Barrier-free film screening in China: awareness, practice and suggestions

Abstract

This article outlines the development of China’s barrier-free screening. It indicates how Chinese film professionals understand cinema accessibility, what efforts they have undertaken to put their awareness into practice, the problems arising and the corresponding initiatives for solutions. I argue that the film professionals’ understanding is now shifting from guaranteeing the equal rights of persons with disabilities to offering them equal treatment in cinematic entertainment. The challenge is that the professionals still focus on updating theatre facilities and screening technologies particularly for blind persons but do not have an overall plan for improving the inclusivity of screenings. A solution is to design a theatre assistant app that allows persons with and without disabilities to enjoy watching films together.

Keywords:

• Barrier-free film screening
• current problem
• film professionals’ efforts and digital solution and Chinese film industry

Introduction

In P.R. China today, barrier-free screening (wuzhangai guanying) is an emerging cinematic practice. In a broad sense, the idea of ‘barrier-free’ in this context means that ‘anyone should be able to access and utilize information equally, easily and without barriers under any circumstances’ (Gao and Yu 2022, Ch.1). It develops from the country’s aspiration since its establishment in 1949 of giving due attention to the rights and interests of persons with disabilities. This idea in a narrow sense is about offering deaf and blind persons facilities and services to guarantee them equal access to enjoyment of cultural products. In practice, barrier-free screening in most cases refers to activities that make film exhibition accessible and inclusive to persons with visual impairment.

The common method to achieve such screening is audio description (AD, aka visual description) that provides an additional narration track to describe and explain the visual contents of films. The track must not change the original films’ length or disturb their audio messages (Ibid). There are two main forms: Live Audio Description (LAD) and Pre-recorded Description (PD). In China, film screenings with LAD did not appear until the early 2000s. Almost a decade later, the PD version of film DVDs became a main supplement to LAD screenings. Mass production of barrier-free films occurred at the turn of the 2020s. Many well-known Chinese directors were involved. Jia Zhangke, for instance, launched a barrier-free version of his own film Mountains May Depart (Shan he gu ren, 2015) in 2020 (Hu 2020). This kind of engagement triggered the growth of barrier-free screening within the filmmaking community.

This article outlines the development of China’s barrier-free screening mainly for blind and/or deaf people. It indicates how Chinese film professionals understand cinema accessibility, what efforts they have undertaken to put their awareness into practice, the problems arising and the corresponding initiatives for solutions. I argue that the film professionals’ understanding is now shifting from guaranteeing the equal rights of persons with disabilities to offering them equal treatment in cinematic entertainment. The challenge is that the professionals still focus on updating theatre facilities and screening technologies particularly for blind persons but do not have an overall plan for improving the inclusivity of screenings. A solution is to design a theatre assistant app that allows persons with and without disabilities to enjoy watching films together.

Barrier-free awareness

At present, the main focus of Chinese film professionals remains one of how to ensure persons with disabilities share the country’s cultural achievements. In practice, this guarantee of rights is often achieved through offering special screening services. This situation has much to do with media scholars and film professionals’ understanding of the meaning of the barrier-free concept. Li Xiaodong and Xiong Mengqi (2017), for instance, regard this idea as derived from the ‘normalization principle’. In Gao, Xiaohong, Pan Yue and Fu Haizheng’s exposition (2020), N.E. Bank Mikkelsen of Denmark first proposed the principle in 1959, hoping to help persons with disabilities return to mainstream society with the rest of the population, and this principle was later defined more precisely by Bengt Nirje in 1969. The Chinese scholars suggest that the principle became the basis of barrier-free services. It follows that normalizing the lives of deaf and blind persons is the goal of China’s barrier-free screening.

However, this theoretical basis has its own problems. According to Nirje, the principle emphasizes the facilitation of enjoyment for persons with disabilities of ‘patterns of life and conditions of everyday living which are as close as possible to or indeed the same as the regular circumstances and ways of life of society’ (1985, 67). The question is how to determine a life as ‘normal’ and whose life patterns are assumed to provide the normative model. In fact, this is also the main critique of the normalization principle, as the examples of an advocated course of life embody predominant ideologies (Ben-Moshe 2020). Offering the ‘normal’ life is therefore more like a process of discipline or domestication. It carries an implication that persons with disabilities must accept a privileged normative life pattern to reintegrate into society.

