As part of the exhibition WITHIN/Infinite Ear, Council proposed a selection of films and videos or various sources (documentary, essays, artists’ videos, films and recordings of dance performances). The program was an invitation to hear music through different languages and gestures created by artists and choreographers and through different experts’ “ears.” It also suggested a short history of Deaf culture in cinema.

Pray consider that if, to judge correctly of intonation, we must listen to an actor without looking at him, it is very natural to watch an actor without hearing him, if we are to judge correctly of his gestures and action.
— Denis Diderot

The programme was composed of :

RUBBER COATED STEEL
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 2016, video, 21min

In May 2014, Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank (Palestine) shot and killed two teenagers, Nadeem Nawara and Mohamad Abu Daher. The human rights organization Defence for Children International contacted Forensic Architecture, a Goldsmiths College-based agency that undertakes advanced architectural and media research. They worked with Abu Hamdan to investigate the incident. The case hinged upon an audio-ballistic analysis of the recorded gunshots to determine whether the soldiers had used rubber bullets, as they asserted, or broken the law by firing live ammunition at the two unarmed teenagers. A little over a year after Abu Hamdan completed his report, he returns to the case of Abu Daher and Nawara in his video Rubber Coated Steel. Rubber Coated Steel acts as a tribunal for these serial killing sounds. It does not preside over the voices of the victims but rather seeks to amplify their silence, fundamentally questioning the ways in which rights are being heard today.

TITLE WITHDRAWN
Robert Ashley, 1976, film, 45min

Title Withdrawn belongs to a series of videos, Music with Roots in the Aether, directed by Robert Ashley, in which he establishes a panorama of the New York experimental scene of the early 1970s through interviews and concerts by Pauline Oliveros, Philip Glass and Alvin Lucier, among others.
Title Withdrawn is a film based on the music of his piece Automatic Writing. Ashley used his own involuntary speech that results from his mild form of Tourette’s Syndrome as one of the voices in the music. The second voice is a French translation of his ideas. Ashley was intrigued by his involuntary speech, and the idea of composing music that was unconscious. His interest in the use of voice and words went beyond their explicit denotation, believing their rhythm and inflection could convey meaning even if one does not understand the actual phonemes.
It features David Peterson and Donald Renzulli from the California School of the Deaf signing the involuntary speech heard in Automatic Writing.

HOW THE EAR FUNCTIONS
KK Bosse, 1940, 11min38

An educational film with animation describing how the ear functions from a physiological point of view. This film was approved by the American College of Surgeons’ committee on medical motion pictures.

BOTH SITTING DUET
Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion, 2002, video excerpt, 10min

The two artists have stated that Both Sitting Duet has no direct link to sign language, being rather a gestural translation from the score (not the sound) of a piece of music – Morton Feldman’s ‘For John Cage’ – and that the gestures were chosen according to rhythmic properties in relation to the demands of this music, accepting meaning where it arose but never accentuating or developing it. The primary effect for audiences over the years has been described by many people as hearing music where none exists, which is a kind of synesthesia where one sensory experience or expectation is confused with another. People have, from time to time, asked if the gestures are meant to mean something, but usually in relation to particular performances where one or other set of linked gestures sparked a reaction, specific to that country or culture. The piece has never been performed for an audience of deaf people, though the profoundly deaf choreographer Chisato Minamura did indeed see it and entered into a long and ongoing exchange about the ‘visibility’ of unheard music, which conversation has been greatly illuminating.

THE LIFE AND LOVES OF BEETHOVEN
Abel Gance, 1937, (excerpt), 4min39sec

The Life and Loves of Beethoven is a biography of the classical composer based on his love affairs. The biography chronicles the years in which the master began to lose his hearing. This excerpt is a pivotal part of the film, in which we see the composer be- coming deaf but holding on to the memory of sound in his work and his surroundings. The director makes a notable use of sound to represent Beethoven’s affliction. The music is played by the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire de Paris under the direction of Louis Masson.

SIRENENPROJEKT
Friedrich Kittler, 2011, Footage, 6min38sec

Friedrich A. Kittler and a group of friends (Anthony Moore, Pink Floyd songwriter and former Dean of the Academy for Media Arts Cologne, Humboldt media theorist Wolfgang Ernst, Peter Weibel, and others) travelled to the Sirenusas, an archipelago off the Amal- fi Coast (Italy) where mythological sirens once lived. The idea was to prove that the Odyssey actually happened and that the alphabet was invented in order to give Homer’s poem a fixed form (Barry B. Powell). Friedrich Kittler wanted to demonstrate that Odysseus, one of Homer’s heros, was a liar. By placing two opera singers on the island in a form of reenactment, he proved that Odysseus cheated on his wife Penelope, certainly having an affair with the sirens, because only vowels and not consonants travel over water.

