POTO AND CABENGO

Director Jean-Pierre Gorin / 1979 / USA/West Germany

Poto And Cabengo deals with American small town six-year-old twins Gracie and Ginny Kennedy who confounded language experts by developing a private idioglottic language, or 'twin speech'.

It is a multi-layered film whose investigation of documentary forms makes for a distant and refined connection with the films Gorin made with Godard. Though this film is neither didactic, nor overtly political its play with sound and image allows for a certain connection to be made with the earlier experiments. The tale of the twins serves as a focus out of which Gorin traces multiple paths of inquiry, from socio-culturai identity, the structure of language, the romance of the American Dream, to his own desires as a filmmaker. Gorin has said of the film; "It is about unstructured discourse (the language of the twins) surrounded by structured discourses (the discourse of the family, the discourse of the media, the discourse of therapy, the discourse of documentary filmmaking.) At the end I was left with a sense that we do not speak, but that we are spoken through."

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