Audio Description and the Oscars

I've been doing a lot of thinking about audio description recently. Ahead of this year's Academy Awards Ceremony, I wrote an article for The Conversation about why I think film awards like the Oscars and the BAFTAs should honour audio description alongside things like acting, sound effects and direction. Read the article here. And I wrote a review of Extant and Yellow Earth production Flight Paths - a play which uses integrated audio description in inventive and effective ways. Read the review here.

Blindness Arts: a Disability Studies Quarterly Special Issue

Co-organizing the 2015 Blind Creations conference with Vanessa Warne was one of the highlights of my academic career. As this post written in the conference's aftermath shows, the event was memorable above all for the sense of celebratory community it created. Almost as soon as the conference was over, Vanessa and I began making plans to continue the many productive conversations which started during those few summer days in Egham. We did not want or need to produce a traditional 'conference proceedings': our wonderful audio archive means that all the papers delivered at the conference are still available. Instead we wanted to extend the legacy of Blind Creations by publishing new work which responds to questions raised by our speakers in 2015. Just over three years after the conference, we are pleased and proud to announce the publication of a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly which we have called 'Blindness Arts'. In our co-authored Introduction we explain that this title functions "in contrast with and as a companion to ‘visual arts'". This extract from later in the Introduction gives a flavour of the intersections between blindness, creativity, performance and access which the issue explores:

In the first section of our issue, we share a set of essays that explore methods for accessing cultural works. These essays take up a range of media, namely sculpture, film, theatre and the comic book, all of which have traditionally been understood as visual forms. The authors in this section challenge this overly narrow perception and share experiments with both audio description and the role of touch. As Fayen d’Evie’s and Georgina Kleege’s individual contributions to blindness studies are noted by other authors throughout our issue, it is fitting that we begin with their co-authored essay, in which they share their work on tactile interpretations of the collections at the KADIST Art Foundation, and call for new opportunities and methods for touching art. Like d’Evie and Kleege, Hannah Thompson also calls for a collaborative approach to blind access. In her essay on audio description (AD) in cinema, she engages with four films with blind protagonists in order to compare extradiegetic and intradiegetic approaches to AD and to argue for its creative potential. Louise Fryer also explores the possibilities and challenges of integrated AD by sharing her experiences as an audio describer who, in a break with traditional models of objectivity and neutrality, took an active role in a play written and performed by a blind theatre group. Arseli Dokumaci shares a video project and essay that together use an exploration of the everyday travel strategies of two disabled people to propose an AD practice shaped by crip time. The final essay in this section, Brandon Christopher’s comparative study of an audio version of a conventional comic and of Philipp Meyer’s tactile comic Life, explores audio and tactile access questions raised in other essays in this section and extends our issue’s exploration of blindness arts to include the comic book genre. Remaining attentive to questions of access, we turn in the next section to the experiences of artists and to works of art that comment on blindness, either explicitly or through their use of design elements associated with blindness. Sculptor Aaron McPeake opens this section by reflecting on the making, exhibition and reception of his works in bronze, offering insight into the role of sound and touch in experiences of them. The role of touch is also important to the art made by Florian Grond and David Johnson. In the issue’s second co-authored piece, they share their experiences as artists collaborating at a distance and they reflect on the central role of blindness in their creation of accessible art. As blind artists, both McPeake and Johnson have encountered sighted misunderstandings of their practices. In an essay that responds to the misrepresentation of blind artists and their working lives, Catalin Brylla proposes filmmaking methods that challenge supercrip narratives and make possible nuanced depictions of the creative lives of artists who are blind. In an essay on the contemporary proliferation of braille as a design element in creative works, including public art installations, made by and for sighted people, Vanessa Warne explores the appropriation of braille as a visual code. Heather Tilley offers an historical perspective on the visual depiction of blind people, analyzing nineteenth-century images of blind people reading by touch and messages about blindness that the visual record shares. A pair of essays in our final section explores different kinds of performances that have been shaped by blindness. Piet Devos analyzes two non-visual contemporary dance pieces and his experiences of them. He also discusses the practice of blind dancer Saïd Gharbi. Offering a personal reflection on her own vocal practice, Emily K. Michael moves between sacred and secular spaces to map the relationship between blindness, vocal performance and persistent myths of compensatory ability. We close the volume with a co-authored essay by Rod Michalko and Tanya Titchkosky that uses a trans-Atlantic journey and a dialogue between the authors to explore the theme of travelling blind and the ways that blindness transforms sighted understandings of the world when it enters into dialogue with them. The presence in this final essay of a series of ‘excurses’ functions as a kind of crip time, similar to the audio description method proposed by Dokumaci. In both cases, the contents of the narrative are translated into a different format so that an ableist timeframe is replaced with space for creative reflection. 

