On the art of audio description: Naomi Kawase’sRadiance

Abstract

Audio description improves access to visual culture for people who are unable to fully participate in it due to visual impairments. Because of this direct benefit to disabled people, it is usually defined as an accommodation or inclusion service. Rather than adopting this view, we see disability as a creative force, arguing that it can engender a new dimension of art: audio description as a form of cinematic ekphrasis. This claim is made by drawing on the 2017 movieRadiance, by Japanese director Naomi Kawase. This movie puts audio description in the spotlight and stimulates discussion on this underdeveloped and under-recognised art.Radianceis structured around the process of making the audio description, thus offering good insight into the artistry and main challenges of this process. Between the words of this meditation on the art of audio description, Kawase also challenges the dominant ocular normative narrative on blindness as a deficiency and provokes a discussion on the contribution that blindness—with its different, still culturally unexplored modes of perception—could make to the interpretation of visual arts.Radiancecan thus be treated as an artful argument for the greater recognition of disabled people’s right to participate in cultural life.