“To gain our full humanity, blind people and sighted people need to see each other” – John M. Hull

Notes on Blindness is a 2016 documentary film by director’s Peter Middleton and James Spinney about theologian and writer John M. Hull who became blind after enduring decades of deteriorating vision.

The documentary incorporates a mix of interview recordings and personal recordings from Hull himself that the actors would lip sync to that it’s hard for the audience to distinguish apart. Unlike the previous documentaries we’ve seen, Notes on Blindness relies on digital media as the basis of creating an immersive experience into his life in living with his loss of sight. In Ohad Landesman chapter in Studies in Documentary Film, “digital technology, often perceived as complicating evidential claims about the representation of the world, has been playing a significant role lately in formulating new aesthetic grounds for the hybridity between fact and fiction in cinema”.

Not only is the film visually stunning with such colour and grace, but Middleton and Spinney ensure that their film is maximising its accessibility to almost everyone. The heightened sound throughout the sequences such as rain and wind against the grains of grass, and even the feature of the film within a VR simulation allows us to understand the purpose of the film in breaking the stigma that surrounds disability.

Although it’s quite a thought provoking with a heavy subject matter, the film straddles this line of fiction and fact with this collaboration and subverting these conventions of documentary. It’s an example that “contemporary documentaries… [are] pressing harder on the thin line between fiction and fact in an ongoing effort to redefine the genre’s aesthetic and ethical doctrines” (Landesman, 2008, pp. 34), and therefore engaging the audience into what is becoming a constant evolution and bending of a progressive genre.

References:

Landesman, O. (2008), “In and out of this world: digital video and the aesthetics of realism in the new hybrid documentary”, Studies in Documentary Film, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 33-45.