Come any closer and you’ll be in the movie

Accepting Mission Molière

As a kid, I used to dream of being able to sit in the front row in the huge auditorium of the ABC Cinema in Ilford High Road where I used to go with my brother Simon on Saturday mornings for two hours of cartoons and the adventures of Flash Gordon, Davy Crockett and others. Cinemas being very popular places back in the 1960s, they were often packed out, sometimes with hundreds of people wanting to see the same screening. Every seat had to be sold so, even in the front row, we were still far enough from the screen to be able to maintain a sense of wonder for that total visual experience as we became part of what we saw. Every Saturday, we ran to get those front-row seats – and you had be in the queue early if you wanted to get one!

These days, the cinemas I go to are much smaller and rarely packed at each screening. People tend to steer away from front-row seats because they’re seen as being too close to the screen, and sitting there as a potentially uncomfortable experience. But when a film is popular and there are no empty seats left elsewhere, we have to choose between taking them or accepting to come back another time for another showing. That can be a tough choice.

Recently, I went to see a movie up close. The closeness was unplanned. I saw things you don’t normally notice, and I heard others that you don’t normally listen for. It all happened at a screening of the 2024 French movie Le Molière Imaginaire – released as Molière’s Last Stage in English – directed by Olivier Py.

As I remember, that week the film was only showing at one cinema in Toulouse, the American Cosmograph, an independent art-house theatre with a fascinating history.¹ Obviously, seats had sold fast, as we discovered when we arrived at the last minute to buy tickets. They warned us at the desk that the last seats available were in the front row – just a few metres from the screen. They wanted us to understand that these were the only seats left. They made it sound like Mission Impossible. I turned to Sylvie who was with me. Sitting that close to the screen would mean an intense visual experience in perspective. What do we do? Our wish to see the film about the French Shakespeare, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, universally known as Molière, was stronger. We accepted Mission Molière.

Life in the front row

Finally seated in what was an absolutely full-house showing, we were next to other people also sharing the front-row experience. There was an unspoken bond of solidarity between us. We’d all have preferred to be in another seat, but this was the way it was going to be, and all we could offer each other were smiles of encouragement.

Those front-row seats, in this cinema at least, were tilted back slightly. Our proximity to the screen meant that we were not only sitting up close, but that our gaze was also directed upwards – which was all a little disorientating, as it also opened up the prospect of 90 minutes of neck strain, a privilege we had actually paid for.

The story of the movie, which takes place on the night of 17th February 1763, is set entirely in a theatre where Molière is unknowingly giving the final performance of his life playing the leading role in his comedy Le Malade Imaginaire or The Imaginary Invalid, while the man himself is truly and seriously ill. Between his comic passages in the play, we follow Molière backstage, intensely pursuing his own life, loves, and fantasies. This contrast creates a world where time offstage seems suspended just the way it is onstage when you go to see a play in a theatre. The offstage action takes place in its own uncannily slow-motion time-frame, while the onstage action follows its own inevitable course in parallel. It is a film of great depth which I thoroughly recommend. But now it’s time to focus on that front-row experience.

See more clearly with eyes closed

From where we were sitting the whole thing looked enormous. The sound came from behind as if we were wearing headphones. The oversized image filled all the space above our heads with everything seeming too big and too colourful. We were able to detect the tiniest of camera movements which would not have been visible to a viewer sitting at a normal distance from the screen. As the film moved slowly forward, I had one obsession : I dreamt of being able to get up and to sit comfortably in the back row or even on the floor somewhere, just so everything could be far away, even so far away that I would have to squint to see. But of course, that was impossible.

I had a sense of information overload. From time to time, it was necessary to rest my eyes, and my brain for that matter, either by looking off to the side – doing this I once found myself eye-to-eye with the person sitting next to me taking a similar break – or by simply closing my eyes. I gradually realised that this strategy allowed me to continue mentally visualising without the saturation of the screen image. With sound as my only guide, I became more attentive to tone of voice and to what characters were actually saying. This process of active listening compensated for the temporary absence of direct visuals by helping me create what I can best describe as imaginary images. Thanks to this movement back and forth, I was able to watch the film through to the end.

There were certain passages with no dialogue which invited me to keep my eyes on the screen, specifically during the director’s lengthy camera-pans of the faces in the audience. Like Molière himself in his backstage scenes, although the spectators were all supposedly watching the performance, most had other business going on and were shown engaged in constant and sometimes unsubtle interplay with those seated around them. These observation scenes underlined the importance of the non-verbal in human interaction in a film which was otherwise very focused on the verbal. As purely visual sequences with no sound they made sitting close to the screen less of a strain. My brain seemed more able to cope with the simply visual.

There was one oddity, however. When there was no dialogue, I felt a voice in my head describing the scene begin to speak. I would be observing the characters closely when suddenly, as if invited by the camera, I would start to describe them mentally. With words? Sometimes. Then, when the dialogue resumed, that inner voice would stop and I would ultimately turn away or close my eyes as explained earlier. In the latter case, my mind would then start to use what I picked up from the words spoken by the characters to create mental images. Eyes closed, it seemed, vision was clearer.

Meeting Marius outside afterwards

When I was finally able to get up from my front-row seat at the end, I was no longer the same person. I was elated but exhausted. Unexpectedly, Marius was waiting for me on my way out. Like the person meeting a stranger at an airport holding up a card with my name written on it, Marius caught my eye. I’d already seen a picture of him (cf. photo) but this was our first direct meeting. The words written in large letters on the card he held read audio description.

I greeted Marius, but wanted to know the reason for using audio description to catch my eye. All I knew about audio description came from recent information gleaned by chance from a French radio programme. And all I knew about Marius was that his was the name for the annual award given for the best audio description for a full-length feature film in French every year since 2018.

We have all heard an announcement informing us that a programme is also available in audio description for visually impaired people viewing a movie, a TV series or a documentary – in other words, a narration of meaningful visual information in a video to provide context, clarify speakers, and articulate visual elements in order to be accessible to people who are unable to see it.

Marius looked me calmly in the eye and pointed out that, as I came away from my unforgettable experience of Molière’s Last Stage, I had just spent 90 minutes in the world of visual impairment and had attempted to compensate for my difficulties by creating my own system of spontaneous audio description. I was able to recover normal vision as I left the cinema, but that is not the case for people who are permananently partially sighted. It was time, Marius concluded, for me to go deeper into audio description.

More than just a voice-over commentary

Marius was right. My experience with Molière’s Last Stage had made me want to know more about how audio description was constructed and how it helped the visually impaired. In the process, I discovered that audio description is more than just a voice-over commentary of a film, it is an art of subtlety and minimum waste. It means that someone who can’t see something, can simply listen for all to be revealed. It is also an unsuspected world of strongly committed people working towards the creation of an essential form of oral storytelling which you can read about more about in Lend me your eyes so my ears can see.

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Meanwhile, here’s a taste of what audiodescription can do with two contrasting examples from two succesful manistream movies.

Footnotes

1. The excellent Wikipedia page for the American Cosmograph, founded in 1907, tells the full story. Only currently available in French. ↩︎