Radiance

As befits a meditation on cinematic art, the storyline of Radiance begins and ends in the cinema. A man in a black jacket enters a crowded theatre. In an extreme close-up, the camera almost hangs on his back and follows him as he walks confidently down the rows. In this way, his leading role in the composition is announced right from the start. He takes a seat and puts on a headset. Testing, testing, testing. Are your earphones working? A movie is about to begin (figure 1). The same scene with the man in the black jacket, who, as we later learn, is Masaya Nakamori, will reappear at the end of the movie, and this time we will watch the fragment of the audio-described picture with him. This circular composition makes a clear statement: it is a movie about audio description, and we are witnessing the process of its creation.

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Figure 1

© ‘Radiance’ film partners/Kinoshita, Comme des Cinémas; Kumie: close-up of Mr. Nakamori’s face against the backdrop of a crowded cinema hall.

The next scene takes us to the White Light, a studio creating audio descriptions for movies. Misako discusses the draft of her audio-visual translation with a control group composed of blind and sighted colleagues. Initially, she receives mainly praise. ‘Behind thick clouds, a pale sun is visible’, I like that, says Mr. Akitoshi with a radiant smile. When Misako receives some criticism, it is delivered so subtly and sugar-coated with so much laughter and appreciation that it is hardly distinguishable from approval. The description seems flawless—only the details are missing: they suggest she might replace ‘black hair’ with ‘dark hair’ or describe what figure the protagonist is sculpting in the sand. Ms. Ishida is about to say something more, but she stops in the middle of the sentence and later dismisses her opinion as not really important. This benign atmosphere shifts abruptly when Mr. Nakamori asks Ms. Ishida to finish her sentence before he adds his own critique: some of Misako’s comments are intrusive. The girl is too invested in her work not to take it emotionally, and she replies, There’s no need to be so blunt. I wrote it that way… for all of you. By opposing him in this way, she discloses a seemingly well-intended yet patronising approach so commonly displayed when assisting disabled people. Mr. Nakamori challenges this charitable attitude: That’s why it’s intrusive, he concludes. Misako, although somewhat resentful, understands and promises to ameliorate all the intrusions.

She does her best. Before everyone returns to White Light to revisit the improved text, the next sequence of scenes shows the various steps Misako undertakes to describe the picture better. In following her creative efforts, Radiance unfolds as a coming-of-age story of a beginning and experimental writer, testing the capacious potential of language. One of her initiatives is to meet the director of the movie. Despite the difficulty of obtaining a private appointment with an old master, she succeeds, through which she brings the audio descriptors closer to the artistic vision of the film’s director and improves its quality.

Just as, in the art of ekphrasis, word and image seek each other, so, on the level of the story, Misako and Masaya also do. In the following sequence of scenes, we watch their relationship take a new turn and see them befriending each other. Back in the White Light studio, despite Misako’s best efforts, her blind collaborators—apparently emboldened by Mr. Nakamori—begin openly expressing criticism for her work. Misako engages in a sharp exchange with Mr. Nakamori, which causes him to leave the studio and her to be taken off this project. Yet, despite this abrupt disconnection, Misako and Masaya continue to long for each other, the way word and image are drawn to each other. Their next meeting is coincidental: Misako spots Mr. Nakamori in a crowded metro and follows him. This is a vulnerable moment for him, as his vision, gradually diminishing throughout the movie, is now completely gone. Misako accompanies him, this time very subtly, and the affection grows between the two.

Meanwhile, despite officially no longer being involved in the project, Misako keeps working on the translation. When the White Light crew meets again, it is not at the studio but in the cinema where the audio-described movie makes its premiere. Testing, testing, testing. Are your earphones working? We watch the last scene together with all the guests and marvel at how the images and words go hand in hand.

Mr. Nakamori and the authority of blindness

According to Healey and Michalko (2021), the word ‘blindness’ is one of those words that has a meaning and a ‘feel’ to it. They draw here from Bauman (2001), who observed that some words evoke such powerful connotations that their meaning, in addition to being understood, may also be almost viscerally felt. For example, according to Bauman, the word ‘community’ feels like a roof to shelter beneath when it rains, or like a fireplace where one warms one’s cold hands (Bauman 2001, 1). What is the feeling of blindness? In our ocular normative culture, it is not a positive one. Michalko and Healey recall the way the iconic Al Pacino-starring 1992 film Scent of a Woman (Brest 1992) depicts this feeling of blindness. When its main character, a former military officer, goes blind, he declares: What life? I got no life! I’m in the dark here. You understand? I’m in the dark. This desperate lament echoes the dominant culture’s stance on blindness as a crippling deficiency. Founded on the seeing-as-knowing premise, this attitude suggests that blindness equals ignorance. We see this echoed in certain sayings: ‘being in the dark’, ‘reaching a blind spot’ or ‘turning a blind eye to something’ (Bolt 2014, 20). This metaphor also has a moral undertone: blindness may feel like ‘blind rage’, ‘blind fear’ or even a punishment for one’s sins—an ultimate, worse-than-death Oedipian tragedy (Kent 1989).

In contrast to this, Kawase’s Radiance evokes a different feeling of blindness. Mr. Nakamori impresses us with his calm, discreet and controlled demeanour. Rather than lament over his sight loss, he comes across as being at peace. When we first meet him, he retains his partial sight and continues working as a renowned photographer. Yet, as the film progresses, he gradually goes blind. The artificial eye of the camera allows us to accompany him throughout this process in a very intimate manner. One of the readings of the title Radiance alludes to this light-drenched vision that unfolds before his eyes when he goes blind. Contrary to its stereotypical cinematographic portrayal, blindness in this context feels more like dwelling in the light than a tragic and solitary ‘being in the dark’, and this reading is further supported by the French title of this Japanese-French coproduction, which describes Nakamori’s journey towards blindness as a path towards the light: Vers la Lumière. Kawase introduces us to this light throughout the entire film. Many shots seem almost overexposed to light: while some are bathed in warm, diffused daylight, others contain a shimmering object (like a crystal or piece of metal) that reflects light across the screen; still others are shot in direct sunlight, blinding a viewer’s vision. Kawase hereby mitigates any negativity towards blindness, displaying it as a part of the human condition rather than a tragedy that befalls those unfortunate ‘others’ (Healey 2021, 12). While accompanying Mr. Nakamori through the process of going blind, we also acquire a certain feeling of blindness, a feeling that is as warm and luminous as radiating light.

This strong contrast in the portrayal of blindness as light might suggest that Kawase is simply swinging to the other extreme of portraying the main character as a blind seer. Typically, blind characters are depicted cinematographically either as villains whose disability is a visible sign of their moral decline (Norden 1994), eventually members of some sorry lot (‘timid, morose, cranky, resentful, socially awkward and prone to despair’ (Kleege 1999, 45)), or, on the other extreme, as blind seers endowed with an amazing sixth sense, such as supernatural hearing or abnormal olfactory abilities. However, both extreme depictions, each in its own way, single out the blind person from a community of equals and are thus both products of the same ocular-centric culture. As Jay (1993, 29) demonstrated, Greek thought, which laid the foundations for Western ocular-normativity, distinguished two types of vision: observation with the two eyes of the body and speculation with the inner mind’s eye, which became metaphors of, respectively, empirical and theoretical reasoning. In that sense, a blind seer, like ancient Greek Tiresias, who cannot observe the outside world, is compensated with an abundance of inner vision: fortune-telling, mysticism, prophesying or some other extraordinary gift.

Yet Mr. Nakamori defies both stereotypes. He is a remarkable figure who does inspire admiration, but achieves it without resorting to any compensatory super talent, depending solely on the fortitude of his spirit and his courage, which are inextricably related to his vulnerability. He is profoundly human: we see him suffer; we witness him clinging to his vision and his camera; but we also see him disarming Misako’s awkwardness with a smile and, with the same relaxed smile, answering his colleagues’ interrogations: no, he says, blindness does not drive him crazy. Perhaps the only stereotypical feature about him is his profession as a photographer, as blind people have often been portrayed as such (cf. Kleege 1999, 59). However, it is justified by the fact that the character of Mr. Nakamori was inspired by Juuji Otani, Japanese painter, writer and athlete, who interpreted his blindness in terms of gain, also with respect to the arts, as it ‘made his senses more acute’.1 Moreover when, in one of the last scenes, he ends up throwing away his previously inseparable prop of the artificial eye, it serves as a powerful symbol of his rejection of and simultaneous liberation from ocular-centric culture as he opens up to new forms of perception. We mature together with Mr. Nakamori, moving beyond the tragic scenario of blindness interpreted as loss and learning to recognise ‘blindness gain’ and the whole rich spectrum of inventiveness, imagination and creativity that belongs to it (cf. Chottin and Thompson 2021, 35).

