Audio Description Script by Elaine Lillian Joseph
Audio Describer’s Foreword
637 words
I first watched ‘Handsworth Songs’ during the national lockdown in late spring 2020. George Floyd had just been brutally murdered and I couldn’t look away from the graphic footage on social media and on the news. I’d only ever seen snippets of ‘Handsworth Songs’ up till then and heard a few stories from my parents about the riots in Birmingham in the 80s. My maternal grandparents settled in the suburb of Handsworth, along with other West Indians in the 50s and 60s, so many of the streets and locations in the film were familiar to me from my childhood visits or through family photos.
It was a haunting, harrowing watch as much for its relevance today in 2022 as for its radical perspective on the 1985 uprisings in Birmingham and London and the auditory experience was just as important as the visual. My audio description script needed to sit comfortably in the layered soundscape alongside dub echoes, a wealth of different accents, narrators, eerie industrial reverbs and mashed up anthems. My own voice, which has Brummie inflections although dampened by years of living in London, is a new layer 37 years after the film’s first broadcast. In some ways there’s already a layer of description embedded in the film: onlookers offer their take on the burnt out aftermath around them and a British Pathé presenter with clipped received pronunciation observes freshly arrived migrants. But other long clips, like Cynthia Jarrett’s funeral, are played with only singing as accompaniment, so the description there was crucial in making the procession and the nuances of the various gazes accessible (media vs mourners in this case but more commonly police vs rioters).
This is not meant to be a neutral script (as far as neutrality can ever be achieved when translating one medium into another) but rather an attempt to inhabit the unflinching, political world of the film. At times I use sarcasm to rebuke the colonial disdain of the archival narrators or a tongue-in-cheek news reporter tone. At times I relax into something like poetry, which felt like the best vehicle to memorialise the victims of police brutality featured. I debated with myself about the word ‘migrant’ rather than ‘immigrant’ as the media can be guilty of assigning the latter to non-white people and similarly decided to place power in the otherwise perjorative word ‘rioter’ as those pitted against the exaggerated police presence in Handsworth, Winson Green and Broadwater Farm Estate in London. At other times, ethnicity (Black or South Asian) was more helpful or even religious identifiers, like Sikh or rasta. I’m most pleased with the phrase ‘a dreaming islander’ which refers to a painted subject at the beginning of Tam Joseph and Gavin Jantjes’ wall mural, ‘The Dream, The Rumour and The Poet’s Song’ because that seems to get to the heart of migration – a dream of a better life.
My hope is that the horror of some of the images in this film is retained, even through the dilution of my gaze. A recurring scene shows a Black teenager trying to run away from police officers on an ordinary looking suburban road. It’s played twice, once at normal tempo and then towards the end in slow motion. When I wrote:
‘A Black teen bolts down a road, outruns four policemen, misses the slash of a baton, is brought down by a shield. They kettle him in, officer after officer after officer, piling on as he struggles to rise. They, now 8 against 1, shove him against a wall, where children are sitting and watching’
I couldn’t help recalling George Floyd’s death and the countless other Black men and women hunted and murdered in the UK and across the globe. It feels momentous to integrate audio description into a film that resonates so viscerally today.
Audio Introduction
64 words
Handsworth Songs is a documentary by the Black Audio Film Collective, released in 1986, one year after the riots in Birmingham and London. The essayistic approach flicks between poetic voiceovers from Meera Syal, Yvonne Weekes and Pervais Khan, contemporary interviews with politicians and bystanders at the time, black and white archival newsreels and still photographs of Black peoples’ lives in the UK.
Audio Description Script
4,563 words
Timecodes are displayed in the format hh:mm:ss:ff, which is two-digit hours, minutes, seconds, and frames.
Scene 0
In a museum, a Black attendant in uniform and peaked hat watches the mighty rise and fall of a Victorian piston
Scene 1
Grainy, black and white, 16mm. Yellow letters appear, divided by a white line. Handsworth. Songs.
Scene 2
His eyes follow the mechanism. Round. Up. Down. Left. Right. An arm churns, a wheel spins, cogs turn. His head tilts in time to the rotations.
Scene 3
Silhouetted, birds descend on a treetop
Scene 4
The spectral outline of an ambulance speeds through the night. Light leaks across the frame in streaks of red and yellow.
