Libro

MEDIA LITERACY AND INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE
Strategies, Debates and Good Practices
What constitutes an audiovisual image is a disjunction, a dissociation from the
visual and the sonant, both autonomous, but at the same time an immeasurable
relationship of an “irrational” that connects one to the other without becoming a
whole, without turning into the minimum whole.
Ouedraogo (2011), in an investigation of cinema, sound and education,
highlights the relationship between sound and image that implies the
consolidated coupling of eye-ear. The authors consider the audiovisual
perspective of the senses of sight and hearing taking into account that
spectators have both. However, we are proposing an analysis about other
perceptive paths, tread by subjects that lack the auditory reception of sound.
The hearing-impaired develop sight as their main information input source.
Without hearing, they cannot perceive audiovisual as those without this
handicap. How do the hearing-impaired assign meaning to image and sound? If
they follow a different perceptive path, will their reception of audiovisual works
do so as well?
The question of how deaf people perceive audiovisual stimulus has stirred
sound researcher Michael Chion. The author asks if, when they are watching
television, “(...) the deaf mobilize the same regions at the center of the brain as
hearing people for sound (...)”? (1994, p. 12).The author does not give an
answer, but his questions moves us to conduct our research more specifically
with the deaf.
Those who were born with bilateral deep neuro-sensorial deafness have never
experience hearing sound. They do not have auditory memory, have not
developed oral language, which characterizes pre-language deafness. The
profoundly deaf are not capable of hearing the human voice. Even though they
cannot hear those sounds, according to Freeman, Carbin and Boese (1999),
sound can reach them through bone or skin, permitting the deaf the perception
of the mechanical wave of vibration. In that sense, even though the deaf cannot
hear, they have all the conditions necessary to interact with sound, something
that is not exclusive of hearing people.
2. Sound, deafness and stereotypes
Cinema has dealt with the relationship between sound and deafness in some
films, which will help us illustrate how that confluence has helped build
stereotypes. On Children of a Lesser God, by Randa Haines, the deafnesssound
dichotomy points out the differences between two worlds. Actor William
Hurt plays a speech teacher who falls in love with his former student Sarah, a
deaf character played by Marlee Matlin. They are protagonists of a sensible
narrative in which the importance of sounds lies in its representation of the
difference between the deaf and the hearing. While Hurt, playing professor
Leeds, finds self-realization by teaching his deaf students to speak and sing,
Sarah defends deaf culture and sign language, which does not include speech
or sound as an element of constitution of its identity. On this movie narrative, we
highlight the scene in which deaf students sing and dance for their parents on
their graduation. On Thoma’s conception (2002), this scene, which brings up
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