Notes on Blindness is a delicate portrait of theologian John Hull and his reflections upon his adult-onset blindness. While the film has poignant moments, it is ultimately less than the sum of its parts, failing to deliver fully on the promises of its creative form, rich setting and pathos-laden subject.
Hull (Dan Skinner) struggled with vision issues and partial blindness for most of his life, and went irrevocably blind in 1983 just days before the birth of his second child. After a few years, he began keeping an audio diary on the experience. These recordings are the source material for an experimental documentary in which actors lip-sync dialogue spoken by Hull and his family.
Craftsmanship and set design is such that the film looks just as if it was photographed on location at Hull’s house in the ‘80s. Every interior is brown layered over brown, and with furniture and clothing oppressively dull, the drabness of the decade’s middlebrow sensibilities is perfectly recreated. The setting is an apt metaphor for Hull’s frank and often confessional discourses on what blindness means for him.
However, the audacity of the film’s experimental form is not an unambiguous success. While the actors and sound design bring Hull’s recordings to life, other elements of the film open up questions of intent. Its cinematography has Terrence Malick pretentions that distract from Hull’s commentary and make the filmmakers seem pedantic. The editing compounds this, with elliptical and tangential jaunts detracting from Hull’s story. Do Hull and his recordings merit a feature film? Notes on Blindness suggests that that they do, but why dress them up with desperate editing and pretentious camera work? The directors are themselves performing, and it is not a good look.
For all its aesthetic interest, Notes on Blindness fails to captivate as a story about an exceptional individual and his extraordinary circumstances. The first act focuses on Hull’s work as an academic, emphasizing technical problems related to reading and lecturing. Yet the film fails to convey his actual scholarship and makes no attempt at broader social commentary.
The filmmakers subsequently travel to Hull’s native Australia, where he meets his parents for the first time as a blind man, which is like a first encounter. The episode could have been a powerful statement on what it means to be blind, but the meeting is handled poorly, and makes Hull seem petty and childish, an unworthy advocate for the blind.
Writer-directors Peter Middleton and James Spinney finally come to their senses in the film’ third act and find the true center of interest: Hull’s family. Hull had five children, four of whom were born after his blindness set in. In every scene, his steadfast wife Marilyn (Simone Kirby) appears more interesting and remarkable than Hull. She is by all right the true hero of the story. Here the film finally zooms in on the incredible story of a blind man serving as a faithful father to five children and the implications of such a role. The power of these scenes only heighten the failures of the rest of the film. Despite its flaws, Notes on Blindness offers a sometimes affecting meditation on blindness and disability.
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