Notes on Blindness

Watch Notes on Blindness (2016) online on iFILM — a feature documentary by James Spinney and Pete Middleton built around the actual audio tapes of British theology professor John Hull, who started losing his sight in 1983 and recorded everything.

Hull taught at the University of Birmingham and went completely blind after a failed operation. Rather than hiring an actor to narrate, the directors cast Dan Renton Skinner and Simona Kirby to lip-sync against Hull's own voice — a choice that turns the film into something between drama and document. Hull describes rain differently when you cannot see it. He describes forgetting his children's faces. The recordings are precise in a way that scripted dialogue never is.

Hull called blindness a world of its own, not an absence of sight but a presence of something else. The film follows that argument without sentimentality. Stream Notes on Blindness (2016) on iFILM.