In 1983, after years of deteriorating vision, the writer and theologian John Hull lost the last traces of light sensation. A church spire was the last thing he ever saw. For the next three years, he recorded more than 16 hours on audio cassette, as he excavated and explored his new, interior world of blindness.
These recordings would become a 1990 book, Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness, which would become a key text for filmmakers Peter Middleton and James Spinney, while filming a short documentary about the blind experience of snowfall. In 2011, the two began listening to the cassettes. Their film, Notes on Blindness, is a dramatisation that uses these original recordings in a style that recalls Clio Barnard’s ground-breaking bio-doc The Arbor.
Disability has frequently been ill-served by cinema - Me Before You, anyone? - so this probing, philosophical film is almost disconcertingly thoughtful. Actors Dan Renton Skinner and Simone Kirby play John Hull and his wife Marilyn in dramatised vignettes, although the film is not afraid to linger in darkness, as John mulls over his loss, or more accurately losses.
An initial flurry of practical considerations – how to function as a blind academic, how to lecture without notes – give way to an extended period of mourning: “Who had the right to deprive me of the sight of my children at Christmas time?” he asks.
After three years, he is distressed to find that his visual memories have dimmed: he can no longer picture his wife or daughter, Imogen. When his infant son Thomas falls, John is crushed to discover that he cannot rush to the child’s assistance.
There are small musings: he becomes conscious of smiling, as in the absence of a returning smile, the expression requires mindfulness. There are Big Questions, once he decides that he must ponder the meaning of his condition, in order to retain his humanity.
This is not a portrait of silent suffering or unalloyed stoicism. At times, despite Hull’s measured, softly-spoken and contemplative words, the film can feel like a howl. Befitting Hull’s original project, Notes on Blindness is achingly, poignantly human.
