Charlie Swinbourne: Subtitled cinema screenings would benefit from support from hearing audiences too

Please sign Limping Chicken’s petition for multiplex cinemas to dedicate a screen to subtitles here, and sign Deafie Blogger’s petition for more reasonable times here.

A week ago, I had a meeting with a local independent cinema to talk about subtitled screenings. This is a cinema with just a couple of screens, rather than a multiplex showing hundreds of screenings a week.

Since we live nearby, we wanted to encourage them to put more screenings on. The meeting covered a lot of ground and it went pretty well – the cinema have agreed to regularly show more subtitled films!

But one part of the meeting stayed in my mind afterwards – about low attendances at their previous subtitled screenings.

The cinema said that when they put on subtitled screenings, audience figures were often lower than for other screenings, with (on several occasions) numbers not reaching double figures. They explained that when this happened, it might take them a day for their takings to catch up with the loss from that one screening.

Now, this is something we hear quite often from the cinema industry – about low attendances at subtitled screenings. Many deaf cinema-goers will also tell you that they know the feeling of being one of the few people at a subtitled screening.

I often feel that it’s a chicken and egg thing. With screenings at inconvenient times, poor marketing, poor customer services and deaf cinema-goers often let down by failed subtitle files or cancelled subtitled screenings, what do the cinemas expect?

In my view if cinemas actually welcomed deaf customers and became proud and positive, they could drastically increase deaf audiences at subtitled screenings.

That’s why I’ve been campaigning for mulitplexes to have a dedicated subtitles screen – because I think this would grow the deaf audience, which is one in six people, and would lead to those screens being filled up. Especially since deaf people could go anytime they like. Over 25,000 people have signed the petition to say they agree.

Before that happens, the situation we have now is that we have irregularly timed subtitled screenings, which I don’t think helps the subtitled cinema audience to grow at all.

In the meeting, we looked at attendance figures at the cinema’s subtitled screenings, with numbers like 26, 14, 8, 10, coming up on a chart (out of an auditorium of about 50), meaning they were losing revenue.

This is obviously a big issue, but I also went away questioning something I hadn’t questioned before, about the assumptions cinemas make about their irregularly arranged subtitled screenings.

This is the expectation that you can arrange a screening once a week, or once a month, and the whole audience will be deaf.

It occurred to me last week that this isn’t the case at theatres, for example.

I thought back to my time working at Soho Theatre in London, when I used to organise captioned plays, usually once a month, for each of the main plays the theatre put on.

At those performances, deaf attendance numbers were similar to the figures at my local cinema. Perhaps the average was around a dozen people at a captioned performance.

What was different is that at our captioned theatre shows, the deaf people in the audience were joined by a substantial number of hearing people.

Typically, at Soho Theatre, around 10% of the audience would be deaf, with the other 90% being hearing (they didn’t seem to mind the captions, incidentally). This meant that the theatre wasn’t making a loss, or feeling that their audience was a lot lower that night.

Clearly there are differences between theatre and cinema. For one thing, a play might only be performed once a day, meaning people have one chance to see it, rather than multiple screenings, as at a cinema. Perhaps this meant more hearing people were happy to go on the ‘captioned night.’

But what strikes me is that the expectation cinemas have, that auditoriums will be full to the brink with deaf people whenever they arrange a solitary subtitled screening, may be unrealistic.

This may be a bit counter-intuitive, but it makes me wonder whether deaf audiences need more support from hearing cinema-goers when it comes to subtitled screenings. If more hearing people joined us at subtitled shows, that would increase audiences and also stop there being a feeling of segregation.

Of course, ideally the audience at a subtitled screening would be full of deaf people. But perhaps that’s not realistic, particularly when options for when people can go are so limited, with few screenings at peak times, for example.

So when I started encouraging people to come to my local cinema for a subtitled screening following the meeting last week, I didn’t just target deaf local people, I also reached out to local hearing people I know, suggesting that they come and support the subtitled screening as well. So far it looks like the audience will be about half deaf and half hearing, and the screening is over 60% booked up, with a week left to go.

Which is good for the cinema, and will hopefully encourage them to arrange more subtitled screenings as time goes on.

There’s clearly a great many issues with subtitled screenings, and a strong feeling among deaf people that we’re being short-changed by the industry. But perhaps, alongside campaigning for dedicated subtitles screens and better timed screenings, this is one thing we should be looking at – asking hearing cinema goers to support subtitled screenings, and boost audience numbers.

What do you think?

Charlie Swinbourne is a journalist and is the editor of Limping Chicken, and is also an award-winning filmmaker and screenwriter. He also runs Eyewitness Media. His RTS award-winning sketch comedy show Deaf Funny, can be seen in the comedy section of the BSL Zone website.