Scene 5
A mechanised clown’s head turns from side to side. Stationed behind a window pane, passing traffic is reflected onto the glass, briefly crossing its white face.
Scene 6
Twenty or more police officers stand shoulder to shoulder, their shields and visors glinting in the dark. An elevated view reveals the sheer numbers present and the press taking photos. Cast in marble, James Watt stares down from his plinth. Then Joseph Priestley’s statue, viewed from below. The concrete megalith that was Birmingham Central Library looms behind them.
Scene 7
The window clown waves stiffly at the outside world with a permanently jolly grin
Scene 8
(The birds ascend and descend on treetops – rhythm) Birds ascend and descend onto surrounding treetops in the colloquially known, Pigeon Park. Birmingham Cathedral stands in silhouette amid the trees. In Handsworth, onlookers and police have congregated outside boarded up shops. Suddenly everyone flees and the camera captures their running legs. More footage shows rioters lobbing brick missiles
Scene 9
An elderly white couple watch from their doorstep as police march past in a tight shield wall.
Scene 10
The squinted eyes of the ever-watching clown
Scene 11
Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, visits a terraced house. He’s met by a white family and mostly white residents.
Scene 12
Douglas, who’s in his fifties and white is met by a crowd of mostly booing Black men. He maintains an unruffled smile along with his white entourage.
Scene 13
A young white man pulls a milk float down a street. He passes policemen who are guarding an adjacent road. Smoke smoulders behind them, the aftermath of past conflict. Black and white children stare as more police arrive in a van. 13 or more coppers stand vigilant.
Scene 14
A Black teen bolts down a road, outruns four policemen, misses the slash of a baton, is brought down by a shield. They kettle him in, officer after officer after officer, piling on as he struggles to rise. They, now 8 against 1, shove him against a wall, where children are sitting and watching.
Scene 15
An interview with a young Black man and a young rasta.
Scene 16
A stop animation montage of tinted newspaper cuttings slide by.
Scene 17
Headlines like: ‘£2 million damage in night of violence’ accompanied by photos of burnt out businesses. A street of rubble. Infernos in the night. Police in riot gear. Car barricades. A shield wall of police. A running Black youth.
Scene 18
Headlines like: ‘Riot of death’ ‘Racial fights could take over city’ ‘Handsworth, the front line’.
Scene 19
‘Face of a bomber’ with a black teen beneath.
Scene 20
‘The Bloody Battleground’ ‘Riot-hit families pack up to move out’ An image of a white woman wheeling her baby across debris.
Scene 21
‘Britain tomorrow: It could be armed police, safe in super machines’ ‘The bleeding heart of England’ ‘The words are just worthless’ ‘Anger, frustration and destruction…’
Scene 22
A photo titled ‘Handsworth in flames’ grows larger and larger until it engulfs the screen.
Scene 23
A convoy of police vans, cars and motorcycles glides down a road. Two pedestrians jog across the high street as more vans arrive. Someone films from their car as they drive past parked police vehicles.
Scene 24
One, two, three, four, five, six seven police vans and one copper who double takes when he spots the person filming.
Scene 25
A montage of portraits from the 50s and 60s float past. Black couples are all smiles on their wedding day: The grooms wear dark suits with white gloves, the brides pose in veils and long frocks.
Scene 26
The final couple glide by, posing in front of the church doors.
Scene 27
Footage of well-dressed Black guests greeting white officials in a hall. An interracial dance is interspersed with scenes from the West Indies: labourers on a sugar plantation and a river.
Scene 28
Cuts between rural life in the West Indies and the mixed couples dance.
Scene 29
A baby’s bathed in a bucket.
Scene 30
Poised police.
Scene 31
The viewpoint zooms out from Black boys on a street corner to behind a barricade of police and press. As more riot police run on, a young Black man stops to photograph them then casually walks on. South Asian men of various ages are sitting in a front room. A middle aged man in a suit reads from a paper.
Scene 32
Dirty smoke and flames billow from upturned cars. The sky’s turned black. A cameraman shouts and points to someone. From a safe distance, a mass of press, train their cameras on the fire.
Scene 33
The Asian man in the suit continues to read…
Scene 34
The King of Calypso in suit and hat sings among fellow migrants on the SS Empire Windrush. Then scenes of Black construction workers.
