For over half a century, their speech has remained invisible: un-listened-to, and perhaps unlistenable, buried beneath the phenomenal threshold of the film. Their names are not even listed in the film’s credits. In these so-called credits—in fact they are necrologies—in these crawling columns of the dead, the extras do not merit registry. They are the plebeian dead, anonymous corpses. Faceless, mute, they have been lost to nameless oblivion. Now, half a century later, Bereyter has arrived to disturb their rest.

The pulmonary-embolism death mask kisses the not-yet death mask

At the lectern, Bereyter is silent. He frowns down at his notes, apparently pausing for emphasis. Then he glances up and clears his throat: If you listen to this woman, he finally announces, you will hear only the surrounding drone of Ernie’s Restaurant. But this drone, he goes on, is diegetic: it is as deafening for the characters as it is for us. This man at the bar, he says, this woman’s companion, he is leaning forward to hear her, in fact must be struggling to hear her, and perhaps he is even reading her lips himself. Bereyter smiles coyly here. In forcing us to squint at her lips, he continues, the film gives us a deaf person’s viewpoint on the action depicted. As in a silent movie, this woman portrays a character whose lips must be read. Which is all the more remarkable, Bereyter concludes, when we finally discover what she is mouthing. For she is the first self-conscious author of a metafictional or metatextual white dialogue, a self-referential white dialogue. He holds up his left hand now, to indicate a direct quotation, and then—looking down at the lectern—begins to read: Read my lips, this woman says, Bereyter says. It’s Jeff.

Read my lips: it’s Jeff