[?] - the use of [?] at the end of a particular word indicates that the word is pronounced with hesitance by the speaker
Text in green indicates extract from the conversations, voice overs or vocals taken directly from the film Handsworth Songs.
Grainy, black and white, 16 mm. [metallic clanks reverberate, like a pulled string]
Yellow letters appear, divided by a white line. Handsworth. Songs.
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.
Slow Emergency Siren, Ongoing is a project that aims to make this still resonant film more and differently accessible. We commissioned an augmented audio description track and creative captions and consulted with caption and audio description users about how best to create new modes of accessing the film.
I'm Sarah Hayden, co-convener with LUX of the project. This audio documentary records a year-long collaborative process as we work together to develop and document creative forms of cross-modal translation. We were hoping to find forms that would be appropriate for Handsworth Songs.
You'll hear the voice of audio-describer Elaine Lillian Joseph, speaking over the film's soundtrack, deliberating about word choices and phrasing in her script.
But first, Dr Clive Nwonka, a London-based academic specialising in Black British and African-American film, offers an introduction to Handsworth Songs. Clive explains why it's still so important today.
[firmly with deliberation] The Black Audio Film Collective's Handsworth Songs is a landmark film from 1986 that explores Britain's narratives of racism and socio-economic laceration. [distant, disjointed industrial clanks bellow and reverberate as if in an echo chamber]
Directed by John Akomfrah, the film is a central text within the works of the Black Film Workshop Movement, a group of film collectives who had emerged in the early ‘80s with a shared set of stylistic and political sensibilities.
The political context of the 1980s is crucial to understanding the motivation and the nature of the text. The film performs a radical visual and narrational intervention into the dominant media narratives that distorted the realities of the Black conditions. This was a period of Black uprisings and rebellions against police violence and the social and eco- nomic oppressions of Thatcherism in Bristol in 1980 and in Brixton, Liverpool, Man- chester, Leeds and beyond in 1981. [distant, disjointed industrial clanks continue]
It is in the aftermath of the riots in Handsworth, Birmingham in 1985 that Handsworth Songs takes its lens towards producing a counter-hegemonic account of the racial har- assment existing within the Afro-Caribbean locale. But the film is also interested in situat- ing its analysis within the context of Britain's colonial history that continue to inform the Black presence within the nation.
Handsworth Songs exhibits a concerted rejection of the documentary realism that had become the dominant framing device for narrating the Black British conditioning, exchan- ging the othering and particularising of our existence and identities for a more expression- istic, poetic, and formal approach that could be understood as a political stance in itself. Handsworth Songs not only remains a high point in Black British film but occupies an es- sential position within British visual culture.
This is Elaine drafting her audio description. Elaine Lillian Joseph is a freelance audio-de- scriber from Birmingham with Caribbean heritage. [strenuous, disjointed clanks punc- tuate over doomy synth music] She describes for TV, cinema and live shows.
Elaine specialises in experimental films, gallery exhibitions and dance, but also loves to provide live description of cabaret nights. Elaine and I meet in a busy café to check in.
How is it all?
How is it going? How is the actual scripting going?
I just like, okay… Take for example the first - the first description, I rewrote that — I don’t even know how many times. I'd like pick a word that I'd be like: ‘No, not that word this word’, and then eventually return to the first word. [chuckles]
I have done a looot of research. [laughs]
I know, I could really feel that. Yes, so much!
I found a lot of the original clips from like British Pathé and other archives.
Do you have any idea what this like museum is?
Nooo. [laughs]
Isn't it funny?
I am still researching.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I know the film that… that it’s from - -
is this amazing film from the 60s, but I have no clue [!] what that machine is--
- I wonder what it could be?
-- and again, like, I don't want to… I don't want to find out and be like, this is a --
Yeah.
Like, I like ‘mighty rise’.
Yeah.
