Audio Description as Verbal Art by Sarah Hayden
2,588 words
In ‘More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art’ (2018), Georgina Kleege expresses a hope ‘that audio description can be elevated from its current status as a segregated accommodation outside the general public’s awareness and launched into the new media – a literary/interpretative form with infinite possibilities’. Over almost a year, Elaine Lillian Joseph (ELJ) and I have been talking about ‘Handsworth Songs’, and about what (and how) it is to audio describe a work of such political and cultural significance. Our every conversation, and each new successive draft of Elaine’s audio description script has affirmed and augmented my conviction in Kleege’s claim. Subtended by excitement for what access-making brings to moving image art, this essay sets out to offer a preliminary, partial close-reading of Elaine Lillian Joseph’s cross-modal translation of ‘Handsworth Songs’ as literary/interpretative form. In a nod to the ubiquity of the gerund verb form (the -ing ending) in audio description, as well as to the continued relevance of ‘Handsworth Songs’, and the continu-ing development of audio description as profession and practice, this essay is posed as a set of notes framed verbally: a commentary on actions ongoing.
Audio description (AD) must first and always make visual material accessible to blind and low-vision users. What follows understands audio description’s responsibility to create access as pre-eminent. With this condition as absolute, via analysis of seven actions wrought upon the film by her script and its speaking, I will try to articulate how Elaine’s audio description simultaneously honours, reflects and radically extends the intrinsic import and energy of ‘Handsworth Songs’.
Magnifying
‘Handsworth Songs’ has always been at least as much about how print and broadcast media drove the development (and disintegration) of discourse around race and migration as it is about postwar British race relations themselves. Montaging newspaper headlines, and making especially canny use of footage from a camera-team’s setup before a Thames TV broadcast of community leaders speaking from a church, the film explores how events in Birmingham and London in 1985 were handled by the press who, as the audio description observes, ‘from a safe distance […] train their cameras on the fire’. In her description, ELJ works to pull this consciousness into still sharper, more tangible relief. Deliberately though inobtrusively, she notes each appearance within the frame of those outsiders who were onsite to report on and represent communities not their own. Blind, low vision and sighted audients alike are prompted to apprehend not just the presence but the behaviour and effects of these ostensible onlookers. ELJ comments upon the contorted poses of TV crewmembers; she exposes how they insert themselves into the milieux of traumatic events – even to the point, at the funeral of Cynthia Jarrett, of shooting directly into a hearse. This awareness is sustained at an ambient level throughout the audio description track, but pulled to the sonic surface only once, when ELJ notes that two South Asian women carrying their toddlers ‘look uncomfortable being filmed’. The ensuing passage tracks the pursuit of these women by a camera whose dipping gaze focuses a prurient attention on their legs. Under the audio description, the camera’s obsessive magnetism to its prey’s legwear – as though the salwar they wear justifies its invasive attention – becomes legible as the exoticising, racialized harassment it is. When one of the women ‘wallops the camera with her handbag and everything goes black’, a tincture of delight registers in ELJ’s exuberant verb choice as well as in her vocal delivery. This satisfying conclusion to a troubling chase is made doubly, emphatically audible.
Pointing up
Besides its harrowing accounts of police brutality, ‘Handsworth Songs’ also pictures the violence of police visibility. ELJ describes streetscapes transfigured by ‘a barricade’ composed of both ‘police and press’, neighbourhoods oppressively surveilled by officers who, ‘with hands behind their backs […] watch police vans drive by’. Commenting on recurrent images of this heavy police presence, she remarks both on how residents are shown noticing those observing intruders, and how a ‘copper […] double takes when he spots [a] person filming’. Retroactively corrective, the audio description denaturalizes that to which policed populations are supposed to become inured. In one scene, as a convoy of police enter screen-left, ELJ enumerates their arrival onscreen in real time, counting ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven police vans’. Everywhere abundantly present, the police are made still more numerous in the audio-described film when, in describing footage of a night patrol, ELJ even notes the appearance of the shadows they cast ‘onto the close shutters of a shop’. Through her audio description, the ‘patrolling police men’ of ‘Handsworth Songs’ are made meaningfully to ‘stand out’.
Compressing
Audio description is a time-based spoken art. Shaped by constraint and condensation and scripted with vocality as its destination, it is also, often, a kind of poetry. In addition to tessellating spoken words into the extant audio of Trevor Mathison’s extraordinary soundtrack, the describer of ‘Handsworth Songs’ must contend with the imagetrack’s fast cuts. Balancing these obligations against each other requires extremes of precision, and extreme verbo-vocal efficiency. Even when still and moving images are coming thick and fast, ELJ remains faithful to the film’s montage aesthetic. Where a synthesising comment would surely have been the easier option, her script instead stretches micro-pockets of time, in order to register the film’s fleeting conjunctions of mutually co-implicated visual references: ‘An advert for steel. An advert for screws. A way out sign. Blurred buses. Black teen cycling. Back to backs. Curved iron fence. Graffiti on a wall: Keep Britain White Blacks Go Home’.
