"Linguists" the talk of the town at Sundance

[Harold Schiffman]

Linguists" the talk of the town at Sundance
Mon Jan 21, 2008 4:29am EST

  By Kirk Honeycutt

PARK CITY, Utah (Hollywood Reporter) - Indiana Jones' spirit certainly
infects the intrepid heroes of "The Linguists." These are bold
academics who plunge into the jungles and backwater villages of the
world to rescue living tongues about to go extinct. There are more
than 7,000 languages spoken in the world. Yet we lose a language every
two weeks thanks to colonialization, globalization and indifference.
David Harrison and Gregory Anderson are scientists in a race against
time. They trek deep into sometimes dangerous territories to record
nearly dead languages, a thing that is at the heart of culture and
knowledge. Clocking in at a little more than an hour,
director-producers Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller and Jeremy S.
Newberger's "Linguists" watches three of these fascinating and at
times treacherous linguistic expeditions. The film should perform
marvelously on television once it completes a festival run that begins
at Sundance.

In Siberia, the linguists search fruitlessly for speakers of the
Chulym language only to discover their driver, who at first won't
admit he speaks Chulym, is fluent. This speaks volumes of a tyrannical
Soviet regime that tried to suppress much of native culture and
languages. In the Indian state of Orissa, tribal children attend
boarding schools where they learn Hindi and English. This is
practical, of course, but a disaster for native languages. In Bolivia,
the men seek the less than 100 speakers of Kallawaya language in the
Andes, a language tied into the rituals and practices of medicine and
not a language learned as a child. They also find themselves in a
sticky situation when they botch an act of gift-giving.

The film has a perhaps unintended subtext of cultural
misunderstandings where well-meaning but sometimes impatient and naive
Westerners confront ways of thinking and behaving totally antithetical
to their own. For instance, when Harrison insists on spending a night
in a remote Indian village where bandits lurk, he not only endangers
himself but also embarrasses his disapproving middle-class Indian
hosts. Yet guileless bravery and full-throttle enthusiasm see the
linguists through these scrapes. Jumping from one expedition to
another while throwing in an excursion to an American Indian
reservation in Arizona causes the viewer to lose the thread of the
individual quests. But this does help identify patterns in language
disuse and subsequent extinction. The film certainly makes a
compelling case for this particular kind of academic derring-do.

Director-producers: Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller, Jeremy S.
Newberger; Writer: Daniel Miller; Director of photography: Seth
Kramer, Jeremy S. Newberger; Music: Brian Hawlk; Editors: Seth Kramer,
Anne Barliant.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

http://www.reuters.com/article/email/idUSN2135148520080121?sp=true

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