Liza Sylvestre: Captioned – Twentieth Century
Granary Arts
Friday, October 12 - Friday, December 14, 2018
Response > Ephraim, Utah
Stephen Anderson
November 5, 2018
Liza Sylvestre had never seen the 1934 film Twentieth Century before providing closed captions for it. The artist is medically deaf, and can distinguish only vague sounds with the help of cochlear implants, not enough to understand the film’s dialogue. In a new video installation, she deploys captions as a form of live commentary: guessing at what’s happening, commenting on the different characters, observing visual details, and reflecting on her own condition. A caption summarizes the pathos of this task: “I write my own story out of boredom. But also to distract myself from this fact.”
Captioned – Twentieth Century is currently on view at Granary Arts in Ephraim, Utah. The video is projected on the wall of a small cabin adjacent the gallery’s main structure, and the audio of the original film is left on. That means that a hearing audience is forced, uncomfortably, to follow a double thread: that of the film’s conventional narrative, and that of Sylvestre’s experience, one of isolation and boredom but also a certain kind of freedom. She is not, like us listeners, under the spell of the film’s plot. Caption: “I observe the basics. Facial expressions. Shapes between bodies. Emotions in their movements.” In so doing, the artist gains access to a dimension of the film that—until now—lay hidden in semi-consciousness.
Twentieth Century is the story of an impassioned theatrical producer, Oscar Jaffee (John Barrymore), and a lingerie model-turned actress whom he has stage named “Lily Garland” (Carole Lombard). At first Lily is hopeless, blundering her lines and stage movements, but Jaffee is undeterred. The pivotal moment comes when, in an attempt to elicit a realistic scream, he stealthily jabs her with a tailor’s pin. Later, in her dressing room following a fabulous premier, Lily produces the pin which she has lovingly preserved as a memento. “The sorrows of life are the joys of art,” intones Jaffe. “Seriously?” reads the caption. “The pin he stabbed you in the ass with?!”
The pin is a fitting symbol: the effort of a dominant male producer to control his female protégé is refined in miniature to a point of violent efficacy. Sylvestre is attentive to the way this violence is dispersed in subtle and unsubtle ways throughout the film. Jaffee pats the actress’ cheeks. Caption: “More face pats.” He fawns seductively over her. Caption: “It’s like he’s casting a spell on her with his words and gentle hand gestures.” Outrageously, he draws her directions with chalk on the stage floor. Caption: “That constellation of control is growing larger and more complex.”
Artist Christine Sun Kim has commented on how deaf persons have to reconstruct the rules of a social space by observation. In a sense, that is what Sylvestre is doing here: reconstructing the social rules of the film on the basis of what she sees. She is not by any means experiencing a “silent film.” Silent films are designed to exaggerate the actions on screen, guiding the audience with pantomime and intermittent text. But Twentieth Century, like virtually every post-silents era film, presumes a hearing audience—that is, an able-bodied audience. Of course, any movie can provide captions for those with hearing loss, but that’s not the point. Captioned reproduces the experience of deafness in a whole range of normalized spaces, both real and virtual, in which the deaf person is left with the overwhelming task of filling in context.
It is a lonely and tiring position. “I feel like I’m watching a cartoon,” reads one caption. Another, “How much am I really missing?” Another, “This is supposed to be funny, I think.” The captions, for the most part, are declarative and basic. But there are moments when it becomes clear that Sylvestre’s exclusion from the script—both the literal script of the film and the ideological script which normalizes its power dynamics—has allowed her to see something the rest of us looked right past.
Stephen Anderson is a writer based in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Liza Sylvestre is an artist living and working in Urbana, Ilinois.
lizasylvestre.com
Granary Arts is a contemporary art gallery housed in the historic Ephraim granary building in Ephraim, Utah.
granaryarts.org
info@granaryarts.com
86 N Main Street
Ephraim, UT 84627
Wed - Sat / 11 am - 5 pm
435-283-3456
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