The set and sound were deliberately ordered so that although the translator stands in front, her voice is broadcast at their backs and the sound from the film itself emits from a speaker situated behind the translator. Voices are thrown. The seating was altered. In the past, RU arranged the audience in the opposite direction. This night, any late comers, entering through the large wooden doors, face the audience. They must reconcile.

The Slightest Gesture
A Screening and Experimental Translation of the Cinema of Fernand Deligny

In Collaboration with Natasha Marie Llorens

Residency Unlimited, Brooklyn, NY
Thursday, May 26th, 2011, 7pm

In the 1960's, Fernand Deligny, French pedagogue and cohort of Deleuze and Oury, moved in with a group of so-called "unmanageables" in the south of France. This community of autistic children wandered through the rocky Mediterranean wilderness. Deligny followed with a camera. He filmed them because "language is sometimes more problem than tool;" it was more effective to dispatch with the tongue in favor of the eye. Later, his subjects would observe themselves on film, detect the gap between their behavior and others, and sometimes alter their interactions with those outside of autistic space.

Autism denotes those who process sensory and social information according to singular logics—this singularity is responsible for the isolation of the autistic mind, their seemingly tangential relation to other beings. When autism is imagined by the non-autistic as the radical other, Deligny nudges his viewer to ask themselves: "How do we move near and with the Radical Other?" Our collaboration is the performance of another kind of movement, a moving with one another and the film.

These films are not available in the United States and the soundtrack is not translated. As one soundtrack quietly plays, we will offer a competing soundtrack. Llorens will translate the fragments that are intelligible and Walling Blackburn will annotate this running translation. Our sonic intervention hovers on the threshold of translation and footnote, visitation and occupation. We perform the logic of collaboration through our engagement with this film.

Audio recordings of Fernand Deligny and Natasha Marie Llorens' translation: Here