Unlike much academic writing, this volume is free, open access and accessible. Please read, enjoy, respond and share widely.

Audio Description (3): Even better for Action

Katniss looks towars two other tributes at the start of the 75th Hunger Games.

I had my first audio description experience around 18 months ago and - as this post shows - I was absolutely blown away by it. Since then I've had a couple of disappointing experiences where the AD didn't work: as it only starts at the beginning of the film it is always too late to fix it if you don't want to miss the beginning. After a very helpful email exchange with Odeon, we have realised that AD works best in certain, quite specific, parts of the auditorium. Last night, when I picked up my AD headset, the usher was enormously helpful. He accompanied me to the auditorium, showed me where I should sit for best coverage and came back at the start of the film to check everything was working. I am so glad I persevered with AD and didn't just give up: if I hadn't got in touch with the cinema and asked them to find out which seats have optimum coverage I wouldn't have had such an amazing cinematic experience last night

I already knew that AD works brilliantly for costume dramas but last night I discovered that it is also a fantastic addition to fast-paced action films. Because it is set in a futuristic and imaginary world, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is full of objects, people and settings which are unfamiliar and therefore difficult to guess at. When I use my eyes to interact with the world I rely mainly on context to tell me what things are. If I see a dark, circular shape on my son's bed, I am pretty sure it is either our cat or his folded up dressing gown. But if I saw the same shape lying on, say, the floor of my office at work, I would have absolutely no idea what it was until I touched it. The AD in The Hunger Games told me about all kinds of key plot-related objects - such as brooches, bracelets, lockets, axes and red-tinged drinks - whose significance I would otherwise not have understood.

I knew that AD would also be incredibly helpful for identifying the various tributes. As they were all wearing the same uniform during training and in the arena, it was impossible for me to tell them apart. And when the dead tributes were projected into the night sky, my describer helpfully told me their names and districts. (I have it on good authority that sighted viewers did not always have access to this information). But I was surprised to find that AD really comes into its own during fight scenes. The speed and darkness usually associated with such scenes make them impossible for me to follow. I tend to sit back and enjoy the general atmosphere knowing that the outcome of the fight will become clear at some point. With AD I was completely immersed in the action, utterly captivated and more involved in a film than I have ever been. It makes we want to re-watch every single film I have ever seen to fill in all the gaps I now know there must be.

 It is hard to describe the effect AD has on my film-going experience but I suspect it might be compared to the addition of 3-D. For obvious reasons I have no idea what the appeal of 3-D is, but I imagine that it gives the sighted viewer the kind of ultra-intense cinema experience that AD gives me. AD is neither intrusive nor unwieldy. It is an art form in its own right, an enhancement, an amelioration. It becomes part of the film itself, enhancing the action like a good football commentary might. It more than doubles the pleasure I get from a film. My only regret is that it does not also exist in real life.

Disability and Culture: Whose Tragedy? Workshop

** UPDATE: Audio from this event is now available here **

As part of my research on representations of disability, I am developing an interdisciplinary and collaborative research project called 'Disability and Culture'. The first event in this project is a study day to explore how the 'personal non-tragedy' approach to disability, which I have already discussed here for example, can encourage us to see disability differently. I also wanted to showcase some of the ways in which Modernl Languages is interacting with the discipline of Disability Studies.

Disability and Culture: Whose Tragedy?

Part of Royal Holloway’s Trauma, Fiction, History Series, jointly sponsored by the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures and the Humanities and Arts Research Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Thursday March 21^st, 2013

Centre for Creative Collaboration (c4cc)

16 Acton Street

London WC1X 9NG

Programme

11-11:30 Registration and Coffee

11:30-1pm Session One

Whose Disability? Challenging Stereotypical Representations of Epilepsy

Maria Vaccarella (Centre for the Humanities and Health and Comparative Literature Department, King’s College London)

Sur mes lèvres, Deafness, Embodiment: Towards a Film Phenomenology of a Differently Ordered Sensorium

Jenny Chamarette (Queen Mary, University of London)

Beyond the ‘Narrative of Overcoming’: Representations of Disability in Contemporary French Culture.

