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Kamdan

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Hello everyone! This is my first time posting here, but I’ve been a frequent visitor. I’ve been learning ASL in school about a year now and I’m part of a class that wants us to be more in touch with the deaf community.

Something that I’m very interested in is films and film study. Something that I’d love to hear from people that are deaf are what do movies mean to them. Can they understand a film without captions and just appreciate the visuals or do they prefer just to read a book?

I’d appreciate any sort of response to this topic and I hope to hear from you real soon!
 
Well, I like to read...A LOT! Like I just told my friend today, I go through books like tissue paper. But I love to watch movies too...drives me nuts though if there is no captions. It's hard to follow what is going on in some movies without them. Other movies, you can more or less get the gist of it and I can read lips but that's hard when watching TV...it only goes so far. But still I have to have captions if I am going to sit down and watch a movie, that way I can follow the whole storyline, other wise I get left in the dark and lose interest.
 
I would have to say no, at east in my case, I would not be able to watch a movie without captions and get enough understanding about what was going on to enjoy it. The last movie I saw at the movie theater before I got my hearing aids was Signs. I had lost too much hearing at that point to understand anything that was said. In fact the only scene from that movie I heard anything was when they were running around the house screaming. Now I understood the basics of what was happening, the gist of the movie. But I missed out on all the details that made the movie entertaining.

I did watch 300, and the captions were all screwy, only like every 3rd or 4th sentence was even captioned and a lot of time it didn't make any sense. BUT that movie was um very visually um stimulating. Yeah I could watch that with no captions :naughty:

Oh yeah, I watched a pirated dvd of the 3rd Lord of the Rings, my mother in law brought back with her from the Philippines. The people that put the captions in must have been Philipino and Tagalog was obviously their 1st language. Same thing with that movie, only every few sentences had a subtitle, and oh boy was the English botched. That was at least fairly entertaining, at one point Merry says to Pippin (or the other way around) "I was counting on you" or something like that, but the subtitle said "I was going to count to you" me and my stepson were cracking up going "1...2.....3" all dramatically. But the movie would have been infinitely more enjoyable if I knew what they were actually saying.
 
I'm Hard of Hearing but I absolutely need captions, otherwise I lose interest in the movie. Unless of course, the movie is "Wall-E" or something strongly visual. I loved "Sunshine" because of the visuals alone. Amazing. I like a movie that can do visuals and storytelling really really well. Like Star Wars. I will not continue a movie if the dialogue is horrible though. If a book is badly written (twilight) but the visuals in the movie are interesting, I can sit through it (dialogue is barely manageable in twilight). sometimes I prefer a book simply because there's a lot that can't be put into film. I can work my imagination any way I want and it's nice to read. I prefer movies over books though.
 
This seems like a good one to actually try for yourself. Get a DVD of a foreign film and turn off the subtitles. Or a DVD of any movie you haven't seen before and just turn off the sound. See how much you get out of it. I'm not being sarcastic: you can ask questions about other people's experience, but if you do things like this, maybe you'll relate better.
 
I can read lips in some movies but the problem is sometimes the actor is not facing the camera or there are sound effects such as in horror movies where there's footsteps. If a movie doesn't have captions I'm not watching it no way.
 
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