Voix-off: … aber wir sind der Sprache scheissegal

The publication documents Lengerer’s engagement with the French educator, writer and filmmaker Fernand Deligny (1913 – 1996).

Deligny began working as a social worker with children and young people in the 1940s. In the 1960s, he founded a settlement with young adults in the south of France to live with children labelled “autistic” by psychiatry. In his pedagogical work, the aim is not to educate or cure the children entrusted to them; rather, the aim is to enable the children to find deviant ways within and outside the life structure of the adults, to create for them an environment and field of action for their intrinsic use of space and time. Several documentary film projects are made (e. g. “Ce gamin, là”, 1975).

In the publication, Lengerer examines how the soundtrack is used in this film and how Deligny proposes the cinematic voix-off as a literary narrative voice that is carefully set parallel to the cinematic image; a soundtrack that is “put on” the image track and that articulates itself in fragile balance to the “non-speaking” of the children.

Anne Querrien is a French sociologist and political scientist and co-founder of the journal Multitudes. Achim Lengerer is an artist and editor of Scriptings.