Barrier-free screening practice

Partly due to the influence of this idea, persons with disabilities were often interpellated as passive in China’s early barrier-free screening activities. For example, Chinese film professionals often came to schools for blind persons to screen AD films or assembled them with the help of government organizations to watch AD films. These activities to some extent isolated the audiences from others and the audiences had little choice in both selecting films and attending the activities. Recently, the situation is changing along with the mass production of PD versions of DVDs and the rise of barrier-free online screening. For example, in 2021, Xigua Video, a top Chinese online video-sharing platform, launched a ‘Barrier-free Cinema’ channel that allows people who have visual impairments to select their favourite films to watch in the place where they feel comfortable. This article will now further illustrate the changes and the efforts the film professionals made therein.

In the early 2000s, a few voluntary barrier-free screenings happened sporadically and only in big cities. For example, a Beijing-based couple, Wang Weili and Zheng Xiaojie, established Xinmu Cinema, a charitable theatre that invites volunteers and uses LAD to explain films for blind persons in 2005 (Liu 2012). One year later, Jiang Hongyuan, a retired staff member of the Shanghai Film Group, proposed developing barrier-free film production (Zeng 2012).

Jiang’s proposal later got a response from local government departments in Shanghai. In 2009, Shanghai Disabled Person’s Federation, Shanghai Library and Shanghai Film Comment Society jointly founded China’s first barrier-free film studio. The studio makes AD versions of films such as Examination 1977 (Gao kao 1977, 2009) and produces PD versions of DVDs. It distributes these products to local communities in both Shanghai and the cities in western China (Pan and Li 2013), which therefore promotes the popularity of barrier-free screenings.

Given such DVD production, it is evident that Chinese film professionals had adjusted their previous practice and began to consider issues of inclusivity. More changes appeared in the 2010s. At the 2010 Shanghai Expo, Shanghai Disabled Person’s Federation, Shanghai Audiovisual Publishing House and the state-owned China Telecom Corporation together launched an IPTV barrier-free film channel. The channel, as advertised, allows persons with disabilities to enjoy films on demand at home and for free (Ibid.). It technologically empowers these people to select films and watching patterns on their own.

Simultaneously, attention to barrier-free screening’s inclusivity was growing among film professionals. One manifestation is that commercial cinemas became involved in the screening activities in 2012. The Cathay Theatre in Shanghai, for instance, worked with the Shanghai Disabled Person’s Federation to offer screenings for persons with disabilities once a month. These screenings were still exclusive in a way. But this practice at least was set in a public place and this presence relieved the disabled people themselves of a sense of social isolation.

In 2013, the situation regarding exclusions was further addressed, as Chinese media scholars such as Pan Xianghui and Li Dongxiao introduced a compatible idea of barrier-free films. This film version contains AD, sign language and subtitles, which can deliver accessibility to deaf and blind persons at the same time. However, this idea seemed not to work well in practice since this version of films were not common in the market.

Since 2017, a concerted endeavour to industrialise the screening practice occurred, which featured collaboration between universities and media companies. For example, the Communication University of China, together with Beijing Gehua CATV Network Company and Oriental Jiaying Media Company, conducted a project titled ‘Guangming Theatre’. Under the project, the university not only produced the AD version of particular films but also organised barrier-free screenings in rural areas and at the Beijing International Film Festival.

Starting in 2020, some other universities in the north also participated in the collaboration practice. Shandong University, for instance, launched a programme titled ‘Lingting Guangying’ (which literally means ‘hearing the cinematic world’) committed to producing AD version of films featuring regional traditional culture. These collaborations help to set up an industrial chain for China’s barrier-free cinema, covering AD film production, distribution and exhibition. To what extent they can improve inclusivity of access remains to be seen.

Conclusion and suggestions

Based on these changes and developments, it is obvious that current barrier-free film practices in China still prioritise offering services to guarantee the right of people with disabilities to access entertainment. Also, many measures have been implemented to promote achieving cinematic accessibility for all, including screenings in commercial theatres and film festivals, to name a few. Nevertheless, these efforts do not handle well the issue of the inclusivity of barrier-free film screenings. They still confine audiences with disabilities to particular screenings. In a short, a shift in the Chinese film professionals’ understanding of barrier-free screening is happening.

For them, an overall and long-term plan for improving barrier-free screening’s inclusivity is a pressing matter of the moment. The Smart Cinema App launched in China in 2019 may offer an idea to solve the issue temporarily. The app’s producers claimed that it could ‘automatically detect the mobile phone system setting, switch to the barrier-free viewing areas for users who have turned on this mode’ and allow users to watch the latest films (Zhang 2019). Film professionals may further develop a theatre version or a theatre mode of the app, containing both AD and subtitle functions. Likewise, users can preset the app and when entering theatres, so that streaming servers automatically match and connect the users’ mobile phones, assisting them in watching the latest films. In so doing, persons with and without disabilities could enjoy watching films in the same projection rooms.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.