Notes on Blindness: ‘There’s something paradoxical about a film about blindness’

When writer and academic John Hull went blind in 1983, just before the birth of his son, he grabbed a tape recorder and began to make an audio diary of what was happening to him. It’s those scuzzy recordings that form the basis of Peter Middleton and James Spinney’s incredibly moving and thought-provoking documentary, Notes on Blindness, in which actors bring to life Hull’s diaries through a lip-sync technique previously seen in Clio Barnard’s experimental docu-drama The Arbor (2010).

As the film unspools, Hull’s steely determination in the face of adversity comes to the fore, his mission clear. “If I didn’t understand it, it would defeat me,” he explains. That’s not to say he doesn’t have his low points. He describes his frustration at never seeing his smile returned, and missing the look on his son’s face when he opens his Christmas presents. Eventually, though, with a cast-iron commitment, he gets a handle on his blindness. Then he becomes an expert in mapping acoustic space, using the sound of rain to find shape and contours in the environment – kind of like Daredevil, only without the physical prowess and skimpy costume.

Hull’s remarkable ambition clearly rubbed off on British filmmakers Middleton and Spinney, whose surefooted debut is as fascinating and heartbreaking as it is daring and original. We spoke to the duo recently about John’s tactile experience of the world, how they communicated his ideas both visually and audibly, and the virtual reality version of the film that will screen in select cinemas.

Five years ago, the pair were researching first-person testimonies of blindness when they came across Hull’s book, Touching the Rock, based on his audio diaries from the 80s. “We reached out to John to see if his tapes were still in existence,” says Middleton. “Then about six months later he sent us this box of cassettes that hadn’t been heard for the best part of 30 years.” Listening to the tapes – around 90 in total – the first-time filmmakers recognised that there was the potential for a long form project; but diving in the deep end wasn’t the best way forward. “To help us develop our style and approach we started taking individual passages and making a series of short films. It was a way of testing the material.”

“We recognised that cinema is predominantly a visual medium so there’s something paradoxical about making a film about blindness,” says Middleton. “But we thought the best way to approach this was to embrace it, and this led to the development of this aesthetic in close collaboration with our cinematographer [Gerry Floyd]. We often framed supporting characters in silhouette or just above the mouth, corresponding to John’s visual memory of them. We tried to refrain from using wide establishing shots that would give the audience a privileged perspective; and we considered use of light and shadow, corresponding to what John described as a reduced world of blindness.”

These stylistic principles, Spinney explains, were part of a wider break with convention: “It made us aware of how much the grammar of cinema is based around both spatial geography and eye lines, which were two things that John talks about losing. So we were trying to work against those conventions. Because John’s account is about his dreaming life, his visual memories, his shifts in how he perceives the world, we felt we needed to try and find a way to access that material, and that necessitated a more creative approach.”

Alongside the feature film, the filmmakers have offered a unique virtual reality experience. “It focuses on John’s process of mapping acoustic space and it uses binaural audio tethered to 3D animations where sound is tethered to light. There are passages where John talks about how listening to the sound of his children’s footsteps in the park, how sounds allow people and objects to come in and out of existence, how weather can transform space, how thunder puts a roof over his head, how intricate patterns of falling rain can give shape and definition and contours to the environment We found that the VR experience allows you to access this more exploratory material,” explains Middleton. “It’s a completely different experience [to the feature film]. We were conscious that many of the passages and reflections on blindness weren’t necessarily best suited to interpretation through film – particularly his more meditative or exploratory passages around the senses – and so we were very fortunate to team up with our French co-producers who developed the VR side of it.

To bring Hull’s recordings to life the filmmakers decided to have actors lip-synch the audio, a technique they had admired in Clio Barnard’s The Arbor, as Middleton explains: “The Arbor was a very important reference for us in development, particularly so in helping us communicate our ideas in pitching and so forth. We were struck by the way Clio used the technique, but whereas she uses it theatrically, for us it was much more naturalistic; we wanted to embed these recordings within a natural setting and try and preserve the immediacy and the emotion in the original recordings.” Spinney describes how tricky it was for their actors: “Technically it was a challenge in that on set we didn’t record any sound, we just had the audio playing with pips beforehand in order to cue the actors in. And they spent a long time learning the rhythms and cadences of that material.”

“We very much saw the project as a collaborative process up until John passed away a couple of weeks into production, very sadly but suddenly in 2015,” says Middleton. “Up until that point he’d been very engaged in the process; we’d spend a lot of time with John and Marilyn, encouraging them to reprocess these events and recording their conversations, their reflections on the time between 1983 and 1986. So in a sense we could never stray too far away from that. We were always very conscious that it is John’s story, and that became increasingly apparent to us even after we got into post-production. We very much felt his guiding hand throughout.”

Notes on Blindness was backed by the BFI Film Fund.