Listen to me! Whether we are caught in an argument or it’s the frustrated cry of a child, we’ve all made that urgent call for attention.
The drive to communicate crosses species; according to botanists, it features in plant life too. Trees reach out to one another. On the human side, countless words are spoken, roared or whispered into the air, but how can we know if we are truly being heard, never mind understood?
It is hard enough when we are speaking the same language. Who hasn’t had the feeling that if only we could find the right words, we might experience the relief of being both believed and agreed with? And how much more difficult is it when translation and interpretation come into play?
Jenny Brady’s new film, The Glass Booth/An Both Gloine, explores the worlds of interpretation and communication. It begins with scenes at the summit between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in Geneva in 1985, which was hailed as a new beginning in US-Soviet relations. While the spotlight was on the world leaders, behind them sat the anonymous figures of their interpreters.
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Although invented in the 1920s, simultaneous interpretation was first officially used after the second World War, at the Nuremberg trials of those involved in the Nazi regime. The term “translation” is used for the written word; “interpretation” is when languages are mediated orally.
Watching The Glass Booth, we discover a subtle, complex and fascinating interplay of power and trust. Sometimes the Geneva interpreters mirror the gestures of Gorbachev and Reagan; sometimes the leaders appear to defer to the men who are whispering in their ears.
A series of vignettes follow, exploring stories surrounding those unable to speak – or, more accurately, unable to be understood in their own voices. A trio of women role-play an asylum interview. An interpreter-in-training session, it falters when the would-be interpreter forgets to speak in the first person. Done properly, the interpreter should be, literally, embodying the voice of the person who would otherwise be unable to be heard.
Then there is a group of schoolchildren, interpreting for their parents, other community members and new arrivals at their school. Their accents give clues to their countries of origin as they describe finding themselves sometimes pitched into adult situations.
Brady is a low-key, fascinating artist, and despite her significant international career this will be her first solo show in Ireland. Dublin-born, she had wanted to be an artist from an early age. “I remember being 15, and going to drawing classes on a Saturday morning at the Trinity Arts Workshop. I found there was a freedom that was afforded through art, in every way. You wouldn’t know what kind of experience, what sort of journey you’d be brought on, going through the gallery doors.”
Language, interpretation, having a voice and trying (and failing) to understand have fascinated Brady throughout her career. Previous films, such as Wow and Flutter (2013) and Going to the Mountain (2016), explored the interpretations we can put on to the behaviours of animals, and babies; and the alternative languages of music and gesture.
Through each we encounter the idea that interpretation can be more like imposition. When we look at a dog, a cat or, in the case of Wow and Flutter, a cockatoo, it is tempting to ascribe meaning to their sounds and movements, even though we can only parse them through the filters of our own thought processes.
Extending these ideas, Brady’s Music for Solo Performer, from 2022, delves into speech synthesis, and the essence of the mind in EEG waves, through illness, death and even pizza delivery (an early trial of text-to-voice technology). Are we our thoughts or our words? And can words ever do justice to the complexities of what goes on in our minds? Building on this, how much do words pin down ideas and emotions, limiting them, and their infinite potential, in the process.
In the world of The Glass Booth, simultaneous interpretation brings its own issues. “There can be a huge amount of secondary trauma,” Brady says. Speaking the words, in the first person, of someone who may have perpetrated or experienced almost unspeakable things requires, as Brady puts it, “a great deal of compartmentalisation”.
The final passage of The Glass Booth introduces us to a Nato interpreter. “Sometimes we’re used like a fuse,” he says. “We’re accused of having interpreted wrongly, when all that’s happened is the speaker is aware of having gone too far, or said the wrong thing.”
This is Chris Guichot de Fortis, who’s a rally driver in his spare time. The film closes with scenes from a rally, where trust between driver and navigator must be absolute. For the uninitiated, the navigator’s language is impenetrable, words distilled down to essentials, vital for success and survival.
The stakes are high at every level. From an international summit where the interpreters are, as Brady says, “at the shoulder of history” to an asylum hearing, to children standing in as the voices of their parents: these are all life-changing scenarios.
“From a filmic perspective I found it so interesting,” the artist says. “What is the real thing? What is the point of view when someone is speaking someone else’s words?”
Brady’s films are always richly researched, and ideas emerge in your mind long after their closing credits. “I’m someone who is often in my head,” she says. “I don’t think that it’s always the best way to be. Especially working as an artist, I can be fighting against that. It’s why I love working with people.”
Alongside all this, context itself plays a role. The Glass Booth had its premiere at this year’s Galway Film Fleadh, in advance of its installation at Project Arts Centre, in Dublin. How different is it seeing a film in a cinema or a gallery? And how different is an “art” film from a “regular” film anyway?
“You can walk out of a gallery whenever you want,” Brady says wryly. “But I like that cinematic experience ... You’re watching it with people, so when it’s your own film you can see and hear the parts that people respond to. There’s so much learning in showing work, in either context.
“A gallery can give you a more personal experience,” she continues. “When you’re watching an installation that loops, I find it exciting, as if it’s a never-ending story perhaps. And as it loops it gives you a prior reading. Maybe you find other nuances each time.”
Documentary films exploring language and translation include The Interpreters, commissioned by the United Nations to mark its 50th anniversary. On the fiction front, Sydney Pollack’s film The Interpreter, from 2005, saw Nicole Kidman pitched into danger after overhearing a secret, but perhaps the most fascinating is Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve, from 2016.
[ Lost in translation: ‘You can be shocked by the bad news you have to interpret’Opens in new window ]
Playing a linguist, Amy Adams is tasked with communicating with the occupants of an alien craft. In the process, we learn that language is just the overlay we have evolved to cover our notions of time, space, culture, emotion and experience. Even on Earth these are not always the same.
More diffuse and allusive than Arrival, The Glass Booth delivers an emotional punch that stays with you. As the 30-minute film concludes, the voices inside the rally car fade to silence. The vehicle continues its course, leaving behind a sense of aloneness in the dark.
It seems to recall Susan Hiller’s 2008 The Last Silent Movie, on show in 2004 at Imma’s Take a Breath. There, Hiller archived endangered and lost languages, giving glimpses of what all lovers of the Irish language know: how much of a culture – its histories and beliefs, powers and passions – are lost when the native speakers are gone.
Brady’s work touches on this while living in the here and now. From animals to humanity, we can never hope to fully know the thought processes of someone else. Translation, interpretation, listening and hearing what is really being said are not simply about the daily business of being understood. They are fundamental to the harder work that is the vital effort of empathy, of always remembering to try to understand.
Jenny Brady, The Glass Booth/An Both Gloine is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, from Thursday, July 24th, until Saturday, October 4th
