Sign language and cinéma-monde in Marie Heurtin: On Deaf cinema and troubling the notion of French national language

What can films in French Sign Language teach us about the French nation? From its inception in Bill Marshall’s 2012 article of the same name, cinéma-monde has been concerned with borders: linguistic and geographic, internal and external. Cinéma-monde equips us to decenter the concept of French national cinema, to unthink historical, monolingual notions of Frenchness and to reconceive of francophone film-making in terms of plurality, diversity, and transcultural exchange. However, this reimagining has generally been conceived of in transnational terms, and not as a means of interrogating the inherent, original multilingualism of the Hexagon itself. This article examines contemporary French Deaf cinema through a cinéma-monde lens. It focuses on Jean-Pierre Améris’s 2014 film Marie Heurtin [Marie’s Story], about the sign language education of a deaf-blind girl in rural nineteenth-century France, critiquing the notion of the language barrier to evoke the border within. In so doing, it uses Marshall’s description of how ‘the boundaries of, say, national identification have to be understood as being reflected in the nation’s internal limits, the impossibility of being fully, purely, and unproblematically French’ (2012: 42), to critique Republican myths of monism and national language.