Just as the sighted audience is meant to be dizzied by the massing of sensationalist headlines in a cover-story montage, so the listener is made to be overwhelmed by the audition of ‘Headlines like: “Riot of death” “Racial fights could take over city” “Handsworth, the front line”’. Just as the audio description sensitises listeners to police presence as alien invasion, so its descriptions of reprehensible press coverage make listeners appreciate the brutality of a newspaper printing ‘“Face of a bomber” with a Black teen beneath’. Here, and abundantly throughout the description, ELJ’s careful discriminations as to the age (as well as the race, ethnicity, faith identity) of those pictured works as an auditory pushback, against unthinking, homogenizing generalization. Setting aside the inflammatory descriptors applied in the archived press coverage, the AD script proposes alternative collective nouns for the many differently assembled groupings of marchers, mourners, demonstrators that feature in the film. To those who took to the streets, her script retroactively restores the dignity that racist, polarising coverage worked to destroy. Dense with reworkings, ELJ’s draft scripts attest to the attention applied to this task. The describer’s rephrasings can be read as testament to her commitment to a translational ethic of care.
Locating
As the AD introduction makes clear, ELJ acknowledges her positionality in undertaking this project; what she has written for ‘Handsworth Songs’ is appropriately (and necessarily) a situated description. Though now, as she writes, ‘dampened by years of living in London’, ELJ’s own Birmingham backgrounded is encoded sonically in the broad-vowelled assonance of ‘A baby’s bathed in a bucket’. It can be heard, too, in the description’s ready recognition of certain of her city of origin’s major public spaces and monuments. Unlikely to register at all except with those for whom they are already familiar, these aural impressions function as fleeting invitations to feel the solidarity of shared origins.
As well as abandoning the myth of describer neutrality, her AD track avoids reproducing the lie of user-group homogeneity – anticipating instead an audience diverse in background, knowledge and experience. Culturally specific garments, hairstyles and musical instruments are both given their proper names – ‘kurta pyjama’, ‘patka’, ‘tala’ and ‘tabla’ – and briefly glossed. This dual-pronged approach allows the AD to acknowledge among its listenership those for whom the former will suffice, whilst simultaneously elucidating for those not familiar with the terminology. In these ostensibly minor ways, ELJ’s audio description enacts a political-project-as-describing-practice that is anything but insignificant in its effects.
Inventing
ELJ’s description strives always to provide an equivalence of access to the formal features (the aesthetic character) of the work described, but without privileging the presumptively sighted user versed in the language of film. Throughout the audio description, allusions to camera work, exposures, editing techniques are firmly oriented towards explicating their function/effects, and not to the exhaustive enumeration of cinematographic techniques. Terminology deployed never depends upon memory of sight or a pre-history of film-watching. Where commercial audio-description and captioning too often revert to uninformative copper-plate descriptors, ELJ’s description of ‘Handsworth Songs’ is inventive and imaginative. As Elaine’s introduction also notes, certain idiosyncratic strategies – that have, in the years since the film was made, become identified as traits of BAFC and Akomfrah – pose particular challenges. These require the describer to devise ingenious (and yet necessarily neat) formulae to translate the filmmakers’ deployments of tableaux vivants, and carousel-like sequencing of still images.When an archival snippet depicting the manufacture of chains bears upon its surface bold white text that expands massively from the centre of the screen, ELJ transposes the visual inflection into sonic form: subtly bearing down upon the displayed text, ‘Chains. For Workshop and Factory. Chains. For the toiler in the mine’, with equivalent vocal weight and emphasis. In one especially memorable sequence, a long, comma-strung litany of individual scenes accretes in ELJ’s description of the camera’s langorous left-right pan across a mural. Starting ‘with a dreaming islander’ and ending ‘with a new beginning, smiling youth listening to a tale under lamplight’, her description preserves the temporal, linear narrative of the filmmakers’ footage as well, significantly, as the affective import of the trajectory it describes. Here, as elsewhere, the AD listener is granted privileged access to a form of description that is also a creative act of interpretation in its own right.
