Seeing a film in blindfolds: cinema experience with EarFilms

ABSTRACT To Sleep to Dream is an EarFilm, that is an audio-only film that combines live narration and an advanced 3D sound system and relies on a half-dome-shaped arrangement of over twenty speakers that surround the blindfolded audience members who sit in the middle of a darkened room. In this paper, I analyse how the mental visual imagery that audiences form during their experience of an EarFilm involves a complete sensory immersion and erases the spatial boundaries of the cinematic apparatus that has been theorised since the 1970s. As one of the contemporary apparatuses, an EarFilm demands that we revise our terminology to address the spatial dispositif in relation to new technologies of ambisonics. In the specific example of an EarFilm, darkness-turned-all-immersive spectacle is an avisual depth of personally-created visual and yet invisible spaces. Utilising Akira Lippit’s concept of “avisuality”, I explain how EarFilms epitomise cinematic visuality by generating personal spatial abysses in total darkness filled with sounds. Earfilms problematise the Western tradition of a hierarchy of the senses and offer a more inclusive art form that both people with and without visual impairments can enjoy.