesting. I appreciate the rightful place that it has earned in both film and Deaf history. I do not anticipate ever watching this again as one time through was more than enough. I did not find it particularly enjoyable, but not every film is for everyone. It is worth finding on YouTube if you are curious!