SACRE DU PRINTEMPS
Xavier Leroy, 2007, video excerpt, 3min7sec

Observing the Berlin Philharmonic during a rehearsal of Le Sacre du Printemps in 2003, Xavier Le Roy decided to work on Stravinsky’s classic from an interest in the movements of conducting. Having no musical training, Le Roy ventured into a laborious process of studying a conductor’s interpretation as if it were a choreography of its own. An inversion of cause and function unfolds: the gestures and the movements that are meant to prompt musicians to play appear at the same time to be produced by the music they are supposed to produce. When is one playing and when is one being played by this highly motile music? What is the moment before and after the sound, the movement, the intention to move, the motorics of the play? How much is our pleasure in listening to music rise in live performance conducted by a desire for, and an unsettledness about, the synchronicity of a well-functioning machine? There are as many bodies as there are different roles and perspectives in listening: what does the musician, the conductor or the spectator hear when hearing thus becomes part of an embodied, inevitably visceral experience of movement and sound?

MIXED REVIEWS (AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE)
Christian Marclay, 1999/2001, 30min

This video depicts American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter Jonathan Kovacs signing a long, collaged text made by artist Christian Marclay from reviews of musical performances and records.

THE TUBA THIEVES
SCENE 55
THE PLANTS ARE PROTECTED
Alison O’Daniel, 2013, video, 21min

Over the past few years, tubas have been stolen from high schools all over the Los Angeles area to be sold on the black market for a high price. The Tuba Thieves, responds to these thefts as a springboard for exploring the material and aural space of cinema through collaborations with hearing, Deaf and hard of hearing artists and musicians. The Tuba Thieves – Scene 55 is based on a score by Deaf artist Christine Sun Kim who was given poems, artworks, news stories about the tuba thefts, and other references to interpret as a score. Alison O’Daniel’s approach reversed the usual filmmaking process by starting with the music, which then informed all the other cinematographic decisions (film plot, settings, images and atmosphere). A process of deep listening orchestrates the narrative which involves different historical or anecdotal events that have incorporated Deaf history, silence or altered experiences of listening. Six short film segments of The Tuba Thieves, made between 2013 and 2015, are completed, and each iteration influences the next.

NIGHT SKY
Alison O’Daniel, 2011, 75min

Night Sky explores the tactile dimension of sound often overlooked by hearing people. This film centers on two women, Cleo (played by Deaf actress Evelina Gaina) and Jay (played by Jeanne-Marie Mandell). Cleo is deaf, Jay is hearing and they take a road trip to the California desert near Joshua Tree, where they receive a cosmic message by touching vibrational surfaces dur- ing the course of a sound bath. Simultaneous to their travels, there is a dance contest happening in a parallel universe, in which the touch of dancers’ hands affects the music being played. A deaf dog is the only character that traverses both planes of existence — through a membrane delineated by a hula hoop. Alison O’Daniel is hard of hearing; she grew up in the hearing world and wears hearing aids and lip-reads. Night Sky contains multiple mirrors of that perceptual experience, and disability is examined as providing the possibility of an alternative form of communication and reception which is not lesser than that considered medically normative – by Danielle McCullough.

THE SILENT KEYS
Simon Ripoll-Hurier, video, 11min

In 1959, Friedrich Jürgenson played back a recording he had made of birdsong in the surrounding area of Stockholm. He believed he could make out a voice evoking night birds. This experience and his numerous subsequent recordings led him to develop his theory of Electronic Voice Phenomena (E.V.P.). According to him, the voices we seem to pick up through white noise on the radio or the background noise of certain recordings are the voices of the dead trying to communicate with the living. He believed spirits have the ability to articulate certain noises in order to im- print their voices on magnetic tape. The techniques and tools available have developed greatly since Friedrich Jürgenson’s day, and the number of enthusiasts has also multiplied.
The Silent Keys shows a session with the group Behind the Wall Paranormal in the basement of Camp Evans, Wall Township, New Jersey. On the alert for the slightest vibration, surrounded by wave detectors, microphones and infrared cameras, they politely ask the spirits to imprint their presence on one of the machines.

