Notes on Blindness

In 1983, after years of failing sight, John Hull, a professor of theology in Birmingham, England, became completely blind. Soon after, he began keeping an audio diary, saying, “I had to think about blindness, because if I didn’t understand it, it would defeat me.” The understanding he reached, through years of quiet and sometimes painful probing, was profound: Oliver Sacks called the published version of Hull’s diaries “the most extraordinary, precise, deep and beautiful account of blindness I have ever read.” In this penetrating and eloquent documentary, filmmakers Peter Middleton and James Spinney have mined Hull’s original tapes as well as interviews with Hull and his wife to evoke Hull’s inner world. The film combines the voices of Hull and his family—performed by actors and woven into a sensitive sound design by the accomplished sound editor Joakim Sundström—with images that represent his experiences, memories and dreams through reenactment and metaphor. Tracing Hull’s struggle “to retain the fullness of my humanity,” Notes on Blindness conjures both the loveliness of a visual world tragically lost to him and the value of what remains. For Hull, out of sight was never out of mind. —Juliet Clark