This rejection of the ‘assumed authority of sight’ (Bolt 2014, 9, 99) acts as the source of Mr. Nakamori’s authority and the resulting leading role that he plays with respect to Misako and his blind colleagues. In an ocular-centric culture, where seeing equals knowing, sighted people assume their epistemic authority over blind ones. The following dialogue between Mr. Nakamori and Misako illustrates this problem well:

Nakamori: Also… in the last scene, after the sunset, you decided not to say anything?

Misako: I gave it a lot of thought. But for that last scene, I preferred to leave it to the audience to form their own opinion. I was worried that the audio description could influence them in the wrong way.

N: So you ran away from it?

M: I’m not running away. It’s just… I wanted to be less subjective.

N: Really? I didn’t feel anything.

M: That’s a problem with your imagination.

N: Hmm?

M: I always pay close attention, I watch all your faces, looking for your reactions. But your face is always impassive. I don’t think it has anything to do with your blindness,—it’s just a lack of imagination.

Here, Misako, who, after meeting the director of the movie, realised that she does not really understand the last scene of the movie, refrains from describing it. Rightly challenged by Mr. Nakamori, she resorts to her natural advantage: ‘the authority of sight’. In her mind, what is at play here is not her incapacity to capture the abstract meaning, nor her failure to find the right words; it is not her problem—it is his: his lack of imagination. She can see the movie, and she can also observe his face, so she has no doubt that she knows better. Observation gives her access to what she believes to be objective truth: she knows better what should or should not be said to describe the picture, and believes that this ‘knowledge’ gives her the ability and right to interpret and judge what he thinks, feels and knows.

With his usual non-chalance, Mr. Nakamori does not accept this treatment: he leaves without further comment. Rejecting the assumed authority of vision, he restores the narrative surrender (Frank 1995) of blind people in the group. Finally, they can speak their minds freely, and they start to openly discuss the movie with Misako instead of only passively receiving her work. If they earn authority in this discussion, it is not by some mysterious gift they possess but by the force of the better argument, as it befits the democratic community (implying that it is free from any assumed authority and dominance, be it a dominance of one sense over another, and those who can use it over those who cannot). Their comments are fresh, insightful and intriguing. They are exemplifying how visual arts are ‘more than meets the eye’ (Kleege 2018) and as such are accessible to the blind audience through other senses, as well as through their imaginative powers and understanding. Their different modes of perception open the way for original imageries, different interpretations and perspectives never before articulated. In other words, their difference is not a ‘bad-difference’ (Barnes 2016, 54), it is a creative one. For example, Masako, a timid woman who previously veiled each of her critiques with a polite smile, initiated an elaborate argument to reveal the profound meaning of the movie, teaching her audience to discern deep currents of feeling flowing through the movie. Interestingly, this role was played by a visually impaired consultant of a Japanese audio description company City Lights, Masako Tanaka, who played herself in the film, effectively expressing her actual opinions about the Mr. Kitabayashi movie and cinema in general.2 She captures her understanding in terms relating to touch: There is a certain weight, a certain gravity, to this film. This tactile terminology again resonates with Kleege (2018), 72), who, while describing her touch-tours through different arts museums, regrets that blind people, who are the only few allowed to touch these works of art, are not asked to describe their sensations. She suggests that this unique experience might add another category of aesthetic value and broaden everyone’s appreciation of the artwork. This is exactly what happens in Radiance when Ms. Masako explains the film in new, tactile terms, inspiring both her sighted colleagues in the film and the film director herself. Interestingly, Kawase expresses the gain she has experienced from working with the blind people in terms of feeling, sharpening the senses and acquiring a new sensitivity in understanding art.3

Portrait of an artist as a young woman

The light of the setting sun poured into Nakamori’s room. Throughout the room, the light was scattered by a prism. Misako held her hand up to the light. The light from the prism landed on the palm of her hand. This is just one of Misako’s countless exercises in describing her visual experience. She practices incessantly, describing the everyday sight she observes while waiting at the bus stop and trying to capture in words all the images that fill her with wonder. At this afternoon hour, Mr. Nakamori’s room is bathed in warm light. The piece of crystal hangs against the windowpane, catching the sunlight and refracting it so that bits of light go swirling merrily throughout the room. The way the light dances around gives the space a blissful weightlessness reminiscent of the ballerina dancing against gravity on one of the photographs hanging on the wall. This close-up description sets the scene for the intimate conversation (figure 2) between Mr. Nakamori and Misako as they eat noodles together. The growing trust between the two inspires Misako to exercise aloud. She then turns to Mr. Nakamori, asking his opinion. Not bad, he answers. The girl’s face lights up at this understated compliment—she does not even try to hide her pride.

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Figure 2

© ‘Radiance’ film partners/Kinoshita, Comme des Cinémas; Kumie: Masaya and Misako eating noodles and admiring the light of the setting sun swirling around his room.

The lyrical ambience of this scene captures the growing intimacy between the two characters, as well as, on a symbolic level, the poetic element undeniably present in the process of turning images into words. Despite this strong poiesis component, audio description is typically defined as ‘a form of assistive audio-visual translation, or inclusion service, designed to make (audio)visual products available to blind and visually impaired persons’ (Perego 2018, 114). The amount of time necessary to complete the translation reflects the level of complexity of this process: according to Cronin and King (1990, 503), it takes between 16 and 20 hours to create an audio description of an hour-long dramatic programme. In the case of dynamic arts like films, for which audio descriptions are typically created, audio description requires a skilled translation from one medium to another in a way that captures the meaning and artistry of the original, and its accurate fitting into the time gaps between dialogues. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how can one convey it in just a few? This sounds like an impossible task, requiring no less (linguistic) acrobatic talent than dancing against gravity—a word must be made spacious enough to contain the vastness of an image while, at the same time, remaining light enough to fit in the given time sequences. Against this background, Elisa Perego asserts modestly, ‘in spite of its technicalities and need for precision, audio description is a highly creative process, even comparable to a kind of literary art form (Snyder 2008), that demands a thorough mastering of one’s mother tongue’ (Perego 2018, 115). This phrase perfectly captures the nature of the problem: despite the linguistic mastery and creativity required, audio description is conceptualised as a form of assistive service or craft, which is only humbly compared with art rather than being recognised as a form of art in its own right. Shouldn’t the contrary be the case? Shouldn’t audio description be considered a new literary genre within cinematic arts with the potential to benefit both blind and sighted viewers who choose to turn it on? Isn’t disability, as the ‘artful’ (Michalko 1998, 166) form of living, generating in this a new kind of art?

The portrait of an artist that Radiance depicts is one argument supporting this hypothesis. Observing the movie’s account of how the audio description was made, we also follow the process by which an artist learns what it takes to write a good audio description. It turns out that translating an arthouse film like the one by master Kitabayashi takes even more time than the standard 20 hours and includes, in addition to writing, consulting with the monitor team, meeting with the director and countless exercises that Misako undertakes on her own. Above all, well beyond technical skills and even the best expertise in the industry, it demands embarking on an inner, creative journey. A viewer of Radiance accompanies Misako throughout this journey, observing how she changes her attitude towards disabled people, and how she finds a space within herself where she can connect with their experience, coaching her voice to portray this encounter as accurately as possible. In that way, Radiance unfolds as a Bildungsroman, or, more specifically, a Künstlerroman, which, alongside the psychological and moral evolution of the protagonist, also presents her artistic development.

