Transcendent Communication

This past weekend, I attended the United Christian music festival in Vsetín...

Most of the weekend was focused on music and performance pieces with lots of people and loudness. By Friday afternoon, I was ready to shift gears so I went to the film venue to watch one of the films they were showing. I knew nothing about the film before I entered the theater. I figured it was going to be in Czech and was ready to do some language practice but it ended up being more stretching and enlightening than anticipated.

The movie was titled Marie Huertin. It is a French movie based on a true story about a nun in the 1930's who took charge of teaching a blind, deaf girl sign language (Think Miracle Worker in France). Oh, and it was subtitled in Czech, of course. I do not know French or sign language and I am elementary in my Czech at best. What's funny is that the language barriers didn't really matter. I still understood about 90% of the movie and was moved by the story. There is a saying that 90-95% or all communication is nonverbal and this movie just proved it right. Since the characters were also teaching and learning ways to communicate verbally and nonverbally with one another, the language in most of the film became drastically simplistic. Also, even between characters who could talk at a high level with one another, it was not necessary to understand what was being said. The physicality of the actresses and their facial expressions told us everything about what they were feeling and thinking.

The other interesting thing that was shown in this movie was the non-sexual use of physical touch for communication, specifically between the little girl and her tutoring nun. So much of physical interaction between characters in films these days seems to be sexual or hinting towards sexual attraction between characters. Here, It was used to compensate for a lack of the characters to communicate visually or sonically with one another. This started with introducing Marie (the blind girl) to all of the nuns through letting her feel their faces. Marie expressed frustration and anger by refusing to cooperate physically when her tutor, Marguerite, tried to feed her or teaching her a new sign, even going as far as hitting and kicking and throwing anything within her grasp. But physicality was also used to initiate reconciliation and submission as Marie came to Marguerite over time and submitted to her mentorship.

The dialogue was simple for the most part and I was able to understand most of the Czech subtitles but the majority of the movie can be understood without the subtitles I think. It was an inspiring and beautiful story. Here is the imdb info page in case you are interested in watching it yourself: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3132714/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

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