Scene 35
A lens roams across a spray painted picture picking out abstract figures. It makes its slow progress down a newly arrived West Indian woman in a red hat. A green fish dances in the sea as a man sits on a ship’s gangway. His patterned suit is a bold white and black.
Scene 36
The 60s. A young Black man exits his house, waved off by his wife.
Scene 37
Luther ambles down his street.
Scene 38
Post-riot: A burnt out street by day. Moving along police tape, a smashed up house bears graffiti: ‘Zulu Juniors B.C.F.C’. A cyclist stares at what’s left of next door’s caved in roof. A white man seems to direct the camera operator further down the road.
Scene 39
Broken shutters reveal the carnage inside Eugene and Sons, the high class greengrocers. Cruising down Soho Road, which is a busy high street full of shoppers and residents, patrolling police men stand out in their black uniform and peaked custodian helmets.
Scene 40
Police arm up.
Scene 41
A montage of portraits capturing every day life. Mounted as an installation of artworks in a black box gallery, the camera slowly drifts past Black children in the Midlands. A girl poses on a street. A white teacher shows a child a book. Finally Vanley Burke’s ‘A Boy With A Flag’. The boy in question stands proudly with his bike, a Union Jack attached to the handlebars.
Scene 42
West Indian emigrants peer out from passenger liners. Dapper men and women in their Sunday best.
Scene 43
An interview.
Scene 44
Two young South Asian men in a room.
Scene 45
Black and white. School children are standing in a yard, some in winter coats. As their teacher arranges them into lines, a camera meanders around them. The children, aged around 6, gawp and giggle, tilting their heads as the camera moves.
Scene 46
A white child breaks into a smirk. A South Asian boy stares. The camera settles on a Black boy at the front of a line. He’s standing straight, looking away from the camera. While the others can barely contain their grins, no smile escapes his lips. The camera circles closer on his earnest face. Sikh men are gathered in a gurdwara.
Scene 47
An image of Baba Puran Singh meditating. Sikhs sing around a microphone. The men are dressed in white turbans and kurta pyjama, a long shirt with wide legged trousers.
Scene 48
A boy with a patka, a topknot, watches his bearded elders. The lead singer plays the harmonium while his neighbour clinks tala, tiny linked cymbals. The tabla, twin hand drums, are tapped by a man, who’s crosslegged on the floor.
Scene 49
A mostly South Asian community marches solemnly down a street.
Scene 50
At the front, in the centre, a tall Black man carries a large poesie of flowers in a box. Beside him a man and woman also hold bouquets. TV crews walk ahead, angling for the best shot.
Scene 51
The footage continues from the perspective of the press. It becomes momentarily black and white. A lens zooms in on the box of flowers. Then a longer shot takes in the crowd from behind.
Scene 52
Members of the community add to the floral memorial which has been set on the ground outside of a burnt out building.
Scene 53
A grey-bearded Sikh man lays a bouquet, filmed by a row of camera operators. Heads bowed, the Black man and three others stand in prayer.
Scene 54
A delegation of suited white men stand before the Colonial office followed by a montage of Black babies in the 50s: a white attendant feels a baby’s fro, babies play on rocking horses and are christened.
Scene 55
Sleeping babies lie on blankets on low cots outside.
Scene 56
The treetops in Pigeon park are lined with silhouetted birds. They ascend and descend in bursts.
Scene 57
A young rastaman in a bulky peaked cap bobs his head to the music. He’s controlling a sound system in a warehouse, adjusting the dials while holding a mic in his other hand.
Scene 58
The only light comes from the back of the room, otherwise the scattered dancers jump and bounce in shadow.
Scene 59
Three policemen are on night patrol. Their shadows are cast onto the closed shutters of a shop. Police vans cruise down a road.
Scene 60
From behind, a rastaman sways to the music. Police vans are parked by a building which has ‘SIKH’ graffitied onto the shutter. Two officers are approached from behind, a light shines on their darkened figures.
Scene 61
Dancers skank and hop. The whites of one guy’s eyes shine in the dark as he nods his head to the beat.
Scene 62
Silhouetted, another young guy feels the music, wheeling a scarf in the air.
Scene 63
Hands folded across their chests, three officers converse against some shutters. A strong light passes over them. Then with hands behind their backs, they watch police vans drive by.