Her moral progress can be tracked alongside the process of renouncing her charity-cloaked dominant position towards blind people and allowing them to lead her instead. As a novice in audio description who also appears to have had little prior interaction with disabled people, Misako makes many mistakes, both in her writing and in her interactions with disabled colleagues. Yet she is easily forgiven; she is young, very polite and, most importantly, humble enough to take criticism from her disabled colleagues and follow their preferences. Their role as guides is emphasised in one of the final scenes of the movie, when, witnessing Mr. Nakamori losing his remaining sight, Misako neither pities nor consoles him. Instead, she asks him to take her to a place he once photographed, which has acquired personal meaning for her. This scene also sums up the moral transformation Misako underwent. Rather than closing her eyes and naively imagining what it would be to be blind, as she did at the beginning of the movie, she descends into her own personal history and learns to understand blind people through her own vulnerabilities (throughout the film, in parallel to Mr. Nakamori’s storyline, we also follow her struggle with a difficult personal history: the disappearance of her father and her mother’s illness). Most significantly, she moves beyond her initial paternalist position, where she offered her services for the disabled (Michalko 1998, 97), and enters into a conversation and a loving relationship with Mr. Nakamori, where both parties are entangled in the dynamics of giving and receiving on equal terms (cf. Bolt 2021, xvi).

This moral evolution directly influences her artistic endeavours. Parallel to her getting to know disabled people, the audio description improves. Her early writing appears to be based on stereotyped notions of how blind people experience and appreciate cinematic art. In her exchange with Mr. Nakamori, when she implies that he lacks the imagination needed to grasp the meaning of the picture, we hear echoes of the classic ocular-centric epistemology, where seeing is equated with knowing. Just as one of its founders, Locke (1999, 129) doubted that blind people, lacking “the most comprehensive of all our senses, conveying to our minds the ideas of light and colours”, would be unable to form these ideas in their minds, Misako is displaying a belief that Mr. Nakamori—and other blind people unable to see such a light-dependent production as a movie—also lacks the capacity to form adequate images and ideas about it. In that sense, Misako is a good representative of ocular normative culture, which, with an authoritative voice, pretends to grasp what it means to be blind (cf. Healey and Michalko 2021)—and in this regard, as her more experienced colleague put it, it is she who, in fact, lacks imagination. Her stereotypical understanding of blindness can also be seen as a byproduct of the image of blindness conveyed by audio description standards, which such a dedicated writer as Misako takes to heart. This is why, as she progresses from her stereotypically constructed representation of a blind man to knowing the experienced Mr. Nakamori, the articulate Ms. Ishida, and the sensitive Mr. Akitoshi, she is challenged to abandon her compliant fidelity to the audio description rules and embark on her own creative journey. Alongside this process, as will be described below, audio description goes from being an inclusive service to becoming an art in its own right.

Three exercises in imagination

Radiance is structured around the creative process of making the audio description. The scene in which Misako discusses the audio description draft with her team (figure 3) recurs like a refrain throughout the movie. We also get to know fragments of the audio-described movie: twice, when it is elaborated at White Light studio scene by scene, and a third time, when a man in a black jacket enters the cinema at the movie premiere. Through these three exercises, we track the evolution of Misako’s work. Each of these exercises adds a different aspect to the understanding of audio description.

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Figure 3

© ‘Radiance’ film partners/Kinoshita, Comme des Cinémas; Kumie: Misako and her team watch the audio-described film at the White Light studio.

As it is a young discipline, it is still legitimate to ask what audio description actually is (Fryer 2016, 8). Radiance, guiding us through different understandings of audio description, gives us good insight into the state of the art of this evolving field. The first draft reflects its conceptualisation as an inclusion service for disabled people, thereby also revealing problems and misconceptions related to this definition. The second version, mediated in Misako’s encounter with the movie director, Mr. Kitabayashi, elevates audio description to the status of an integral part of cinematic art. The third and final presentation, at the movie premiere, draws on the ancient ekphrasis trope to expose the irreducible dimension of the individual literary talent necessary to create audio description as a form of ut pictura poesis. 4

Audio description as an inclusive service

In one of its opening scenes, Radiance gives us a taste of watching a movie with audio description (conceived as an inclusive service). We hear a voice describing an invisible image: The light turns green. An employee yawns. A truck enters the bus lane. When an image appears, the voice continues: A man carrying a stepladder crosses at the light. A man in a hurry checks his watch. Passengers wait for their bus, directed by an employee. A man joins the bus line. A bus stops and passengers get off. A group of school children crosses the road. The girls scold the boisterous boys for not raising their hands. Middle-aged women and employees look tired of waiting for their bus. A frowning man waits for a cab. A woman in sunglasses gives someone directions. The station. A sign for Nanto Bank. A bus stop. A cab stand. This exercise in audio description that Misako undertakes leaves the spectator with the overwhelming sensation of being bombarded with details. Why so much?—we might well ask. Why could not she just describe the impression that this busy Tokyo street makes on her? And why zoom in on the Nanto Bank instead of, say, the expression on the children’s faces? This feeling and these questions are a good segue to the following scene, where Misako is presenting the description of Mr. Kitabayashi’s movie—this time at White Light. Although this picture is calmer than the bustling Tokyo street, Misako is presenting a similarly detailed description, delivered with an equally dispassionate voice. This is why we can fully agree with Ms. Ishida when, encouraged by Mr. Nakamori, she observes: Having all those descriptions is undeniably very helpful, but if all the gaps are filled with words, it can be a bit too much. Yes, she is right: (…) lots of things are described all of a sudden. It is confusing.

The shortcomings of this first draft can be attributed to a strict adherence to the ‘first rule of description’ (Snyder 2014). As Holland explained it: “When I trained to be a describer, we were constantly reminded to be ‘impartial’ and ‘objective’. Our job was to say what we see”. According to this ‘golden’ rule of objectivity (Caro and López 2014, 134), also often referred to as the “What you see is what you say” or the ‘WYSIWYS’ rule (Snyder 2008), the best describer is supposed to operate as a ‘verbal camera lens’ (Snyder 2014), mechanically processing the visual aspects of the film, for example, zooming in on the Nanto Bank, but refraining from describing people’s facial expressions, as that would be considered a subjective interpretation of someone’s state of mind, going beyond what is objectively visible.5 According to a literal reading of this rule, instead of “He’s angry”, the describer should write about what shows that, for example, “He’s clenching his fists” (Snyder 2014, 90). Likewise, the children on the streets of Tokyo should be referred to as ‘turning up the corners of their mouths’ (Kleege 2018, 100), rather than ‘smiling’. As Radiance shows us, the objectivity rule, especially if taken uncritically to its extremes, is not without significant trade-offs. Absolute objectivity is an unattainable ideal—a raised eyebrow, for instance, can suggest many different states of mind (Holland 2009, 179), such as surprise, suspicion, anger or humour. Given that the describer must contain their description within a few seconds, it may not be possible to provide the additional context necessary to capture the meaning of the gesture. And even if it were possible, such detailed descriptions would increase the cognitive overload on the viewer (processing the description ‘upper eyelids and eyebrows lift and jaw drops’ requires much more time and effort than understanding the word ‘surprise’ (Chmiel and Mazur 2012, 178), not to mention the questionable literary value of such a physiologically laden translation.

This being said, it should be noted that the rule of objectivity, being the most basic, is also a controversial and evolving one. As stated, audio description is a young discipline (officially dating back to the activity of Metropolitan Washington Ear in the 1980s) that has only recently (at the turn of the century) become an object of scholarly examination (Perego 2018, 116–117). As Chmiel and Mazur (2012, 173) observed, the objectivity versus subjectivity debate is a hot topic among many audio describers. Also, the guidelines of different countries take varying approaches to the objectivity controversy, and they, too, are evolving over time. Adherence to the objectivity rule is more rigid in the USA and more flexible in Canada and Europe.6 As Martínez (2016) reports, Japan, despite the lack of official guidelines on audio description, also attaches great importance to the principle of objectivity. One of the audio description rules established by the Japan Visualmedia Translation Academy is: ‘Do not put subjective comments on the audio description’ (Martínez 2016, 40). The importance of this principle is also highlighted in Kawase’s movie, as it is the only audio description principle mentioned in the film and is done so repeatedly. For example, when Mr. Nakamori criticises Misako’s descriptions as being too intrusive, he frames her work as an offence against the principle of objectivity. At the same time, when Misako refrains from describing the final scene of the movie (not fully understanding it), she also veils herself behind the unassailable principle of objectivity.

