CNN featured an article on tonight's airing of "Sweet Nothing In My Ear" with MM, Noah Valencia, and Jeff Daniels, a well known actor with a long list of blockbuster movies.
In this article, MM's character is 100% ASL - a challenge for MM who finally admits to being not an ASL user. She admits she speaks, lip-reads, and signs in English to deaf people. Pretty much the same roles she played in all of her movies - she spoke mostly and sometimes signed. These roles she played in her old movies were a walk in the park. Not much of a challenge for her.
In this one, her character is 100% ASL - a novelty for MM. She understands the concept that ASL has a very different system of syntaxes than what she is used to...thus a challenge for her since she does not sign in ASL - never has. She grew up in mainstreamed public school and was educated through interpreters. She socialized with general student population along with small group of deaf students in the Resources program. She grew up immersed in English.
Linda Bove, best known for her appearances on Sesame Street, was on site to instruct Daniels to learn ASL and to coach MM to keep her ASL-authentic. That included keeping her mouth motionless.
....to quote MM, "I have a very tough crowd watching me."
How very right she is! We all will be watching, MM!
Sunday, April 20, 2008
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8 comments:
This is the 2nd post I see someone mentioning about anyone using ASL should have motionless lips.
Honestly I didnt know there's a "rule" or nature of this. Very rarely do I see anyone even with Deaf roots do ASL without lips movements.
Still that's good that MM will do something different than her previous roles.
Lane,
"Motionless lips" is not necessarily literal. We all do move our lips to resemble to an extent the spoken words, but most of us don't move our lips for every word the way most SimCom users do. We only move our lips for emphasis or key words, or words that are easy to pronounce.
Many of us will speak "will", "me," "yes," "really?", among a few instances. Not enough to be collaborative with spoken English when one might be SimComing. Not enough for most hearing people to be able to read if they need spoken lips to correlate to the signed version.
Most hearing people have a hard time communicating with ASL users who do not speak enough for their liking. I am one of those people. In my dept there are 10 teachers, and 5 of them are hearing. 4 of the deaf teachers in the dept can speak and do use speech when signing and I am the only one who doesn't. The hearing teachers had difficulty understanding me just like I had trouble understanding their poor signing skills. But over time, we become accustomed to each others' movements that we are better understanding each other. They never have had trouble understanding the 4 deaf teachers who use speech while signing.
These 4 teachers are similar to MM. This was a challenge for her to drop speech and English-like signing. 2 of our deaf teachers hardly use ASL...one does on daily basis but when speaking to hearing staff, he assumes English-like signing. Nothing wrong with that...understandable communication is the essence, not what kind is being used in that situation.
Welcome to Hollywood world! That's how many directors do the job to tell actors/actresses to do this- do that etc . Of course MM has her rights but she is in the Hollywood world doing her job. I have seen some Deaf people without lips movement. Some do. It is all up to everyone! I believe -- Many many years ago .. The Deaf community rarely used lip movements (that was before the AGB's time) Enjoy the show tonite!
I'm back here again, I was just thinking about your post...actually a good post. And I wanted to leave this comment here before that show begins. Not just about lip movements, more of communicating issue.
Since Marlee (character) and Jeff Daniels (character)are both married...in reality Jeff should be fluent in ASL.
I would believe for Linda Bove, Jeff was harder to train than it is to train Marlee.
I know it's just a movie and probably will turn out to be a good one. Let's see how good Jeff will do.
Lane,
I think I read that Linda stated that it was harder to work with MM in keeping her in her ASL using role than it was to teach Daniels ASL!
I don't think Daniels is expected to be fluent - he would be like many hearing spouses of deaf friends I know...sign okay but not really fluent, and their receptive ASL is even worse - they're too accustomed to their spouses that they don't read others too well.
Hi Cy! :)
Finally, back on your blog after a quite long time.
I wanted to thank you for bringing this up.
Finished watching the movie and I thought it was a very good movie.
I wanted to make a comment on about ASL with or without lips movements. It depends on each invididual.
Have a wonderful week with blessings.
Cheers,
Katrina:)
I cannot believe why Linda Bove instructed MM to keep her mouth motionless. More than 95 % of Deafies I met moved their mouth. It's not correct to assume that most of them shut their mouth shut.
Oh there is my first comment over here .. lol :-) Diane
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