Poto and Cabengo

Poto and Cabengo – Jean-Pierre Gorin collaborated with Jean-Luc Godard on several films that were overtly Maoist during the late sixties and early seventies. Then, improbably enough, Gorin left Paris where he had been educated – he studied with Althusser and Foucault – and moved to southern California at the height of the Reagan era. Gorin was recommended to the faculty of San Diego State University by the film critic Manny Farber who was then teaching art and film history at that place. Gorin liked San Diego (what’s not to like?) and stayed there. His first film was Poto and Cbpengo¸(1980), a lean and deceptively simple documentary essay about two twin girls who were believed to have invented their own private language – an example of something called Idioglossia. For a few weeks in 1977, the press was full of articles about Poto and Cabengo (Ginny and Grace Kennedy) who were then six years old: scientists were said to be “baffled”. Gorin rushed to film the girls and found them already progressing toward fluency in standard English. He immediately realized that the story was nothing but hype. The girls hadn’t invented a new language but were speaking something that Gorin instantly recognized as Creole or pidgin-English -- perhaps, Gorin’s own background as a French-speaking immigrant helped him to this realization. (I should note that my wife, who was previously a speech therapist, immediately recognized that the girls were speaking English with “severe articulation problems” – an accurate diagnosis of their problem.) Gorin’s interest is broad. He shows the girls and records their curious lingo. He depicts their bizarre social milieu. The girls were raised byan ex-Naval officer from the South – his somewhat narcotized way of drawling his words is part of the girl’s linguistic inheritance – a German-born mother who freely intermingled Deutsch words in her English sentences, and a completely German-speaking grandma. Further, the family lived in barracks-like housing largely inhabited by Spanish-speaking immigrants. Gorin shows this polyglot milieu and ends the film with some translations of dialogue between the girls that seemed, at first, to be completely incomprehensible but which, with effort, could be understood – the girls speak a mixture of German and English with a few Spanish loan words, but, most interestingly, have a probabilistic approach to pronunciation: the movie shows that they have 16 different ways of pronouncing “potato” that are all unpredictable and without any difference in semantic meaning. (This begs the imponderable question: how does someone develop a probabilistic (throw of the dice) approach to pronunciation? ) The little girls are cute, puppyish, darting here and there and the members of their family are utterly weird, eccentric, and sad – castaways surrounded by a sea of American wealth and prosperity. The film is only 72 minutes long. One-third of the picture is black frame – Gorin uses sound like Godard and Bresson as a counter-melody to his images and, many times, he wants the film to be nothing more than a soundtrack to which you must listen intently. This is a very subtle and intricately poetic film. It has this effect: you watch a film in English attending to every nuance of your native language – it makes you into a non-English-speaking person straining to hear exactly what is being said in an alien and difficult tongue.