As Perego (2018, 118) points out, most current guidelines are not (sufficiently) based on empirical research (cf. Udo and Fels 2010, 3; Gerber 2007, 29), so they may reflect more experiences and assumptions of professionals rather than the preferences of a blind audience. Nevertheless, as this young discipline develops, more and more empirical studies are being undertaken, including, most valuably, reception studies that investigate the effects of different audio description styles on film comprehension, enjoyment and immersion in the cinematic experience among blind and sighted viewers. This emerging discipline has not yet brought conclusive results vis-à-vis the preferences of audio description users (cf. Chmiel and Mazur 2012). Still, many emerging studies demonstrate that divergence from strict adherence to the objectivity rule and including emotional language (Caro 2016; Jekat and Carrer 2018; Karantzi 2020), first person evaluations and other creative elements (Szarkowska 2013; Udo and Fels 2009a) might be preferred by viewers and enhance their experience. For example, Caro (2016) compared the audience’s emotional response to two audio description styles: an objective one versus an ‘emotive’ one, including information about the emotional state of characters, metaphors, subjective evaluations and inferences. It turned out that the ‘emotive’ audio description was widely accepted by the audience and elicited stronger emotional responses in case of most films, especially those evoking emotions of sadness and fear (without, however, statistically relevant difference for emotion of disgust, which may rely more on the visual nature of the scene and as such require its precise description). These results correlate in an interesting way with another study by Caro and López (2014), which compared the effects of standard objective audio description on emotion evocation for different film genres. They tested two mainstream films with clear narrative lines against a third art film which lacked such a clear narrative line and dialogue. They found that while the emotion elicitation for the two mainstream films was similar among sighted and blind viewers, it showed a statistically significant difference for the avant-garde film. As the authors argue, the principle of objectivity and neutrality is not well suited for artistic movies, as it may fail to convey feelings associated with the film’s lyricism or misrepresent its other avant-garde aspects. In this context it is worth mentioning a study by Walczak and Fryer (2017), which tested the impact of a standard and an ‘emotive’ audio description on the reception of naturalistic drama. It turned out that the emotive audio description, which used the ‘strong’ and ‘spicy’ (Walczak and Fryer 2017, 13) language to match the dark atmosphere of the movie telling a story of alcohol addition, was preferred by the majority of audience (67% compared with 25% who preferred the standard audio description and 8% reported no preference). In light of this research, it can be concluded that the current audio description guidelines should be revised to allow for more flexibility in the choice of the audio description style and for its creative adjusting to the movie genre and the nature of particular scenes. A good guideline in this context might be the proposal by Mazur and Chmiel (2012) to replace the binary opposition of objectivity and subjectivity with a scale of these values, thus broadening the repertoire of possible audio description styles and giving more room to adapt the language of audio description to the film genre as well as the evidence-based preferences of its users. Above all, these emerging findings suggest that further reception studies should be undertaken to better and more systematically capture the preferences of audio description audiences.

However, the main problem with the principle of objectivity is not even its possible mismatch with some movie genres and preferences of the audience, nor its questionable aesthetic value, but the false (and discriminatory) epistemological assumptions behind it. Considering that the preferences of blind users are still insufficiently taken into account, Georgina Kleege’s voice, as a humanist scholar and a blind person herself, stands out as an important reference point for present standards. “I am sceptical, even hostile to current practice”, claims Kleege (2018), 98). Kleege reveals to us the deep philosophical reasons why the strict objectivity principle may disadvantage or even discriminate against blind users. Paradoxically, the rationale behind the objectivity rule is laudable. As Snyder (2014, 90) explains, “the idea is to let the blind audience make their own judgements. Perhaps their eyes do not work so well, but their brains and their interpretive skills are intact”. However, despite this commendable ethical motivation (and except, obviously, those cases where the describer goes too far in imposing his subjective interpretation), the principle rests on an ocular-centric epistemology. As Kleege (2018), 101) explains, the insistence on objective neutrality is founded on the false premise that ‘sighted viewers enjoy an autonomous, unmediated experience of visual media, which is more or less the same from viewer to viewer’.7 This means that ‘if the describer simply chooses the correct words, an image will be transmitted directly to the blind person’s mind’s eye, where she can form an independent, aesthetic judgement about it’.

Clearly, this ocular-centric epistemology overestimates the power of sight. It seems to suggest that the physical eye works as an infallible cognitive mechanism (sort of a camera, microscope and telescope—all in one) that automatically converts visual data into intellectual content. It is based on outdated Cartesian dualist and hypercognitive optics, where the intellect was supposed to inspect entities modelled on retinal images (cf. ⇓ Rorty 1979, 45). However, the operation of the Cartesian mechanical eye has nothing to do with our physical eyes. It rather reminds us, as Jay (1993) so vividly described, of a disembodied eye of a perspectivist painter who passes the image through a geometrical prism to freeze it into static, objective-like vision. Our real, physical eyes operate rather like those of an impressionist artist, which leave us with more or less vivid and irreducibly incarnated sensations, which, together with the data delivered by other synergistically operating senses, have to be actively interpreted by a viewer. In other words, the visual data are not a readymade product, and delivering it without a necessary interpretation may leave a blind audience with the impression of ‘hiding to nothing’ (Holland 2009, 181).

This ocular-centric epistemological regime is not free from political consequences. By privileging sight and treating it as a primary organ of knowledge acquisition, it handicaps blind people, pushing them into a position of ignorant and passive subjects (Schillmeier 2006). Moreover, as Phelan (1993, 13) astutely points out, the physical act of seeing ‘is a process of loss: learning to see is training careful blindness. To apprehend and recognise the visible is to eliminate as well as absorb visual data’. Given the abundance of details, colours, shapes and styles that every image contains, focusing on one element of vision requires unseeing many other ones. This means that behind every act of seeing there is a value judgement, selecting from the visual abundance of each image those aspects that are worth noticing (and as such is guided by hidden criteria, whether of a cognitive, aesthetic, ethical or political nature, eg, a decision to zoom into dominant social groups may unsee minorities). Against this background, Cavallo (2015), a blind performer and audio describer, observes that standard, objectivist audio description involves a subtle exercise of power. The way it presents what one sees as an irrefutable ‘visual truth’ confirms the infallible authority of the ocular-centric regime and its pretence of privileged access to truth. Moreover, it dictates to the audience what they should focus on and how to understand the image without acknowledging the irreducible degree of subjective perspective in this proposal. This is why Cavallo, in their own audio descriptions, challenges this regime by delivering them in the first (instead of the usual third) person, thus dropping the truth-pretence of the objectivist tone or asking the audience interactive questions, thus transferring responsibility for the value judgement to them.

“I am not sure that I have a mind’s eye”, says Kleege (2018, 101), thus challenging this ocular-centric regime. Instead, she writes that she has a ‘mind’s hand’, emphasising the synergic participation of other, not less noble, senses in the production of knowledge and understanding. This linguistic shift is linked to another problem with the audio description guidelines. Treating sight as the master sense leads to discrimination against blind people as knowers. Kleege (2018, 98) writes: ‘rules and guidelines that have become codified seem to arise from problematic assumptions about what blind people can understand and should know about visual phenomena’. For example, many guidelines advise against using specific jargon, including terminology specific to a given art, and ask to keep descriptions simple and understandable for the blind (Perego 2018, 106). They thereby promote the image of blind people as limited in their overall understanding of visual phenomena, and less keen or interested in its artistic side (Fryer 2016, 131). This discriminatory attitude towards blind people as knowers is also well portrayed in Radiance by Misako’s initial paternalistic attitude towards blind viewers. It is only after an exchange with Ms. Masako that she understands that blind people perceive the meaning of the film with their ‘mind’s ear’, without her help. As Ms. Masako explains to her:

Please try to imagine how, when we watch a film, it’s not just about sitting in front of a screen. Our way of enjoying a film is to immerse ourselves in a much bigger world. (…) Without knowing it, I’m already in it. I breathe the same air, I hear the same sounds, and I experience the same sensations as I watch the film.