But the ‘Victorian machine’ is just too vague. But I can see that there are pistons and stuff like that. I just want to describe it a little bit more.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It really is. [Elaine chuckles softly] And the fact that it comes back, you get like… it does return. It does feel like it’s...
Yeah, exactly!
I wonder...
That's a work in progress.
Yeah, but I think you can say like - ‘the mighty rise and fall’ makes a huge difference to what it might just be as a Victorian machine. But it is umm... It's tricky.
Silhouetted birds descend on the treetop.
Birds ascend and descend onto surrounding treetops in the colloquially known, Pigeon Park.
It's really tricky.
I definitely found that with location as well.
Yeah. Yeah, I did wonder about that.
The birds settling on the treetops — [soft, percussive music plays in the background]
— and then realising that - that's a park that we call Pigeon Park.
This is what I wondered, you say like -- [Elaine chuckles softly]
is it like Pigeon Park officially or is it - or do you call it Pigeon Park?
Yes, Brummies call it Pigeon Park.
Yeah. So it's just the park that surrounds the Cathedral. I can't even tell you the name of the official square. --
- - Yeah, I've literally never known it as anything else.
But then much better that it’s Pigeon Park.
Yeah… [with consideration] Like trying to add that extra touch of making it feel more local, but explaining.
Find the rhythm.
Ba-ba, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba. Da-da, da-da-da
Birds ascend and descend …
In Handsworth, onlookers and police have congregated outside boarded up shops. [haunting, angsty synth music lurks in] Suddenly everyone flees and the camera cap- tures their running legs.
’There're still remains’ ’There're still remains’ ’There're still remains’ ’There're still remains’
'There're still remains' 'There're still remains' 'There're still remains' 'There're still remains'
In Handsworth onlookers and police have congregated outside boarded up shops. [people chatter in the background] Suddenly everyone flees and the camera captures their running legs.
It must have been a scary experience
More footage shows rioters lobbing brick missiles. [unsettled crowd boos and shouts in disapproval] [sharp whistle blows]
What about the description of the protesters? [inquiringly] Have you kind of come down on a certain set of terms that you're happy to use or...
I-I think so. Still a work in progress.
Yeah.
- - or ‘South Asian’. [ruminatively] But that's really difficult [!]. And also just even saying the word ‘protesters’--
I know --
--rather than like ‘rioters’, or ...
-- or ‘demonstrator’ [chuckles gently] Yeah.
Even like relative to the kind of, you know, when you're...
Trevor Mathison is a founding member of Black Audio Film Collective and is the artist re- sponsible for Handsworth Songs’ distinctive soundscape.
So, I was doing a lot of the recording of interviews and some location stuff.
Then, later on, I started to experiment with some of the pieces that I recorded, some of the outtakes and atmos and seeing if I could make those into sonic templates that could be fitted underneath certain sections. [disjointed, metallic clanks gain strength, punc- tuating one after another]
My job was not to try and compete with music that's in the film.
It's finding a way of actually enhancing the dialogue, [clanks reverberate with impact, as if in an echo chamber] and the mood, and the set pieces, getting energy into the film [!]. So that's the magic of it… I think is a layering.
There's other things underneath it or on either side of it. So it's made up of different sorts of atmospheres. [gradual, airy hiss swooshes in. Left to right. Up and down, and fades]
It’s growing out of or growing into a different sonic landscape.
A young white man pulls a milk float down the street. He passes policemen who are guarding an adjacent road. Smoke smoulders behind them. -
A chase. A lone Black teen hurtles down a road.
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 eight against one, shove him against a wall, where children are sitting and watching.
Narrowly misses the slash of another copper's baton.
When the guy is running down the road, and the milk cart goes past, and the police are chasing the guy, he is being hunted [!].
And it was the sound of humpback whales that we've been playing around with. That was the through-line, the lament [!].
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.
What about like this appalling, I mean, the fact that you have capitalised this in the note about the horror of that scene, and, it is just so appalling [!]. And it is like the most striking
… moment of violence in a film that is largely about these aggressions but doesn’t visual- ise them in that way.
