Jean-Pierre Gorin’s rarely-seen film Poto and Cabengo just played in New York as part of the Migrating Forms festival. It’s a shame that this isn’t available on DVD, as it’s an absolutely fascinating documentary. Some enterprising soul has made the first six minutes on YouTube, which gives a good idea of the flavor of the movie:
Virginia and Grace Kennedy were twin girls born in 1970 who suffered seizures shortly after their birth and who were raised as if they were mentally disabled. They attracted attention as they grew up: while it’s common for twins to speak exclusively to each other for a period, and thus to take longer to come to speak normally, Virginia and Grace appeared to have their own private language which was incomprehensible to anyone else. A flurry of newspaper reports made them into minor celebrities. In 1978, the French documentarian Jean-Pierre Gorin, who’d been one of Godard’s collaborators, traveled to their San Diego home in an attempt to try to understand what the twins were saying. The film is idiosyncratic but strange and haunting:
(Gorin frequently freezes on a frame in this fashion.) The story quickly unraveled: an army of speech therapists and linguists were brought in, and Virginia and Grace’s language turned out to be a combination of their father’s southern English and their mother and grandmother’s German. A good deal of their language seems to be connected with potatoes and potato salad. The press, bored with the story, departed; in classic Californian fashion, the family banked on a movie deal which didn’t pan out and lost everything. Wikipedia points to a sad coda to the story: one ended up working in fast food, the other on an assembly line.
Gorin’s film captures the pathos of the story. The twins’ family are somewhat reserved from the rest of society: the father is a down-on-his-luck real-estate salesman from Georgia, out of place in San Diego, while their German-born mother rarely socializes, and her mother, who speaks little English, almost never leaves the house. There’s the sense that they were embarrassed about their children: neglected, they retreated into their own company rather than that of the world. It’s a brilliant film: Criterion would do well to bring it out.
[...] is a truly fascinating story (below) and I wish the complete film were available on DVD. I’ve since learned that [...]