It is worth mentioning that emerging reception studies show that blind and partially sighted viewers are indeed more familiar with and interested in film terminology than is assumed in traditional audio description guidelines. For example, in the study by Fryer and Freeman (2013), two styles of audio description to classic movie Lean (1945) were compared: a standard one, and a ‘cinematic’ one, which expressly contradicted the guidelines by incorporating filmic language (with expressions like wide shot from the opposite side of the street that’s awash with water or cut to a close shot of her face screwed up against the rain). It turned out that 67% of participants with sight loss and 72% participants with some usable vision preferred this more demanding, cinematic style. In the other study by the same authors (Fryer and Freeman 2012), the cinematic audio description to the same Lean’s movie was proved to be preferred by blind audience and to elicit higher level of presence8 and immersion in the movie. These findings strongly support Kleege’s argument that the current guidelines’ assumptions about blind people’s lack of comprehension and appreciation of cinematic language may indeed be contentious, and they call for their evidenced-based revision, which keeps audio description users ‘in the frame’ (Fryer and Freeman 2013, 412).

Audio description as a part of cinematic art

Kleege (2018, 108) sums up her critical assessment of current practises with a projection into the future. “I 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”. Radiance fits into this forward-looking conceptualisation and gives us a foretaste of the transition of audio description from a ‘segregated’ service to a new form of art. A decisive moment in this transformation is Misako’s encounter with the director of the movie, Mr. Kitabayashi. This meeting is an exception, we learn. It is Misako’s own initiative and only her dedication to the profession that make her apply for the meeting, and be delighted when the elusive artist accepts it. When the conversation happens, however, it does not feel like an exchange between, say, a cinephile or someone professionally writing about cinema and a famous artist. It has rather the character of a lesson that Mr. Kitabayashi, portrayed as an old master of Japanese cinema (whose role is, incidentally, interpreted by the master of Japanese acting art, Tatsuya Fuji), gives to a young adept of the cinematic arts. Through this dialogue, Misako gets closer to the original artistic vision of the movie and is consequently better equipped to describe it, and in addition, her own work gets elevated to the status of film art.

Screenwriter, scenographer, music writer, audio describer—what do all these professions have in common? The primary factor is that the creative decisions of each of these people will determine how the viewer receives the film. Even if the script, music and set design are inseparable parts of each picture, and turning on audio description, if there is one, is a matter of choice (for blind people, the choice of better access to the picture, and for other groups, the choice of enhancing their experience), the aesthetic bearing of each of these components is the same. Thompson (2018) explains it by referring to the category of supplement by Derrida (1967), which, while adding something to the original ‘always also becomes part of the work of art that it is thus completing by its very presence’. Audio description, just like the script and music, will build the atmosphere and convey the meaning of the film; it will become part of the represented world and influence the way the whole work is experienced by the audience. As stated, the ocular-centric epistemology assumes that audio description works as a screen reader (a metaphor by Holland 2009, 183, which is supported by the fact that some audio descriptions are recorded with a synthesised voice) that automatically converts visual stimuli into auditory ones. However, if the moving image contains at least 24 frames per second, the amount of information the audio-visual translator must contain in just a few words makes it clear that there is no room for any automatic conversion. Therefore, just as behind every act of seeing there is a value judgement, behind every description, even the tiniest one, there is an irreducible interpretative choice—a choice made from the vastness of the image that must be translated into words, mediated through an individual’s understanding of the film’s aesthetics and meaning.

Misako’s choices, which received the most attention in Radiance, culminate in the final scene of the audio-described movie. When the girl meets with the old mentor, the conversation quickly turns to the subject of this very scene. We heard its first description presented at White Light, and it goes as follows: His beige coat swells and ripples in the wind. Seen from behind, his shoulders hunched, Juzo walks in silence. As if he could see the absent Tokie in the setting sun, he stares at the horizon. There’s sand on his face. His eyes mist over. His face beams, overflowing with the hope of life. During an earlier meeting, Mr. Nakamori had pointed out the overly subjective and or interpretive nature of this description, particularly: “As if he could see the absent Tokie” or ‘overflowing with the hope of life’. Now, the change with the movie’s director discloses the reasons behind these unfortunate formulations. When Mr. Kitabayashi gently explains to Misako that the main character, as an older person, is in fact awaiting death rather than hoping for life, we realise how difficult it was for such a young person as Misako to grasp this nuanced meaning. Her youth, however, was not the only reason. Mr. Kitabayashi further explains: Juzo would have preferred to die. But could he, at that moment, be in touch with something that transcends the will to live or die? This comment perplexes Misako, because it betrays her own misreading of the film and it contradicts her own aesthetic preferences. That seems too abstract. I want cinema to convey a more tangible feeling of hope, she claims.

This exchange brings us to the heart of the problem that can arise when audio description is treated as an extradiegetic (external to the film itself, cf. Thompson 2018) accommodation rather than an integral, creative part of film design. Audio description, which is added to a film after its production and as such, does not include consultation with other members of the film crew, may not match its aesthetic style and overall meaning. This is especially true of arthouse films, which leave room for broad interpretation (cf. Caro and López 2014). Audio description guidelines attempt to solve this problem by appealing to the principle of objectivity, which, however, only further distances the interpreter’s work from the creative process and inevitably condemns them to describe the abstract meaning with a sequence of visible, physical actions that will almost certainly result in banality. In Radiance, Misako, whose overall quality of work improved significantly after meeting the director, initially withdrew from describing that scene and left it understated, precisely for fear of violating the principle of objectivity. Therefore, placing audio describers closer to the production process is necessary to recognise the value of their own creative efforts and to allow the word to soak into the image, so that together, word and image form a harmonious whole.

As Haig (2002), a visually impaired filmmaker and the first person to incorporate audio description into her 1997 film Drive(Haig 1997) at the production stage, summed it up:

‘Everything is a creative interpretation, and I don’t see the audio-description as any different. I see it as another part ideally of the creative interpretation of the essential story or piece. And in that sense, it has to be part of the art form that is the whole film. But it’s not an art in the sense that it stands alone, but neither does film music stand alone, neither does the design of the film stand alone, neither does the photography of the film stands alone. All these are constituent elements of the film as a whole’.

The emerging discipline of accessibility studies (Greco 2018) has recently brought forth theories and practices that, continuing Haig’s legacy, recognise the importance of including audio description creation as an integral part of the artwork production. The most important are: accessible film-making (Romero-Fresco 2019), integrated access (Fryer and Cavallo 2022), universal design (Udo and Fels 2010) or poietic design (Greco 2019).

The first characteristics of these new creative strategies is therefore integrating access (audio description, surtitling, subtitles for foreigners, etc) into the very process of film or performance production. As (Fryer and Cavallo 2022, 56–79) demonstrate, one of the motivations behind this integration are shortcomings of traditional, objectivist audio description. Strikingly, the deficiencies reported by the theatre professionals interviewed in the book largely match those expressed by audio description users (both in the reception studies discussed above and those expressed by the fictional characters in Radiance). In particular, the respondents in the book criticised traditional audio description for being inaccurate in its pursuit for objectivity, too dense (as Ms. Ishida in Radiance put it: lots of things are described all of a sudden), patronising, delivered in an inadequate voice (cf. Kleege 2018, 106), ocular-centric and not allowing for equal immersion in the movie for blind and sighted audiences (cf. Fryer and Freeman 2012; Caro 2016). Treating access as an integral part of artwork has already brought significant improvements in the live performances (cf. Fryer and Cavallo 2022, 80–98), as well as in the area of filmmaking9 (cf. Romero-Fresco 2018, 506–508). Szarkowska (2013) provides an interesting example of integrating foreign language accessibility with the work of art at the postproduction stage by basing Polish audio description on the published script of Volver by Almodóvar (2006). As reported in the study, the audience enjoyed the vivid and full descriptions (eg, Evening. They get to the street where Raimunda lives. It seems as if the neighbourhood and the city would end here as contrasted to traditional audio description’s Nighttime… The car pulls up outside an apartment building). They rendered it more entertaining, enabling them to better grasp the motivations of the characters and to follow the plot (Szarkowska 2013, 386).