LOOSING BIRDS
Simon Ripoll-Hurier, video, 17min

In Loosing Birds, Kenneth Ward (president of the North Alabama Birdwatching Society) and his wife Rufina are shown in their garden in Huntsville, Alabama, constantly switching between attempts to communicate with the birds around them, chatting to each other about this and that, and voicing their ecological concerns about the future of local species.
Birdwatchers or “birders” spend their free-time trying to observe birds. They position themselves in a strategic place, in the forest or at the edge of a forest, and wait. They are equipped with binoculars and a list of bird species found in the area. Each time they see (or hear) a particular species, they tick it off the list. To improve their re- sults, they practice “pishing,” which involves imitating certain bird calls (mainly those of predators such as the scops owl in the Amer- ican East) to trigger reactions among smaller birds, who will give their alarm call and start to move, making it easier to spot them.

BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A METROPOLIS
Walter Ruttmann, 1927, 65min

Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis is a 1927 German film directed by Walter Ruttmann, co-written by Carl Mayer and Karl Freund. The film is an example of the city symphony film genre. A musical score for an orchestra, to accompany the silent film, was written by Edmund Meisel. As a “city symphony” film, it de- picts the life of a city, mainly through visual impressions in a semi-documentary style, without the narrative content of more mainstream films, though the sequencing of events can imply a kind of loose theme or impression of the city’s daily life.

THE TRIBE
Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi, 2014, 132min

The Tribe is an Ukrainian film set in a boarding school for deaf children, where a new arrival is drawn into an institutional sys- tem of organized crime, involving robbery and prostitution. The film is entirely in Ukrainian Sign Language with no subtitles and received an award at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.

DEAF SOUND WORKSHOP
Noé Soulier, 2014, video excerpt, 1min37sec
Performance project in collaboration with Jeffrey Mansfield

How does sound manifest itself in the body and consciousness of the deaf? Sign language itself offers no answer to this para- doxical question, since it only takes into account sound as perceived by the non-deaf. Upon the invitation of Council (Greg- ory Castéra and Sandra Terdjman), the deaf architect Jeffrey Mansfield and the non-deaf choreographer Noé Soulier have been looking into this inconceivable lack or gap at the heart of language. This video was shot in MoMA PS1 studio where they met for the first time to start a cross-inquiry into the different manners of hearing and expressing the inaudible. Together, they pinpointed a series of parameters and material qualities — volume, amplitude, elevation — which make it possible to map out what deaf people sense in response to sounds. They used this to extract a monologue blending together first-person accounts, anecdotes, and analyses. Experimenting with all the effects of manipulation and spatialization afforded by sign language, they invent a choreography and set out an equal challenge to deaf and non-deaf alike. The work Deaf Sound will be presented for the first time in September 2016 at PACT Zollverein (Essen) and during the Paris Autumn Festival.

ANDREI RUBLEV
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966, 186min (excerpt), 5min47sec

Andrei Rublev is set against the background of 15th-century Russia. Although the film is only loosely based on the life of artist Andrei Rublev, it seeks to depict a realistic portrait of medieval Russia. The film’s themes include artistic freedom, religion, political ambiguity, autodidacticism, and art-making under a repressive regime. This selected excerpt and one of the final scenes of the film shows Andrei witnessing the casting of a bell. Bell-ringing scenes are a classic feature of Soviet cinema and also a frequent symbol in Tarkovsky’s work.

THE PRESERVATION OF SIGN LANGUAGE
George W. Veditz, 1913 (14min41sec)

Presented without subtitles, The Preservation of the Sign Language features George W.Veditz demonstrating in sign language the im- portance of defending deaf people’s right to sign. Veditz made this film specifically to record sign language for posterity at a time when oralists (those who promoted lip reading and speech in lieu of sign language) were gaining momentum in the education of the hearing-impaired.
An excerpt of his speech: “A new race of pharaohs that knew not Joseph, is now seizing control in many of our American schools. They do not understand signs because they themselves cannot sign. They proclaim that signs are worthless, of no help to the deaf. Enemies of sign language, they are enemies of the true welfare of the deaf. We need these films to preserve and pass on our beautiful signs. As long as there are deaf people on earth there will be signing. And as long as we have our films, we can preserve our beautiful signs in their old purity.”

DEAF
Frederick Wiseman, 1986, color, 164min

The School for the Deaf at the Alabama Institute is organized around a theory of total communication i.e., the use of signs and finger spelling in conjunction with speech, hearing aids, lip read- ing, gestures and the written word. Frederick Wiseman presents an empathetic picture of the disabled students and loving staff, but he makes his way into organizational meetings, the parental decision-making process — all the facets of the lives of disabled people, as they come to play an increasing role in today’s society.