Yeah, it's just like such a weighty scene. And that, umm... note that I wrote to myself in capitals, I do that. That wasn't like, I guess, like special to this. I often write warnings to myself --
-- or something…so I have to watch the same thing over and over again.
Yeah, yeah.
So, just a warning to myself like —
Yeah —
-- this is like a --
No.
The Bloody Battleground. [Vocals break in]
♪ Bring me my spear ♪
Black residents stare at the police.
♪ Bring me my cha-a-ario-o-ot ♪
to move out.
What about a photo titled ‘Handsworth in Flames’
♪ of FIREEEE! ♪
grows larger and larger, until it engulfs the screen. [computer mouse clicks] [light key- board plays ‘Chariot of Fire’ to a dub beat]
The Bloody Battleground —
staring Black residents. Riot- hit families pack up to move out.
An image of a white woman wheeling her baby across debris. [mouse clicks; Elaine hums in tune] [faint typing]
Someone films from their car as they drive past parked police vehicles.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven police vans and one copper who double takes when he spots the person filming.
One thing that I tried to do was actually count the amount of police who were present during different scenes. So, I started to notice that there were like, you know, there'd be one Black teenager surrounded by twenty umm… mostly white officers [?]. There's one description where I actually count them aloud.
A convoy of police vans, cars and motorcycles, glides down the road.
Two pedestrians jog across the high street as more vans arrive. [haunting, muddy baseline throbs and wails] Someone films from their car as they drive past parked po- lice vehicles. [faint typing]
A heartbeat bass.
The only light comes from the back of the room. Otherwise, the scattered dancers jump and bounce in shadow.
Three policemen on a night patrol. Their shadows are cast onto the closed shutters of the shop. Police vans cruise down the road.
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.
Dancers skank and hop. The whites of one guy's eyes shine in the dark as he nods his head to the beat. Silhouetted, another young guy feels the music, wheeling a scarf in the air.
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.
Anita Wolska-Kaslow is a creative captioner with CareFuffle: Disabled-led experimental
film and art working group. [high notes swing and wail, rising and descending, like a slow emergency siren]
I asked Anita to talk about their engagement with the film and the work of devising creat- ive captions that describe the film's abstract sound.
There were a lot of conversations and then - - obviously, we wanted to do justice to the soundscape. And we wanted the captions to be representative and then, kind of like, align with the feelings and emotions of the sound. And then, to also have this coherent narrative and... like, a storyline to align with the sound.
There's something about the repetition of sound and then how you interpret that. It's kind of like the beauty also of abstract soundscapes, especially with Trevor's one, you know, when it's so emotionally charged and is so evocative and visceral. [Bassline pulses over high wailing notes]
We noticed that the way we understand the sound changes depending on the light envir- onment [?]. So we started to create those environments that are highly lit and then de- scribe the sound then, and create an environment that is like very dark, and then see what the responses would be. [uneasy high notes continue to wail, like a slow emer- gency siren] On a regular day, we would just try to balance and see what works.
[earnestly] Especially that scene when a woman is carrying a child, and then the wind gusts, but then you’ve got the shivers across your… body. [wailing notes slowly sub- side and fade into a sound of heavy metallic clanking] And then I think we captioned that as a 'cold wind’ because you can kind of feel the coldness embracing your body as well.
They'll go back to doing the field recording. There's things that you sometimes hear in the space, and feel ‘Oh, this sounds interesting'.
And then, when you take it back into the studio, you can actually tease out another layer, that when it's played back to the same scene, it has another resonance.
The rhythmic sound is made from a galvanised lampshade, and then the microphone put into the area where the light socket would be.
Some of the problems you are trying to get rid of is the sound of either a fan or clock tick- ing or a radiator vibrating, [with passion] but if you take that sound out of that context and slow it down, it has a different kind of quality. But it's still embedding its presence in the frame [!]. You find like ghost signals within the environment that you feed back into the film.