The second and crucial dimension of integrating access advocated by these new creative strategies is to collaborate with their primary users: disabled people. This is best explained by Romero-Fresco (2019, 25–31), discussing the theoretical foundations of accessible filmmaking. He distinguishes between access to content and access to creation. As he astutely observes, ‘access to content is of course useful, but if not accompanied by other types of access it can be seen to promote a paternalistic and self-serving approach that perpetuates the agency of people without disabilities and the passive role of people with disabilities’ (Romero-Fresco 2019, 25). He therefore proposes replacing this narrow notion of access with a ‘fuller and fairer’ view of media accessibility that includes access to creation, so that groups that traditionally have not had the opportunity to create can participate in the production of audio-visual media products that everyone, including people without disabilities, will need to have access to. As artists interviewed in the study by Fryer and Cavallo (2022, 81) reported, giving access to the creative process to disabled individuals and integrating them in the team results in a ‘catalyst for creativity’ for those disabled participants and for other members of the crew. One of Radiance’s main strengths is how well it shows the process of collaboration, still very rare in occidental culture, and the aesthetic benefit it brings. The creative team in the movie consists of Misako, her two sighted colleagues (Tomako, actress in the audio-described film and Shinatsu, representative of the distribution company) as well as four blind or partially sighted individuals: Mr. Nakamori, Ms. Ishida, Ms. Masako and Mr. Akitoshi. Recurring meetings of this team allow us to closely observe how integrating the creative process with disabled participants enriches Misako’s text. It is the voice of disabled people that allows Misako to move beyond the inaccuracies of her first patronising audio description draft, and most importantly, catalyses her own artistic exploration, teaches and inspires her. It can therefore be argued that in Radiance it is the creative contribution of disabled people that allows Misako’s writing to rise to the level of art (importantly the Japanese audio description of Radiance was prepared in the same collaborative way10). As such, the movie, both in its narrative and its genesis, can work as a catalyst for this (still exceptional in practice) collaborative mode of audio description creation.

This leads to the third and culminating aspect of integrated access, which consists of weaving audio description into the very fabric of artwork. Audio description is always an integral part of the artwork for its users, nevertheless, its integration with artwork also for sighted audience (who may not even know of its existence) goes a step further: it allows to explore and celebrate its creative potential, and it also helps to reverse ocular-centric understandings of the audio description/non-audio description hierarchy (Thompson 2018), possibly inspiring a cultural change. The live nature of theatre performance has already brought fascinating artistic exploration in that respect. A very vivid example comes from Udo and Fels (2009a), who describe an unconventional approach to describing Shakespeare’s Hamlet, adopted by Hart House Theatre in Canada. The audio description for this play is written in iambic pentameter and skilfully placed in the voice of Horatio, whom Shakespeare’s Hamlet asked on his deathbed to tell his story. It its literary masterpiece and it also manages to go beyond the ocular-centric regime by providing sensory-based images that do not depend solely on sight (eg, saying: The ball—enflamed in fire from torches lit which evokes the feeling of warmth instead of only Red and yellow hues fill the stage: Udo and Fels 2009a, 8).11 In the film art, a similar artistic strategy is to include intradiegetic audio description or screen a movie with audio description (Thompson 2018). Radiance is a very successful example of this strategy, as it weaves into the film’s storyline a creative interplay between different levels of intradiegetic and extradiegetic audio description: for additionally to be accompanying Misako in the process of audio describing Mr. Kitabayashi’s movie, we also hear her many ad hoc exercises in describing the current movie scenes, as well as a description made at Mr. Nakamori’s request (Describe the photo to me, so I can visualise it) by his colleague, also a photographer, depicting for him a photo he made for the cover of the prestigious Radiance magazine. The description goes like this: The image is mostly green. It’s just a girl in the middle of the forest. But the character, the product, the landscape, the light, the shade, the wind, they’re all perfectly balanced. I think that I’ve captured that moment when all those things become one. This audio description helps Mr. Nakamori visualise the picture and enjoy it—he smiles with appreciation. For the sighted viewers, in turn, this audio description acts as haiku poetry that allows them to enter more deeply into the scene and celebrate the image, thereby also enhancing their experience. Regardless of the art genre and the strategy of integrating the audio description into it, its own artistic medium is a word, and as such it deserves further literary analysis of its creative potential as discussed ahead.

Audio description—the case for cinematic ekphrasis

Panoramic view of Lake Hamana. There is a low-hanging sky. The ridge of mountains across the lake is blurred. Through a thicket of trees, the lake is below. The tiled roof of a traditional Japanese house appears. The window giving on to the garden is wide open. On the lake, a white motorboat approaches the shore, slowing down. This description, which we hear at the movie premiere, has improved a lot compared with Misako’s first attempts at White Light. Those first crude exercises consisted of a set of mechanically consecutive sentences like: Through some trees, a calm sea. A house with a tiled roof. A motorboat moves along the shore. Like Misako’s description of the Tokyo street, this admittedly gave an account of the images observed, yet did not manage to paint a vivid picture in the listeners’ heads. In her later revisions, the words flow with a poetic grace and draw the audience into the current of the story. Also, this time it is no longer the young Misako reading out the description in the tone of a school essay, but rather, the mature voice of the narrator that charms and lures us to immerse ourselves in the fictional world. What caused such a stark contrast between the two versions? To understand this, we need to delve into the aesthetic material of audio description: language. Just as the previous chapter argued for the inclusion of audio description in the cinematic arts in general, this one will analyse its literary specificity. Unlike other verbal art within cinema—a screenplay, which grows out of drama—audio description draws on the ancient rhetorical figure of ekphrasis and moves the author’s poetic resources into the difficult art of painting with words.

Ekphrasis (from the Greek ‘vivid description’, etymologically combining the prefix ‘ex’-‘out’ or even ‘in full’ or ‘utterly’ with the verb ‘phrazein’—‘to speak’, ‘to show’ (Führer and Banaszkiewicz 2014, 52) originally referred to an ancient rhetorical or literary trope evoking—through words—an impression of a visual stimulus, object, or scene (Squire 2015). Modern critics define ekphrasis as ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’ (Heffernan 1993, 3), or ‘the sought-for equivalent in words of any visual image’ (Krieger 1992, 9). In the case of ekphrasis, it is not just about a description, but one so vivid that it manages to manifest the described objects in a hearer’s imagination. Mitchell (1994) opens his article on literary ekphrasis with a reference to probably the most familiar example: radio. Indeed, anyone who has ever seen a radio play or listened to an audiobook knows that verbal descriptions are able to draw us into fictional words and recreate its multisensory experience.

‘Something special and magical is required of language’, writes Mitchell 1994, 158). Indeed, ekphrasis takes us into the heart of the language’s poetic powers. These do not exhaust themselves only in aesthetic beauty, rhythm and rhyme, but also concern its capacity to create new worlds, that is, poiesis in the deepest sense of the word (Martin 2020). In the ‘Iliad’, when the allegedly blind poet Homer places the earth, the sun, and the stars of the night sky in the middle of Achilles’ shield and then goes on to describe the two inner cities with their marriages, harvests, crimes and battles, it is clear that he, with almost divine creative powers, is raising a whole new world to existence here. The world, that, as Keats so suggestively put it in another classic example of ekphrasis (‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’), enchants its visitors with unheard melodies that are sweeter than those heard, and with its beauty, that not being sensual, cannot fade. As such, ekphrasis is both a miracle and a mirage, as Krieger (1992, xvii) points out. A miracle, because, with verbal, invisible colours, it manages to paint an image in our minds, and a mirage, because the poet can only convey the illusion of such an impossible picture through his words. Audio description, too, if it attempts to imitate the world depicted in the film, must go beyond the purely descriptive and referential function of language, and embrace its poetic capacity.