Sam Haigh (University of Warwick)

1-2pm: Lunch (Provided)

2-3:30:  Session Two

Ana García-Siñeriz, Esas mujeres rubias (2010): disability, gender, and the medical establishment

Abigail Lee Six (Royal Holloway, University of London)

The pain of itching

Naomi Segal (Birkbeck College, London)

‘Raw data’: autistic aloneness and the category of insight in Elle s’appelle Sabine

Vivienne Orchard (University of Southampton)

3:30-4pm: Tea

4-5:30pm Session Three

Telling, not seeing: blindness and travel writing

Charles Forsdick (University of Liverpool)
Read Charles' account of the day here.

On not being deaf to the blind

Kate Tunstall (Worcester College, Oxford)

Disability and Sexuality: the poetry of Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin (1595-1670)

Nick Hammond (University of Cambridge)

5:30 Closing Remarks and Plans for Next Stages

Attendance at the study day is free and includes lunch and refreshments. Anyone interested in attending should contact me to register for catering purposes.

The Centre for Creative Collaboration is a neutral collaborative space near King’s Cross. We are using this space to think about the  interdisciplinary and collaborative potential of the Disability and Culture project. This workshop is the first step in a project which we hope will expand into a dialogue not only between academics, but also with artistis, medical professionals, charities, activists and community groups.

Happy Birthday Blind Spot Blog!

When I created this blog a year ago I had no idea what an adventure it would be. It started as a place to chart my research into French representations of blindness, but quickly blossomed into a way of commenting on the place of blindness - and then disability - in modern society more generally: the posts on audio description, the Paralympics and Tina Nash continue to attract interest from around the world. Alongside these current-affairs-related posts, there are also posts on my own way of living with blindness. This blog has given me a place to work out what I think about using a white cane, the shape and size of my eyes and what reading in detail really means.

But in this birthday post, I'd like to look again at my original research project. I have been spending a lot of time in the past year at the Association Valentin Hauy in Paris. Their library contains a vast collection of literature in French either by or about the blind. By gradually reading all the nineteenth-century novels they possess, I am building up a picture of how nineteenth-century France saw blindness. At first I was disappointed by what I found. Novels by blind novelist Therese-Adele Husson seemed to confirm my fears that blindness would be seen as a pitiful state characterised by emotional, financial and intellectual deprivation. As this blog has shown, this is the image of blindness usually found throughout cultural representations, from Madame Bovary to contemporary advertising and children's fiction. But as I delved deeper into the world of the nineteenth-century French novel, I found some examples of novels where the blind protagonists are capable and likable role-models. In the published work which will be the eventual fruit of this research, I will be arguing that these novels - by relatively unknown writers like Berthet and Pont-Jest - embrace the 'personal non-tragedy' approach which twentieth-first-century Disability Studies is only just engaging with.

I hope that my research will bring these neglected works out of obscurity and encourage readers to think again about literary representations of blindness.

Changing the Face of Disfigurement

Yesterday I saw a cinema advert that will stay with me longer than the film I watched afterwards. A man with a badly scarred face is sitting in a car. Outside it is dark and rainy. He is watching a house. A pretty woman enters the house. She is alone. She goes upstairs and starts cooking dinner. The man in the car can see her through the window. She doesn't know he is watching her. The music she is listening to on the radio is the same music that the man is listening to in the car. She pours herself a glass of red wine. The sound of the door knocker startles her. She goes downstairs and opens the door cautiously. She sees the man with the badly scarred face and stares at him in horror. If you want to see what happens next, watch the advert here.

What did you think was going to happen next? This ad is part of campaign for face equality on film. it is fighting against the ease with which the film industry uses facial disfigurement to represent evil. When a character with a disfigured face appears on screen, he or she is almost always a baddie. Cinema is incredibly lazy in the ways  it uses bodily appearance. Anything which departs from the perfect Hollywood body generally becomes part of the character's essence. But facial disfigurement is only skin deep: it doesn't change the way a person loves, laughs or thinks. How can the facially disfigured expect to be treated equally in the street, at school,  at work, or on the beach when there are no positive images of disfigurement at the cinema?

As the Face Equality on Film website points out: "these long-held and inaccurate beliefs are completely at odds with the reality for most people with disfigurements - who are lawyers, teachers, comedians, DIY lovers, parents, feisty teenagers, doting grandparents. They worry about their children, love cooking programmes, have affairs, worry about the rent, dye their hair, hate commuting - just as other characters do who are portrayed on the big screen."

This advert was shown at the cinema. But perhaps it should also be shown behind the scenes. For it is only when casting directors, producers and writers stop obsessing over stereotypical ideas of beauty that the cinema-going public will have the chance to see disfigurement presented in a more positive light.