I was just going to add how hard it was, [soft chuckle] in terms of audio description, to add another audio layer onto something that's already so layered.
And also just talking about how abstract the sounds are [?] - - and that, I guess, in some ways, the audio description had to be quite literal about the images.
But also, these sounds tell their own, like you said, like that cold wind gust that tells its own story. So wanting to like allow space for those sounds to like break through, and… The audio description should dip basically, so you can still hear the other layers.
But it was just trying to create another layer that works, I guess, that flows.
[Camera Operator speaking in a deeper low-tone voice with a slight distortion in the audio]
The camera is on the wide, as you can see.
[TV Director speaking in a low, deep voice comes through a speaker, distorted]
I see that.
The other one I quite like is the TV broadcast where they've got different panellists. They had the BBC van outside and the van door was open. So I'm standing outside, and they're talking on a direct link back to London, and he's got speakers inside the van, where the guy from London is talking back.
[Camera Operator]
I don't think so.
But you're worried that there are not too many whites obviously there.
[TV Director]
No, in lighting terms I am talking about.
Just looks a little bit dowdy, especially at the front.
[Camera Operator]
I have my friend, Mr Landamina here, and he says the reason is the colour of their skins. He is just checking VT with the rights, yes.
I overhead the guy was sort of saying, yeah, there's a problem with the lighting.
It's too dark. [firmly with emphasis] Somebody told him that the reason why the colour is not right is because how do you light Black people when they're sitting beside a white person? And I thought… [!]. Did he say that?
[warm and smooth, higher pitch voice speaking]
On the 10th of September 1985, a journalist is pestering a middle-aged black woman on the Lozells Road. He wants her opinion on the disturbances.
'Did she have a relative involved?’ 'Could he talk to one of them?' He is writing a story. She looks at the debris and says to him calmly, ’There are no stories in the riots. Only the ghosts of other stories.'
[background street noise fades]
The view point is from behind a police barricade.
It focuses on two groups of Black men on the street corner and draws back to reveal the shield wall and reporters.
the Black guy -- [Elaine's voice fades into the background, Sarah’s voice comes to the fore]
As Elaine works through the film, scene by scene through successive drafts, she has questions about some of the archive material. Over a phone call, her mother Sonia Hinds, assists Elaine in her research.
It’s - It’s a hand press, I see that we had to pull down with our hands.
Mhmm.
That is a handpress. I used to work at.
Oh, did you?
She is printing out something.
I know what you mean. It's almost like she's stamping out.
That's it! Stamping out. Stamping out so... so...
Do you think it's just like a part for something? I don't need to know, exactly - - you know, exactly what it is?
I was just wondering if it's like… You know, when you did something similar [?]. Oh, what was it?
What were you doing at the hand press?
Oh, well, putting in some, you know, ring binders in the folder, you know, the metal part you put your finger through and pull it out.
Yes. Mm hmm.
Ring binders.
Oh, okay.
She... she's stamping out something.
Mm hmm.
Awesome. [laughs softly] Thanks, Mum.
♪ They said I had some fine young lady.
Fine, young lady Fine, young lady
They say they had some fine young lady Tra-la-la-la-la-la
And every night she's sitting on the sofa Sitting on the sofa.
Sitting on a sofa
Every night she's sitting on a sofa Tra-la-la-la-la-la ♪
What about like all those, like the different periods of archival stuff --
-- [with a smile] that, that - I kept like thinking about that that as you were doing it
-
- and like how much you want that to be present there? Because, it feels like really ma- terially present - -
- Yeah, it is.
-- and it is visible.
Exactly. I am still struggling with that. [chuckles]
Yeah, I think it's very, um… [with realisation] Yeah, you're right. So, I thought maybe I'd just say this is it --
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
this is the 60s and this is the 80s, and sometimes, I am kind of inferring that.