Scene 64
The camera’s jostled as a young Black woman is torn from a Black teen on the steps to Victoria Law Courts. High above a neglected statue of Queen Victoria is visited by a pigeon. Clearly in distress the woman clings to the boy, but he’s frogmarched away. Another rastaman resists arrest.
Scene 65
Four police officers restrain him. The Black attendant from the beginning paces around the machine.
Scene 66
A white cameraman gazes down the viewfinder of a shoulder mounted TV camera.
Scene 67
He’s one of many, filming Black children laying out funeral poesies on a pavement. Some squint as they refocus their lenses. Others move into new positions. A dark-skinned Black woman hovers behind them, then passes by.
Scene 68
The black square eye of a surveillance camera looms above them.
Scene 69
Text appears: ‘The Funeral of Mrs Cynthia Jarrett’. London. October 1985. Mostly Black mourners spill from the pavement into the road, where several hearses are parked outside an estate. A TV crewman adopts a bent pose to photograph the lead funeral car which is adorned with flowers.
Scene 70
The funeral cortege, a dozen or so black hearses and dark cars, rolls slowly down an urban inner city street. Three white funeral directors in black suits walk ahead, one at the front and two on either side of Cynthia’s hearse. Pedestrians stop to watch.
Scene 71
The second hearse contains flowers which spell out the letters GRAN and Cynthia’s coffin is visible through an elongated glass pane.
Scene 72
Black family members are glimpsed, their faces solemn.
Scene 73
The cortege rolls to a halt in front of a shopping parade and the funeral directors climb into the main hearse.
Scene 74
The slow parade continues.
Scene 75
West Indian women in posh frocks and hats gingerly walk down a ship’s gangway. Colour footage reveals the joy of their outfits, the rich tones and patterns.
Scene 76
Twin Black girls play with their cat.
Scene 77
The view from a train approaching town, Birmingham’s city centre. Factories and warehouses pass by.
Scene 78
Rapid cuts at New Street railway station. Trains gush steam. A Black couple leave. A kiosk. Stairs. Faces.
Scene 79
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’.
Scene 80
TV cameras are setting up for a panel discussion in a community church. The audience are mostly Black and Asian.
Scene 81
A car cruises down Soho Road…
Scene 82
He was talking to the Labour MP for Perry Barr.
Scene 83
Broadwater Farm Estate.
Scene 84
Her voice ran over images of the heavy police presence on the estate.
Scene 85
Various young Black women pull hand presses in a factory.
Scene 86
A white woman smiles at her work. Another Black woman at a hand press punches holes in an endless stream of components.
Scene 87
A compilation of new emigrants in Britain. At a food market, window shopping and at a factory.
Scene 88
Firefighters put out a burning car. An eyewitness…
Scene 89
Another interracial couples dance from the 60s, this time in colour. Men in snazzy suits twirl their partners in a club. Women sport tall beehive hairstyles. An Asian man and a white woman chat on the dancefloor. Next to them, Black lovers rock, in an intimate slow dance. Black men in dark shades watch the room, cool, young, and confident.
Scene 90
More young South Asian men sitting in a room.
Scene 91
Malcolm X beside the Marshall Street sign in Smethwick on his 1965 visit. He strolls past red-brick terraces in a thick overcoat and woollen hat. He’s photographed inspecting a For Sale ad in a window. He walks on, his serious eyes behind brow-line glasses.
Scene 92
In the black box gallery, photographs from the 70s appear suspended in the space. Protestors rally on a residential street. A Black man in bell bottoms holds a placard that says: ‘Bury imperialism in the fire of black unity’. A campaign poster for a Black candidate’s in a grocer’s window: ‘Vote James Hunte, Independent’.
Scene 93
Two South Asian women carry their toddlers in their arms. They look uncomfortable being filmed. As they pass the camera dips down, tracking their legs which are in salwaar, loose-fitting trousers of delicate, patterned material. They’re both wearing headscarves and thick winter coats.
Scene 94
They cross over to a fabric shop but it’s shut despite a sign saying open. They turn back walking briskly past the camera. The camera follows them past a scrubland ringed by terraced houses.
Scene 95
The cameras trained on the first woman’s legs, who’s wearing a leopard print coat. She wallops the camera with her handbag and everything goes black.