In Radiance, Misako managed to bring about this miracle. In the final version, she opens up our imagination and makes us see a panoramic view of Lake Hamana so vividly, it is as if engraved on our minds’ hands by Hokusai’s own chisel. However, the effortful and time-consuming nature of this process, which we follow throughout the whole film, gives us a fair idea of the degree of poetic passion required to conjure up this image, as well as its major difficulties. According to Krieger (1992), the main challenge of ekphrasis is the different matter of the two arts it works with. The domain of the visual arts is extension—the material space they occupy, their physicality—whereas the matter of the intelligible literary arts is time. Looking at the canvas, we can capture all the richness of the image in one second, all the layers of its shapes, colours, tonality, dynamics, the narrative it creates and the impression it makes on us. Verbal description, by contrast, is stretched out in time, with sentences constrained to follow a sequence and describe the image step by step. How to capture all this rich world in words, how to transform sensibility into intelligibility? To freeze the flow of sentences in a ‘still movement’ (Krieger 1992, 263) of a spacious mirage, the poet must indeed accomplish something as impossible as translating space into time. In the case of film, being the moving picture, the audio describer must face an additional difficulty: multiple frames must fit into an ascetic interval of a few seconds. Radiance illustrates this point made by (Snyder 2008, 936), that the audio describer must be a poet gifted in the Japanese art of haiku, which can fit a vivid image and its ideally transcendental meaning into just a few verses.

Due to the paradoxical character of ekphrasis, Krieger (1992, 10), a daredevil who decides to take on this literary challenge is troubled by two opposing impulses. Misako’s artistic path and her film-long struggle to find the perfect words for each picture reflect these impulses perfectly. The first of these impulses is exhilaration, which ‘derives from the dream—and the pursuit—of a language that can, in spite of its limits, recover the immediacy of sightless vision’. This exhilaration, or, as (Mitchell 1994, 152) puts it, ekphrastic hope to find an ideal, infinitely capacious form, is what motivates Misako’s initial relentless energy trying to formulate in verbal description her entire, everyday experience. This pursuit of an ideal is, however, confronted with the other, contradictory impulse, namely that of exasperation (Krieger 1992, 10) or, as Mitchell (1994) puts it, fear born of the impossibility of closing space in temporal frames. When, after meeting the director, Misako withdraws from describing certain scenes, she seems indeed intimidated by the power of the images and exasperated at her unsuccessful attempts to recreate them in words. Also, on an allegorical level, the relationship between Misako and Mr. Nakamori, their game of attraction and aversion, resonates with the ekphrastic tension between images and words: they romantically seek each other out, but, unable to reach each other, become exasperated. It is, therefore, not a coincidence that when they finally fall for each other, the word also begins to harmonise with the image, or as ⇓metaphorically put it in his poem, ‘Song’: ‘the ear and the eye/lie down together/in the same bed’. The interplay of the two layers—literal and allegorical—is further emphasised during the final screening of the film, when scenes from the projected film (now beautifully described) are interspersed with snapshots of Nakamori and Misako’s shared history. In their case, the romantic dream of ekphrasis has come true.

Unfortunately, audio description, despite being such an interesting case of cinematic ekphrasis as Radiance illustrates, is still an underdeveloped and unrecognised art. There are, however, audio describers (Bigotte Chorão and Almeida 2015; Fryer 2016; Holland 2009; Orero and Pujol 2007; Snyder 2008), accessibility scholars working within the framework of accessible film-making (Romero-Fresco 2019), integrated access (Fryer and Cavallo 2022), universal design (Udo and Fels 2010) or poietic design (Greco 2019) and some literary scholars such as Kleege (2018) or Thompson (2018), who recognise the literary potential of audio description. Amelia Cavallo, a blind performer, audio describer and accessibility theorist (Cavallo 2015; Fryer and Cavallo 2022) offers a fascinating practical example of using ekphrasis as a poetic device in the spectacle Sheer, produced by Extant company. This spectacle explores many different forms such as aerial circus and burlesque, and its audio description is delivered in the first person by the performer themselves, Amelia Cavallo, while hanging many metres above the ground, suspended in the air upside down, spinning quickly and performing other acrobatic movements. It can therefore also be read as an embodied symbol of the linguistic acrobatics necessary to apply the ekphrastic technique, which, as if against the gravity, has to transport the physicality of the visual into the temporality of the verbal. As Cavallo (2015, 132–133) reports, using ekphrasis allowed them indeed to construct representational interplay between the physical and metaphorical layers, interweaving the description of the physical movement with its emotive quality and the characters’ inner experience. Moreover, ekphrasis widened the poetic and metaphorical repertoire necessary to express the sensuality and ‘hyperfeminity’ of a disabled body, describing, for example, the movements of her ‘peachy bum’ to the audience (Fryer and Cavallo 2022, 164). This reinforced the political layer of the spectacle, serving as ‘a performative commentary on femininity, the male gaze and how gender and sexuality are constructed, performed and sometimes policed in disabled bodies’ (Fryer and Cavallo 2022, 165).

However, despite this inspiring practical example and emerging theory within the accessibility and audio-visual translations studies, the reflection on the cinematic emphasis is largely missing from literary theory and film studies. And this against the fact that the contemporary concept of ekphrasis is evolving to signify broadly a ‘representation in one medium of a real or fictitious text composed in another medium’ and include such uncanonical cases as musical (transposing a painting or a literary text into notes) or cinematic ekphrasis. In this latter respect, the hitherto extremely interesting and pioneering work of Sager (2008) discusses cases of the transposition of the visual arts into the medium of cinema (as in films such as Girl with a Pearl Earring by ⇓and Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Vreeland 1999), while completely ignoring the more canonical case of image-to-text transposition, as in audio description. Wider recognition of the cinematic importance and literary mastery of audio description would be crucial to take full advantage of the potential of the literary theory of ekphrasis in refining the practice of audio description and establishing its status as an art.

Cinematic poetry in the audio description of Radiance

The Japanese audio description for Radiance can be described as integrated. It was created in collaboration with the film’s director, who shared her artistic vision with the audio describer, Takako Matsuda, guiding her to make the description minimalist, not patronising; respectful of the audience’s own imaginary powers (similar to the way Misako was guided in the film). Kawase, who, in a gesture of mise-en-abîme,12 created Mr. Kitabayashi’s movie inside the movie Radiance in order to introduce the problems of audio description into the storyline, also took on the role of Mr. Kitabayashi herself in the sense that she was available for Takako Matsuda to discuss her audio description text. The Japanese audio description can be described as integrated also in the sense that it was prepared in collaboration with blind consultants from Palabra, whose real-life comments were included in the film. What follows is an analysis of the French audio description of this French-Japanese production, prepared by Jean-Marc Plumauzille and Marc Vighetti from the Association Valentin Haüy. Even if, for linguistic reasons, the film’s director does not have the same relationship with this text as with the Japanese version, this audio description, despite some shortcomings, is a very good example of the cinematic poetry, knitted together with the poetics of the film, and, as such, an asset to blind and sighted viewers’ experience.

Referring to the categories discussed in the previous chapters, Radiance’s audio description can be classified as a subtly emotive one. It goes beyond strict adherence to the objectivity principle, which would be at odds with the lyrical and picturesque nature of the movie. In particular, it involves (a) information on the emotional state of characters; (b) evaluation of the describer; (c) inference or interpretation of a fact; (d) use of emotionally loaded words in spite of its neutral equivalent and (e) metaphors (cf. the classification by Caro 2016, 7–8). It does so, however, in a subtle, unobtrusive way, never multiplying descriptions beyond what is necessary. To give some examples: in one of the first scenes, we hear a description of the enigmatic Mr. Nakamori as watching the first screening at White Light (a) with an impassive, almost indifferent face (un visage impassible, presque indifférent), while radiant Mr. Akitoshi is described as having (b) a kind face (visage bienveillant) and Misako (b) a sweet, childlike, young face (un jeune visage doux et enfantin). When Misako at the second screening accuses Masaya of lacking imagination, everyone present is (a) appalled (toutes les personnes présentes sont consternées). In the scene where Masaya, having lost his remaining sight, turns to touch in his exploration of the world and takes Misako’s face in his hands, it is described with emotionally loaded verb (d): caressing instead of simply ‘touching’. At this moment, she (a) looks at him tenderly (elle le regarde avec tendresse) and closes her eyes to (c) to enjoy the caresses on her face (pour profiter des caresses sur son visage). Also, the radiating light of the sun is personified (e) in the audio description, as it caresses Misako’s hair and Yasuko’s shoulders (caresse les cheveux de Misako et les épaules de Yasuko) or plays among the trees (joue entre les arbres). While engaging these emotive qualities, the audio description remains nuanced and indeed minimalistic in its conclusions and judgement. Unlike Misako’s first audio description in the movie, the audio description of it is not intrusive or patronising. In some scenes, the audio description rightly remains laconic. For example, when Masaya realises that he did not distinguish day from night, this longer scene with a close-up of his face is described only with a single phrase: he freezes (il se fige), allowing the silence to speak for Mr. Nakamori’s stupefaction.