So like, for example, that this is grainier than previous footage or this is in colour, or it's not in colour. [sudden loud background bangs, like emptying a coffee pod] [wonder- ingly] I just don't know what's useful sometimes? Like what's the most useful thing.
Yeah. No, absolutely. I suppose it’ll depend on like what people's experience… or... knowledge of site is in watching it, and knowledge of just like cinematography, and all of that vocabulary. [conversation fades into the background]
We asked artist and performer Mickel Smithen to be our consultant on the audio descrip- tion. Mickel tells us about the experience of accessing Handsworth Songs via Elaine's audio description.
I mean, it’s a really moving film to listen to, and to experience, like audibly experience [!]. I didn't need to look at the screen. I could just listen and hear the music and hear the little interviews and take in the descriptions of people, and the streets.
When you're saying that, Mickel, it makes me want to ask you, as an audio description user, what do you expect or what do you want from audio description more broadly?
What are you hoping the audio description will do or what are you hoping it won't do?
I'm hoping it's clear. I'm hoping it's expressive, so it makes me want to listen [!]. I’m hop- ing that overall it's well balanced and there isn't any interference [?] with the… with the performers. [?]
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.
I guess, I always find endings the most difficult. [chuckles]
I'm just looking back Anita, your penultimate caption 'Distorted crackling bubbles over engine like chugging.’ That's got so much of like the combination, I think across all Tre- vor's work, combining these kinds of industrial sounds that are made very abstracted and distorted, and become kind of unfamiliar. And these natural sounds that also get pro- cessed into seeming also like, unclose to us or something, and how those are brought together into one sound.
The last I would say 5 minutes, it was like climaxing, right? There was a lot of stories and offscreen voices, and then, especially the last voiceover was so powerful as well.
You had this kind of like, chugging rhythm present throughout the voiceover, and then suddenly, when the voiceover ended, this additional sound came in.
[a calm, higher-pitched voice tone, speaking deliberately with gravity, as if in predic- tion]
In time, let them bear witness to the process by which the living transforms the dead into partners in struggle.
The person on screen was walking away from the camera view, and then going towards something.
But then, at the same time, you’re introduced with this nuanced sound, which is kind of like rippling and bubbling, as if something was still boiling [?].
And then, I think the last caption says that... 'Distant blasts go off one by one' and it's on- going.
And then the - - how to also capture those nuances of the sound and this rippling and bubbling.
We're at the launch of Slow Emergency Siren, Ongoing at LUX, the UK agency for the support and promotion of artists working with moving image.
It's the first public screening of Handsworth Songs with audio description and captions.
Elaine and I are on stage with Benjamin Cook, the Founding Director of LUX. I asked Ben about access work in the specific context of artists’ film.
- I really like that.
What's interesting, I think, about artists’ works and the works like Handsworth Songs is they are very layered works. It's not just a kind of clear indexical relationship between what it's showing or what it's describing.
And I suppose that there's a tendency when audiences that are unfamiliar think about captioning or audio description to think of description as a flattening, as a kind of neces- sarily something linear, necessarily something kind of simple that can only ever kind of make… make straight and flat and sort of and obvious.
Being able to have the time over the year meant that I could think of the different kind of layers of the film, so I could think about…
So, I really played around [!], [with a smile] which I'm sure you saw in all of my edits.
But I really tried to play around with different registers, trying to kind of mimic the voices that have just come before where I insert myself, trying to give space to some of the echoes as well, letting those echoes kind of speak for themselves.
What you're saying just there really relates to the sense that I really want to bring out about giving due time to some things. You know, there!s a real social purpose to this work. There's a real need for this to be kind of factored in at the beginning of how artists are conceiving of what they're making. The beginning of how the organisations that are fund- ing that work, that are supporting that work, go about planning for how it's made and how it's to be presented. And there's no other real way, I think, that we can think about making work anymore, once we realise that these are capacities that are there, that these are pro- fessionals that we can work with, artists that we can work with.
