Cheap Sound and the Silence Part 1 & 2 (Video) Price

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Customer Reviews of Sound and the Silence Part 1 & 2

Good but has some serious omissions.
"The Sound and the Silence" is a made-for-TV biography of Alexander Graham Bell. It covers Bell's life from his boyhood in Scotland to his life in America and his 'retirement' in Canada. Highlighted is his work as a teacher if the deaf (both his mother and wife were deaf), his invention of the telephone (and the legal battles over his patents), as well as his later efforts.

While Bell is famous as the inventor of the telephone, this movie concentrates more on the personal side of the man. His courting of Mabel Hubbard is a significant portion of the first episode. Bell was originally engaged to improve the girl's speech after her deafness from illness at an early age. He later married her and received financial backing from his father-in-law to develop a multiple telegraph. This invention would have allowed several messages to be carried simultaneously across a single wire. Though, he was unable to make this invention work, the principles that he employed were to be the basis for his greatest work - The Telephone. After a long series of legal disputes Bell becomes the acknowledged inventor of the device. Ironically it is his wife who owns the majority of the shares in the company, meaning that the real 'Ma Bell' was never able to use the device for which her husband earned such fame.

In later life Bell moved to Nova Scotia to work on a series of other inventions, including improvements on the phonograph and the airplane. He also is a founder of the National Geographic and a mentor to Helen Keller. Bell is shown as becoming increasingly imperious and solitary as he ages. The battle over his theory on the airplane as opposed to the one used by the Wright Brothers is the core of the second half of the production. The death of one of the Wrights while testing a machine is shown as proof Alexander's more cautious approach.

Although Bell is a famous Scotsman, one glaring aspect of this production is the strong Australian accents that so many of the actors (including the lead) let slip in. It is a bit of a jarring note.

Bell is shown throughout the film as a champion of education for the deaf. And so he was, but only on his own terms. Bell was always in favor of oral methods for the education of the deaf. He deplored the use of sign language and felt that any adult deaf person who used sign language represented a failure of the system to educate him. Teaching sign was a crutch that should be used only as a last resort and then never as the only method. While Bell's wife became deaf late enough in life to speak intelligibly, he felt that even those born deaf, should always be encouraged to use speech over sign. With the immense resources of his personal fortune Bell was able support schools which agreed with his method. This is a debate that a century later still rages on.

More than just the education of the deaf was the goal. Bell hoped to eliminate deafness from the face of the nation. Not with schools or inventions but by employing eugenics. This theory was much in vogue in the early part of the 20th Century. It maintained that by selective breeding of the Human race not only most defects and diseases could be eliminated but also vice and indolence. Bell exhorted congenitally deaf students to marry only hearing people. He felt that their hearing genes would overcome the weaker ones for deafness and eliminate the issue in a few generations. While Bell did not go so far as to recommend actual laws be passed to prevent marriage between deaf people (because it was often hard to determine who was congenitally deaf and well as concerns for deaf people simply having children out of wedlock), he did work hard to make sure that the deaf were educated insinuations where they would not mingle with deaf children of the opposite sex. Day schools, rather than residential centers would allow the deaf to meet and marry students without hearing problems.

Deafness was only one of the scourges that he foresaw ruining the racial stock of the Anglo-Saxons. He also felt it was important to control the number of immigrants allowed into America from less desirable nations such as those in Eastern Europe and Italy. Blindness and feeblemindedness were also to be bread out of the American population. Bell was not alone in espousing this view. From the publication of Darwin's "Origin of the Species" right up until the rise of Hitler many people felt that the only way to save mankind was the selective culling of humanity.

People are almost never as simple as they seem and great men, like Bell, seem to have even more contradictions than most. I would have liked to seen more of that in this film.

Video education at its best
This is a good movie, and very educational. It's wonderful how they can bring history to life like that, and it's certainly much easier to remember than just reading it from a book. It would be good to pow-wow this for younger audiences. It's not something you can just put in the video machine and leave them to watch because it is a little long and would benefit the kids best if it were explained well by someone who has even done a little studying up on the subject. It would make an excellent class, watched over a period of time. Even adults will find it educational, and interesting to watch. It's a good true story of someone who was a real go-getter, and is inspiring in many ways.