Reflecting
Crucial to the composition of ‘Handsworth Songs’ is its incorporation of footage that depicts the communities elsewhere portrayed in extremis in other, happier contexts and less troubled times. ELJ encapsulates these tonal shifts in descriptions of clips of ‘West Indian emigrants [peering] out from passenger liners. Dapper men and women in their Sunday best’. Reflecting the buoyant attitudes with which the latterly grievously betrayed ‘Windrush’ generation entered England, she describes how ‘West Indian women in posh frocks and hats gingerly walk down a ship’s gangway’, taking time to note that ‘Colour footage reveals the joy of their outfits, the rich tones and patterns’. When the film cuts from footage of a burning car to ‘Another interracial couples dance from the 60s, this time in colour’, the describing voice noticeably warms as it lifts in tone. The joy of the occasion is audible in the sound as well as in the script spoken by Elaine’s voice as it notes sartorial and tonsorial signifiers, ‘snazzy suits…tall beehive hairstyles’. Pleasures abound – both for those engaged in an ‘intimate slow dance’, and, too, for those observing the culturally progressive scene as ‘Black men in dark shades watch the room, cool, young, and confident’. Astutely responsive to how ‘Handsworth Songs’ visually engineers accessions of relief, ELJ’s audio description finds ways to incite equivalent instances of hopefulness. She transposes affective swerves originally induced visually into equivalent effects delivered vocally and received aurally.
With restrained intent, via nuances of the scripting as well as inflections of her performance ELJ draws the listener’s attention to the jagged inequities communicated by the imagetrack. Having first described how: ‘These “immigrants” toil in industrial factories. Hot relentless work, operating heavy machinery. Sweat drips down their faces’, ELJ then immediately, and within the same timecoded segment, observes that Thatcher is ‘interviewed in an armchair’. Even here, ELJ allows herself only the subtlest note of sarcasm: discernible in her unpausing sequencing of observations and in the press-parroting pincers of those inverted commas around ‘immigrants’. The prime minister’s sedentary situation is handled (vocally) with a faux-oblivious breeziness that (aurally) only arches the eyebrow higher. Listeners are prompted to notice chasms in embodied experience which might not land via visual means – whether for reasons of levels of vision or (for the sighted listener) long habituation to the everyday inequalities of Life in (Tory-blighted) Britain. Called to react to a sequence of images constructed to orchestrate wild swings in atmosphere, ELJ’s voice responds pliantly. Tonal shifts transmit the fickle, exploitative switches in attitude and policy; tonal patterning helps to communicate how Commonwealth citizens once enjoined to help Mother Britain were rounded upon, and forcibly, unforgivably cast out. Perfidious Albion indeed.
The use of found footage in ‘Handsworth Songs’ is characterised by its inclusion of uncommented-upon visual surprises that work to keep the watching viewer alert. Some of these, such as a clip in which ‘Twin black girls play with their cat’ incite wonderment; others like ‘a montage of black babies in the 50s’, during which ‘a white attendant feels a baby’s fro’, induce a wholly other kind of surprise and disquietude. Acutely attentive to how the film deploys the fugitivity of these sightings (now also made hearings) to provoke swift, near-subliminal feelings of delight as well as lingering feelings of unease, ELJ’s description transposes across modes film’s orchestrations of its audience’s affective ambiences. The describer’s skill is abundantly in evidence at the micro-level of individual word choice. When, in describing how an early clip shows a recently arrived bus-driver called Luther ‘[ambling] down “his” street’ (emphasis mine), that possessive pronoun does exactly what’s needed to convey how Luther’s departure for work, waved off by smiling wife, is intended to stoke resentment among the ‘white natives’ troubled by this representative of what the accompanying TV voiceover identifies as ‘nearly a million more like him in Britain today’.
Reckoning
‘Handsworth Songs’ deploys one especially disturbing piece of footage twice and it is, I believe (for I am no less absent from the writing of this essay than is the describer from the writing of the AD script) in the description of this repetition, that the power of ELJ’s poetic condensation and artful cadence is most vividly apparent. In her first description of how ‘A black teen bolts down a road, outruns four policemen, misses the slash of a baton, is brought down by a shield…’, ELJ conveys the desperate predetermination of the scene’s conclusion: the adolescent’s apprehension by ‘officer after officer, piling on as he struggles to rise’. Committed to conveying the horror of this kettling as ‘They, now 8 against 1, shove him against a wall, where children are sitting and watching’, ELJ allows herself no escape into abstraction or summary. Impossibly deft, the resulting description is rhythmically balanced in such a way as to communicate – via voice’s alone – the foreclosure of the teen’s own doomed attempt to flee. When, almost 50 minutes later, the clip returns, this time ‘In eerie slow motion’, ELJ’s description is equally unrelenting. Her self-echoing is appalling to hear. But by posing repetition against variation, she manages to provide access not alone to the scene’s action or visual content. Instead, with painstakingly achieved precision, she transmits to the AD user the scene’s purpose in ‘Handsworth Songs’. And it is here, I think, that Elaine Lillian Joseph’s audio description points up the political potentiality of her verbal art form. The uncanny return of the running teen, the grimly familiar, achingly slowed repeat of his violent arrest – ‘One officer has his arm clamped around his neck’ – summons up innumerable awful near-repetitions of this same scenario. Police violence against Black youth is made audible as a loop within which British society is still, somehow, senselessly suspended.