Umm… It feels kind of impossible to turn your back on that and go back to kind of presum- ing to make work that already demarcates a very specific audience and an audience that presumes that audience to process information in the same way. To receive it via the same sensory channels that, you know, basically expects one body, one mind and one way of being in an art work, of being in culture [!]
You know, a lot of artists that working with moving image, they are intentionally working with different kinds of register, with different kinds of information release, with different kind of tonalities and affect [!].
And often, I meet this kind of resistance where people will see this as, 'Oh, this is almost like a pulling back the curtain on the work and, and like revealing everything in a way that I didn't intend it to be revealed.’
So I think, you know, the work that we have to do in this particular area is much more sophisticated. Again, it has to be about thinking really creatively about how this isn’t like an addition to a work, but it becomes kind of an intrinsic part of the act of creation.
And one thing that we're talking about at the moment is working through a number of other historical works to create a kind of taxonomy of positions [!] that you can take, which eventually, hopefully could become a guide, like a creative guide, because again, there's no one route through things.
Could I just add to that?
I was just thinking of when I've worked with artists in the past who haven’t really under- stood audio description, and I've met that resistance as well. And just how powerful col- laboration is that we can work together to find a common kind of intention [?].
I’ll only just add one tiny note on that Elaine, just to say that like my first encounter with your work was from Jenny Brady, that Ben has put me in touch with.
And Jenny was like bubbling over with excitement because you had collaborated with her on this audio description for recent works of hers and how she described what that was for her as an artist, just kind of, to encounter her own work anew and in this different way, and how it had kind of, propelled her and her own practice to think about her moving image work differently, and that it was something that, again, she couldn't kind of step away from
that once she had encountered what it was to experience and to make work in that kind of collaborative way, that it had changed everything for her.
[at speed] And, I think that these kinds of discussions we've had about resistance or nervousness, about description are - - can sometimes be sort of, can be helped along by an idea that what you're trying to produce is an equivalence of access. To give an equival- ent level of access to a blind listener to Handsworth Songs, [with passion] is to also con- vey the aesthetics of the work. It's to convey the form of the work. It's to convey the confu- sion that it produces. It's to convey the kind of sense of tumult and cacophony. It's to con- vey all of what the work is. Not the story [!], the straight story that's never there in the first place.
But this equivalence of access and that doing that properly [!], doing that with real people who are collaboratively working with artists, brings about something that's never remotely simple but is instead and, as Ben says, is just really, really exciting.
On that theme, I asked Trevor, if experiencing Handsworth Songs with audio description and captions altered his own experience of the film.
It's like the X-ray, I guess. [industrial clanks bellow and reverberate in the back- ground] Like seeing beyond the surface and seeing into the piece, and finding a way of bringing that into play, but also in an artistic or creative sort of way as well.
It's always interesting to see, like out of many years of it being made and now people are engaging wit it again, and finding different things in the pieces or just - - or even the same energy as it was when we made it. That it has currency still [!], because that's the sort of thing that I'm finding interesting is that with, we’re rerunning in a similar situation, but we just change a few characters and you see that similar things have been said. What motiv- ated us to make the film is still amongst us.
Our newly, differently accessible version of Handsworth Songs is available for hire from LUX. The creative captions and audio description scripts are published together with an essay on the film by Clive Nwonka and an essay by me on Elaine's audio description.
This publication can be accessed as a large print book designed by Daly & Lyon, or in ac- cessibly designed website form at www.slowemergencysiren.org.uk
This audio documentary was made by sound artist Hannah Kemp-Welch.
With thanks to Elaine Lillian Joseph, Trevor Mathison, Anita Wolska-Kaslow and Care- Fuffle Working Group, Dr Clive Nwonka. Sonia Hinds, Mickel Smithen, Benjamin Cook and all at LUX, and Hannah Kemp-Welch.
A text transcript of this audio documentary is available from the LUX website. Slow Emer- gency Siren: Accessing Handsworth Songs was funded by the AHRC as part of a re- search project called Voices in the Gallery.