In 1983, as writer and academic John Hull began going irreversibly blind, he embarked on an audio diary as a way of making sense of the upheavals rocking his life. Drawing on these, recorded over three years, the filmmakers innovatively pair this documentary sound component with elliptical moving images and docudrama scenes featuring actors lip-synching actual moments of recorded dialogue. Initially Hull’s frustrations are at his dwindling professional prospects. But the onset of his blindness also coincided with the birth of his son. Hull speaks of forgetting what his wife and daughter look like. Memory itself becomes elusive. “I am concerned to understand blindness, to seek its meaning, to retain the fullness of my humanity,” he says. It is also the ambition of this chiaroscuro-lit, dream-like film.
Emmy 2015 News & Documentary Awards
CT: Mon 6 8.45pm CN4 V&A