The Knockturnal caught up with director Irene Taylor Brodsky to discuss her latest documentary feature “Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements.” Brodsky spoke of her process as a documentarian, the role of music in her filmmaking, and what she’d like viewers to take away from a story surrounding the deaf experience.
The documentary focuses on Brodsky’s family: her son Jonas has been deaf from the age of four, and is now learning Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on the piano with the help of cochlear implants. Brodsky’s parents are also deaf, and while Jonas is regaining his hearing, Brodsky’s father Paul learns he is in the early stages of dementia. This intimate story explores how deafness shapes a boy’s relationship with music, his family, and the world around him.
Brodsky speaking to the audience before the screening of HBO’s “Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements”
The Knockturnal: You have extensive experience telling the story of your family through film – in Hear and Now – and weaving personal narratives into your work. Is your approach to filming a documentary different when it involves your family?
Irene Taylor Brodsky: The standards always have to remain the same. And the standard is excellence. So when you’re dealing with your family it’s just harder because it’s not always as easy to achieve excellence when you’re living and breathing and working and living side by side with them every day. There’s a lot of negotiating that goes on with the camera, and so I was very aware of that, I was very aware that my family was letting me in, but at the same time I had to be very committed and roll the camera even in the most difficult moments where I was experiencing difficulty as a mother, or daughter, and I still had to just wear my filmmaker hat.
The Knockturnal: I understand you learned a great deal about Beethoven during this process. What were some of the most surprising or impactful things you learned about his life?
Irene Taylor Brodsky: Now I understand that Beethoven did not create the music he did in spite of his deafness, which is the historical narrative we’ve really seen around his work, and his experiences as a deaf composer. I think he created the music he did because of his deafness. The deafness informed his sensibilities, it afforded him a greater isolation, which I have no doubt was very painful for him, but I think it also allowed him to journey inside of his own mind, and disregard the trends of the day and really just present his own fresh music. He broke a lot of rules in classical rules, and he did that because I think he had such a vigorous conversation going on inside his own head, that was not drowned out or dimmed by all the noise of what other people think – critics, and what the rules of music are, you know, or what the trends are – he really just did his own thing
The Knockturnal: So much of documentary film centers on a question that the director is either trying to answer or is posing to the audience to interpret for themselves. What was your question and what do you want viewers to take away from this film?
Irene Taylor Brodsky: What if deafness is not a disability, but a gift? Growing up with deaf parents, and now having a deaf son, I have certainly witnessed the challenges that come with being a deaf person, but I think that there are so many strengths and so many tools that deafness has given me as someone sandwiched in between deaf parents and a deaf child. And I’ve seen these tools in my parents’ lives and in my son’s life. And one of them is really around music. I think that my son, I see, has an inner rhythm and an inner tempo that really creates a different kind of musicianship, and I think that Beethoven must have had gifts that his deafness afforded him. Again, I don’t mean to minimize a challenge that a disability can bring, but I think that what my son went through, what my parents went through as children – to be so determined to communicate, to express themselves in that most fundamental of human endeavors, right, communication – it was harder for them than other people, but in trying as hard as they did, I think it makes them much more focused on and aware of the way we relate to other people, and the way we express ourselves. So I think that was my big question, was considering how these so called disabilities, why do they have to be such a negative thing to overcome. Why can’t we understand them as part and parcel to who we are and what we have to offer the world.
The Knockturnal: As music is such an integral part of this story, I’d love to hear what your approach was to scoring this film. How did you foresee music affecting the tone and pace of the film?
Irene Taylor Brodsky: The music was by far the most exhilarating part of making this film. We have music from the 18th century, we have music from this year made by a hip hop beat maker, and everything in between. We knew that we wanted this film to be rooted in the spirit of Beethoven, and sometimes we would try to incorporate maybe a melodic flourish from a popular Beethoven piece in to our score, but our composers – Dylan Stark and Ben Johnson, our film score composers – they also wanted to create a soundscape in the film with the music where the music had almost some artifacting in it, or it had a texture to it that was almost like you were listening to something over an underwater cable or something. It was like we wanted it not to sound too pristine and crystal clear. I think our composers were trying to imagine what it was like to hear through synthetic auditory pathways like a cochlear implant. They were trying to imagine what that might be like. And so we really tried to bring an approach to our music that was imperfect, messy, but also at the same time elegant and exquisite like Beethoven’s music.
The Knockturnal: What can we expect from your next project?
Brodsky: Right now I’m developing a film around main characters who do not have a voice. Literally they don’t speak. So I’m already thinking about all of the cinematic elements I can use to create language for my characters.
“Moonlight Sonata” premieres on HBO December 11th at 9PM ET.
