Notes on Blindness

The theologian John Hull lost his sight completely in 1983. To understand what was happening he began speaking into a tape recorder: how the memory of light erases itself, not being able to recall his children's faces, how rain makes a room visible. Over three years he accumulated more than sixteen hours of recordings. Peter Middleton and James Spinney make those recordings the film itself. Actors appear on screen but do not speak; they lip-synch to the actual voices of Hull and his family. The line between documentary and fiction disappears, and what you hear remains the recording. The visual language does not present blindness as darkness; it tries to show how sound builds a space. The source is Hull's 1990 book Touching the Rock. The same team made an Emmy-winning short on the subject in 2014. Who it's for: Viewers who like formally bold documentary, sound design, and films that think about perception. Who it's not for: There is no plot and the pace is very slow. The lip-synch method will strike some viewers as artificial.