A black woman, seen from behind, is facing a window. She is washing up clean, white crockery. With obsessively precise gestures, she fills a glass with milk. Very slowly, she crosses a corridor which seems interminable. A child is reading on a chair in the corner of a room. The women hands him the glass of milk. Mechanically, she retraces her steps in the opposite direction. The scene is repeated at the same rhythm, but the woman, wearing a dark dress, is holding a knife. Without a trace of hysteria and with the same meticulousness, she stabs the child. The story will be repeated on another child on the first floor of the house, with the same serenity. The whole subject of Deafman Glance is in its elaborate treatment, from the elegance of the camera angles to the refinement of the rhythm and the sobriety of the colors. The composition of the image retains a trace of pictorial research, a succession of pictures in motion. The characters are silent, while the sounds of the objects are amplified. This amplification of the sound of trivial gestures creates an atmosphere tinted with surrealism, a sensation accentuated by the stubborn repetition of the woman's acts. Every time she sets off, time seems to dilate, pushing this fiction into a dream world. Drawing on his experience with young handicapped people, Wilson seems to show the work to us though the eyes and defective ears of a deaf-mute witnessing the events. The video oscillates between Greek tragedy and a banal news item. The original work appeared a few years after the director taught physical awakening to people suffering from mental and physical illnesses. Deafman Glance is a short television version of one of his theater plays, staged in Europe in 1971, which helped him to gain an international reputation. This play, produced at a time when avant-garde theater generally involved audience participation, put the theatricality back inside the frame of the stage, accentuating the visual plasticity of the work. As in the videogram ten years later, the actress Sherryl Sutton played the woman. Robert Wilson thwarts the television narration by obliterating the suspense and highlighting instead a minimalist performance.

Dominique Garrigues