Xinmu: Seeing from the Heart
Phillip Warnell: film work in progress, July 2024
co-authored with Yu Ming
Filming a non-sighted community present at a film screening in Beijing, China, and working with an augmented, live narrative soundtrack and audio description to enhance understanding of the film. (filming undertaken in July 2024).
This new project extends my ethical filmmaking research into collaborative circumstances, within a subgenre of films made specifically in the cinema auditorium, during the emotional witness of a film screening. It couples an ongoing interest in exposing screen methodologies and disrupting dominant film language, an encounter and experiential dimension of aurally enhanced narrative, transforming entertainment format for its beneficiaries. The project highlights how interpretive media can conduct a listening screen using the tools of close-reading, enhanced audio description and performed voicing, to deliver an inclusive, complex arrangement of screen involvement.
My experimental work aims to think outside conventional narrative and/or overly theoretical constructions, to convey non-exclusive cognitive analyses alongside community perspectives. Conceived by the Xinmu Cinema group - China's first 'blind cinema' organisation based in Beijing - this initiative also extends an exemplary asian cultural tradition of live cinema, using performed narration (Benshi) in this case voiced by locally trained volunteers.
The project involves a unique new partnership between myself and the Academy for International Communication of Chinese Culture (AICCC) based at Beijing Normal University, China and the Xinmu Cinema organisation, established by Wang Weili in 2005. Since then, Xinmu cinema has screened more than 800 films for over 25,000 visual impaired and non-sighted people in Beijing, China with the support of some 9,000 volunteers.
These screenings allow China’s estimated over 12 million blind and partially-sighted people to enjoy the cinema by listening to specially devised narrations, developed and shared by volunteers, augmented with an extra auditory narrative dimension to the soundtrack of the film itself. The narrations are scripted or guided, but often involving an element of improvisation and performativity. One of the volunteer interpreters suggests she "tells the film as if whispering to an elderly lady, and sounds comfortable to the visually impaired". They also draw upon a broad south-east asian tradition, which involves the performative translation of silent films, or 'Benshi' in Japan.