Scene 96
A Black Calypso band, then a Sikh man.
Scene 97
Handsworth 1977.
Scene 98
Protesters of all colours and ages.
Scene 99
1920s Birmingham. A parade with white men in bowler hats, a brass band and an Aston Divisional Labour Party banner. A South Asian woman in a sari demonstrates sewing to working class white men.
Scene 100
People march under the banner of the Young Communist League Birmingham Branch. A series of floats go by: One carriage carries young white girls with flowers in their hair, children ride with the Ladywood Cooperative Womens Guild.
Scene 101
A tableau vivant, a living picture in colour. A carefully staged set has a heap of chains aross a fallen marble plinth. There’s a scroll draped across it along with the Union Jack.
Scene 102
Blue tinted footage of a factory. White men hammer molten slabs of metal, sending sparks flying. The frame rate makes them seem sped up. Long tongs pluck metal from a furnace and huge anchor chains are hand hammered into place.
Scene 103
On the staged set, a colonial pith helmet and white gloves rests on the Union Jack. Next to a stack of books, a wooden sculpture of a Black woman reposes. A Black person whose arm is just in shot, fans the sculpture.
Scene 104
Bold white text appears over footage of working men pulling and hammering chains: ‘Chains. For Workshop and Factory. Chains. For the toiler in the mine’.
Scene 105
‘Chains for those who go down to the sea in ships’. ‘Where will you spend eternity?’ is printed on the side of Sandwell Gospel Hall.
Scene 106
A steam train emits dirty smoke as it emerges from a tunnel then a view from under a bridge of a river surrounded by wasteland.
Scene 107
The steam train continues its journey passing behind back-to-back terraced houses.
Scene 108
Laundry through a wire fence.
Scene 109
These ‘immigrants’ toil in industrial factories. Hot relentless work, operating heavy machinery. Sweat drips down their faces. Thatcher is interviewed in an armchair.
Scene 110
In eerie slow motion, the black teen bolts down a road, outruns four policemen, misses the slash of a baton, is brought down by a shield. They kettle him in, officer after officer after officer, piling on. One officer has his arm clamped around his neck.
Scene 111
The front room with South Asian men…
Scene 112
The spray painted picture is a wall mural by Gavin Jantjes and Tam Joseph. A lens pans across the full length of it.
Scene 113
It starts with a dreaming islander, a ship, a woman and child with luggage, a worker, a coffin-suitcase on a woman’s back, a prisoner booted in the face, a weeping woman, a mourner, arson, a fleeing girl, a dove in flames.
Scene 114
It ends with a new beginning, smiling youth listening to a tale under lamplight.
Scene 115
Press photograph a Justice for Black People rally.
Scene 116
Demonstrators’ placards say ‘End State Racism’.
Scene 117
Black protesters march together.
Scene 118
The Black museum attendant inspects the Victorian machines with a look of fascination.
Scene 119
He walks on.
Scene 120
Flames blaze on an upturned car. On the wall mural, a woman weeps and a mourner visits a grave.
Scene 121
A montage of luggage laden West Indians arriving, travelling, waiting, gives way to 80s Birmingham. In slow motion, a black woman fades down a rundown backstreet past overgrown railway arches.
Scene 122
Camera Sebastian Shah / Camera Assistant Edward George / Additional Photography John Akomfrah, Roy Cornwall / Sound & Music Trevor Mathison / Assistant Sound Avril Johnson.
Scene 123
Voiceover Pervais Khan, Meera Syal, Yvonne Weekes, Interviewees: Handsworth and Aston Welfare Association / Asian Youth Movement (Birmingham) / Sackhand Nanak Dham / Mr McClean / Soho Road Sikh Temple.
Scene 124
Archive Source: Archive Film Agency / Birmingham Central Library / BBC / British Movietonenews LTD / Central Independent Television PLC/ Granada Television LTD / Pathé Film Library. Jerusalem by Mark Stewart and the Maffia / Funeral Song performed by Gretchen Cummings, Barry Ford, Karid Woodley, Paulette Vassel.
Scene 125
A Black Audio Film Collective Production 1986 / Audio Description by Elaine Lillian Joseph commissioned by LUX and Sarah Hayden. With thanks to the AHRC.