Crucially, it helps us to see more clearly the general problem of mutual understanding. Middleton and Spinney's documentary is eye-opening on multiple levels. While the form of the film is reminiscent of Clio Barnard's The Arbor and, in a wider thematic sense, echoes Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell, Notes on Blindness makes for a very original, poetic and moving viewing experience. By this point, he was already deep in depression, and here was a lifeline that he could hold on to and use to pull himself out. Swedish master Joakim Sundström's sound design is intricate and carefully thought-through to maximum effect, and consists of layers and layers of noises, getting deeper as the film progresses and Hull's newly awakened senses develop.Ī particularly beautiful scene that stands out is the one when Hull notices for the first time how the sound of the rain makes shapes around him start to acquire contours, and this is where he finds new hope. The camera work by Gerry Floyd focuses mostly on details, such as mouths, eyes and hands, usually in the warm light of the sun. The result is a highly cinematic experience. Now it is a feature-length documentary in which Hull and his wife Marilyn are played by professional actors, Dan Skinner and Simone Kirby, respectively, lip-synching to Hull's recordings. This prompted him to record his thoughts and observations, as well as some of the conversations with his wife and children, on cassette, and this material served first as the basis for an Emmy-winning short film with the same title for Middleton and Spinney. He assembled a team of 30 people to record volumes and volumes of this material before he realised he was starting to forget the faces of his family. He spent the first few years fighting with essentially superficial problems that his state brought with it: he was concerned about his work – namely, how do blind people read “big books” (anthropology and sociology, as opposed to literature that existed as audiobooks on cassette tapes). English writer, theologian and professor at the University of Birmingham John Hull started losing his sight in 1980, and after a series of unsuccessful operations, he went completely blind a couple of days after his first son was born.
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