Another strength of this audio description is its ekphrastic quality. Plumauzille and Vighetti manage with a poetic lightness to convey the rich shots of nature, otherwise crucial to the pictorial poetics of Kawase. For example, when Misako is driving to the countryside, the audio description takes us into the forest, where the slender tree trunks project their foliage high into the grey sky. The landscape becomes more mountainous as the winding road climbs a hill. Tree trunks flash past behind the glass, creating a hypnotic stroboscopic effect. 13 This and other descriptions of nature with ekphrastic charm manage to bring time to a momentary standstill, allowing the viewer to enter the picture and savour the landscapes described. In one scene, Misako observes: there are so many different sounds here, when I close my eyes, I can hear them even better. The audio description makes the same effect on the sighted viewers, making them hear better as the wind rustles the dense foliage of the tall trees (le vent fait frissonner le feuillage dense des grands arbres) and notice the previously unseen details, such as when a wood fire gives off thick white smoke (un feu de bois dégage une épaisse fumée blanche). In that sense, Plumauzille’s and Vighetti’s text strongly supports the thesis that, if well-written, audio description can enhance the sighted viewers’ experience of art.

It is not surprising that in Radiance (Vers la Lumière) a very important role is played by light, its colours, activity and almost tactile warmth. Its descriptions in no way detract from the beauty of these visible operations. We hear the golden clouds slowly stretch across the sky, masking the setting sun (des nuages dorés s'étirent lentement dans le ciel en masquant le soleil couchant) or diamond-cut crystal hangs in front of a window, refracting the light in tiny rainbows (un cristal taillé en diamant est suspendu devant une fenêtre, réfractant la lumière en petits arcs-en-ciel). The latter extradiegetic description enters into a subtle mirroring interplay with the intradiegetic one, undertaken by Misako in one of her above-cited exercises, which in the French version, as befits the mise-en-abîme trope, resembles a crystal hung at the windowpane and reflects the intradiegetic one, beginning as such light of the setting sun streams into Nakamori’s home. A prism shines in a rainbow across the room (la lumière du soleil couchant pénètre chez Nakamori. Dans toute la pièce, un prisme brille en arc-en-ciel). As argued, this radiating light can be understood as a metaphor of blindness, subverting the ocular-centricity of contemporary culture. In visual terms, when the camera takes Mr. Nakamori’s perspective, we see the view as partially or, later, when he loses his remaining sight—entirely veiled in a yellow mist (brouillard jaune); an experience similar to looking straight into the sun with eyes closed. A similar visual effect can be seen in many scenes shot against the sun, when images blur in the blinding light. Through these visual operations, Kawase subtly overcomes the ‘othering’ narrative of blindness and inscribes it into the universal human experience.

This leads to the audio portrait of the main blind character, Mr. Nakamori. The audio portrays him—just as the visuals do—as a strong, leading figure who, while partially blind, still works as a photographer (and the film makes it clear that he is renowned, admired and professionally still very active, working late into the night and often consulted by others). The portrait of Mr. Nakamori can be read as a very good illustration of the famous quote by Barthes (1981, 15) that ‘the photographer’s organ is not his eye (…) but his finger (…)’. Masaya’s technical and tactile prowess in working with his camera is repeatedly evident in the film and emphasised in the audio description. The following scene is a good example.

He opens the back of the camera and places a film inside.

He engages the film and winds it onto the spool by turning a small crank on the side.

He carefully closes the case and continues to turn the crank until it locks.

He opens the viewfinder cap.

He smiles.

Children approach to take pictures.

A little boy poses in front of the double lens.

Masaya takes a picture of him.14

This scene is accompanied by the shots adopting his partially blind perspective, where the yellow mist shrouds two-thirds of his vision (un brouillard jaune masque les deux/tiers de sa vision) but he operates camera so that the faces of the two children enter the viewfinder (les visages des deux enfants s’inscrivent dans le viseur). While highlighting agency, hope and ‘blindness gain’, the movie does not negate the process Masaya has to go through to adapt to his new life with blindness and accept it, as well as some of its practical difficulties. For example, while repeatedly describing how Masaya guides himself by sliding his hand over the façade (il se guide en faisant glisser sa main sur la façade), the audio description also shows him slip (il dérape). Yet, even after this accident, when he is robbed of his camera, he retains power and agency: he manages to spot the red shoes of the thief (his former colleague, a photographer), follows him to his house and with a cold and determined face (son visage est froid et déterminé) makes the latter give back his possession. His agency is also evident in his private life, that is, his developing relationship with Misako, where it is the latter asking him to be her guide and him not allowing a girl to be overprotective towards him. For example, in one of the last scenes, when Misako spots Masaya at the top of a high staircase and wants to run up to him, the latter protests by saying I’m fine. No need to run after me or look for me. I will come to you, which he does, now completely blind, with the help of his cane (en s’aidant de sa canne).

Despite the many merits of this audio description, one has to mention its minor shortcomings, such as two instances when the audio tells too much (eg, revealing that Masaya is 42 years and Misako 27 years of age, which the sighted viewer does not know) or adds a redundant comment: Masaya pulls up the blinds (Masaya remonte les stores) when it could clearly be heard. While these shortcomings are minor and also rare, there is one general, more important and more acute shortcoming: the lack of cinematic language. In the case of Kawase’s film, where form plays an important and meaningful role, the inclusion of such language would have been enriching. One of the most interesting camera operations is the way it acts as a prosthetic eye in taking Mr. Nakamori’s perspective (which is expressed with the reference to yellow mist) and in containing many other interesting shots when the vision is intentionally occluded by, for example, Misako’s hand or some object (which is not mentioned at all). These camera operations are very interesting for sighted viewers, insofar as they make them realise how much one indeed sees with only partial vision and how a whole image is imaginatively created from only a small part of it. The audio description does subtly refer to the particularities of the perspective adopted, by hinting at cinematic language, for example, in the above quoted hypnotic stroboscopic effect of the path through the forest, or another view from above (vue de l’haut) at the tree that dominates the forest with its green foliage (l’arbre domine la forêt de son feuillage vert). These fragments may suggest that strictly technical language might have been avoided in order not to ‘break the illusion’ (Fryer and Freeman 2012, 421) while trying to convey the feeling of different techniques (which can be partially justifying the authors). Nevertheless, in this movie where so many formal experiments also create meaning and a particular ‘feeling of blindness’, their almost complete omission in the audio description has to be deemed as a lack.

Speaking of shortcomings, it is worth mentioning the deficiencies of the English subtitles as compared with the French ones. Out of many examples that could be cited, one is particularly meaningful for the topic of this paper: whereas the English version of Tomako’s phrase Maybe audio description is a way to connect with those who are not able to see film points to some inherent lack or incapacity of people not able to see films, writing itself into the medical model of disability, the French version shifts this incapacity to the society, which, like Misako at the beginning of the movie, lacks imagination in grasping disabled people’s capacities: Maybe audio description is a way to connect with those who are not supposed to be able to access the film (Peut-être que l’audiodescription est une façon de se connecter à ceux qui ne sont pas supposés pouvoir accéder au film). This example supports the Pablo Romero-Fresco’s thesis that the accessible filmmaking should not ghettoise disability by framing it as some ‘special’ access, but put access for a disabled audience (surtitling, audio description) in the same category as access for foreign viewers (subtitling) and align all these forms of access with the artistic vision of the film director (and, one might add, the ethical thrust of this vision). The above-quoted (and other) examples resulting from the comparative study of two language versions of Radiance strongly support this argument.