Cinema’s paradoxical fascination with sightlessness has spawned movies as diverse as Terence Young’s 1967 thriller Wait Until Dark, Takeshi Kitano’s 2003 martial-arts actioner Zatôichi and Eskil Vogt’s prurient 2014 psychodrama Blind. Yet few films have portrayed the absence of vision with any degree of insight. Honourable exceptions include British film-maker Gary Tarn’s 2005 documentary Black Sun, an electrifying, expressionist portrait of painter and photographer Hugues de Montalembert, who found new ways of seeing after being blinded by a violent attack in 1978.
Now this superb documentary by Peter Middleton and James Spinney dramatises the life-changing experiences of theology professor John Hull, whose audiotape diaries of his journey into blindness formed the basis of his 1990 book Touching the Rock. Building upon their 2014 Emmy award-winning short film, Middleton and Spinney have created an utterly immersive feature worthy of Hull’s end-quote declaration that “to gain our full humanity, blind people and sighted people need to see each other”.
Adopting the mimed “verbatim theatre” of Clio Barnard’s The Arbor, in which actors lip-synch the recorded testimonies of real people, Notes on Blindness is built upon the voices of John and his family (from audio diaries, taped letters, domestic recordings and interviews). The result brilliantly blurs the boundary between drama and documentary, the disjuncture between authentic sound and artificial vision perfectly capturing the contradictory nature of Hull’s worldview as his eyesight is eclipsed by cataracts and retinal detachment. “The stars had gone, the moon had gone,” he remembers, and soon the midday sun would disappear too. Significantly, the last thing he saw was a church spire.
While friends provided “serious books, recorded sensibly” (a home-grown forerunner of Audible.com), Hull’s dreams clung to sight, his brain crying out for visual stimulation. Only when relinquishing his nostalgia for the light could he start to see clearly, enabling a “purging” that increased and enhanced his consciousness. “It’s a gift,” he declares. “Not a gift I want… but it is a gift.” At which point, his question becomes: “Not why have I got it, but what am I going to do with it?”
Like Julien Temple’s The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson, Notes on Blindness lends boldly adventurous cinematic form to the heightened experiences of an articulate, eloquent, and soul-searchingly honest subject. At times, it looks like a thriller, as we stalk Dan Renton Skinner’s John through a threateningly darkened underpass. Elsewhere, shadows of the horror genre lurk; a hallucinatory scene dramatises Hull’s vision of a tidal wave of water engulfing the aisles of a supermarket, recalling the elevator of blood from The Shining, a film that is very much about seeing and not seeing. Throughout, cinematographer Gerry Floyd highlights the growing tactility of Hull’s world, closing in on the sources of sound, eschewing eye contact for more sensory interaction.
As memories of the faces of his wife and daughter fade, so photographs remain weirdly vivid, their browning hues echoed by the palette of the film. Still images come to life, like the implanted memory of a family picture that shimmers briefly into motion in Blade Runner. And rain paints a picture too – its clatter lending aural shape to a sunless landscape, an epiphany of noise as clear-sighted as any optical vision. In scenes that recall the quasi-religious ecstasy of debbie tucker green’s Second Coming, the film-makers bring the rain indoors, with Joakim Sundström’s precise sound design conjuring spatial cathedrals.
There is a divinity at work here, yet Hull’s mantra has a humanist heart, concerning the profound need for understanding between the sighted and the blind, men and women, rich and poor, old and young. His children are a source of joy, from eldest daughter Imogen’s playful “Radio Hull” recordings to young Thomas’s piercing questions about God. But John’s real rock is his wife; a scene in which Simone Kirby’s Marilyn dances with her husband to the sounds of the Mamas and the Papas reminded me of The Possibilities Are Endless, another film that might be mistaken for a documentary about physical affliction (in this case Edwyn Collins’s recovery from a stroke), but is in fact a song of endless love.
Maximising its accessibility, Notes on Blindness is available in audio-described and enhanced soundtrack versions, the latter transforming the film into a singular aural experience. (There’s also a virtual reality project, subtitled Into Darkness, currently touring UK venues.) John Hull died in July last year, but his spirit lives on in this extraordinary inclusive work, which is as educational, entertaining and inspirational as its subject.
