Notes on Blindness
Pete Middleton, James Spinney (2016)
In the early 1980s, the theologian John Hull (1935-2015) lost his sight. He continued to lecture and publish on religious education; he also became more widely known for his writings on visual disability. Hull’s autobiographical Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness, published in 1990, had its source in the audio diary he kept in the early years of his life in a new, dark world. The recordings that comprise the audio diary are the basis of Notes on Blindness, Pete Middleton and James Spinney’s documentary portrait of Hull. These include not only Hull’s reflections on his condition but also the voices of his wife Marilyn and their children – some of the more light-hearted recordings were made to send to Hull’s parents in his native Australia. The film’s soundtrack includes too interviews with Hull and his wife. (I assume these were conducted in much more recent years although this isn’t made clear.) On the screen, John Hull is incarnated by Dan Renton Skinner, Marilyn by Simone Kirby. When they open their mouths, the actors lip-synch to the words spoken by the Hulls’ voices in the audio-diary. (It’s essentially the same technique that Clio Barnard used to good effect in parts of The Arbor.)
Touching the Rock was re-published in 1997, with additional material and the new title On Sight and Insight: A Journey into the World of Blindness. According to Wikipedia, the later publication ‘tends to emphasise features of the state of blindness, rather than the experience of losing sight’. In a New Yorker piece in 2003, Oliver Sacks described On Sight and Insight as follows:
‘There has never been, to my knowledge, so minute and fascinating (and frightening) an account of how not only the outer eye, but the ‘inner eye’, gradually vanishes with blindness; of the steady loss of visual memory, visual imagery, visual orientation, visual concepts… of the steady advance or journey… into the state which [Hull] calls ‘deep blindness’.’
These consequences of loss of sight are vividly realised in Notes on Blindness, perhaps especially in the episode describing John Hull’s trip, with Marilyn and their young children, to visit his parents. In his diary in England, Hull has already voiced fears that succumbing to blindness amounts to a virtual letting go of life itself. Returning to places in Melbourne where he played and went to school, Hull finds that he can’t see these in his memory as they once were, let alone with his eyes as they are now. Feeling stranded and useless, he’s relieved to get back to his Birmingham home, an environment with which he’s intimately familiar and where he can do things – even small things, like make a cup of tea. He feels relatively secure too in his academic life at Birmingham University, where, as Hull perceives it, his students enter his orbit. The Hulls had four children together (he also had a child from his first marriage, which ended in divorce). The film conveys strongly what his blindness means to him as a father. There’s a Christmas Day when he is almost uncontrollably sad and frustrated not to be able to see the children. During the visit to Australia, he hears his daughter yell in pain and stumbles desperately in the direction of her cries. (I wasn’t clear if this incident was actually recorded on tape at the time. Since it doesn’t interrupt any other monologue or conversation, it seems strange if it was. If it wasn’t, that naturally prompts the question of whether it’s the sole instance of ‘audio reconstruction’ by Pete Middleton and James Spinney.)
Hull’s Christianity certainly add another layer to his experience of blindness although it’s not evident from the film that his loss of sight, for all that it was demoralising, seriously threatened his beliefs. He makes clear that he sometimes feels angry with God – what right has anyone to deprive him of the sight of his children? – but also that he’s never regarded his faith as a shield against bad things happening. As time goes on, he’s increasingly excited to find that his loss of ‘the outer eye’ has sharpened his thinking, enabling him, he says, to make new, intellectually more imaginative connections between ideas. This is the third documentary that Middleton and Spinney have made about Hull – following the shorts Notes on Blindness: Rainfall (2013) and Notes on Blindness (2014), respectively four and fourteen minutes long. The directors are clearly wedded to the title and it’s apt enough for this ninety-minute feature. That’s not entirely a compliment, however. The narrative structure suggests a succession of jottings. This corresponds with the fragmented visual scheme and makes the piece more immediately filmic – more optical, if you like – but it tends to downplay Hull’s sense of being on a spiritual journey. Until, that is, the closing stages. The determinedly climactic sequence takes place in a cathedral, where Hull experiences what he believes to be an apprehension of God’s presence and grace. He explains to his wife that he concludes from this epiphany that his blindness is a gift albeit not a gift that he wants – ‘So the question is not why have I got it but what am I going to do with it?’
Middleton and Spinney then cut to a shot of the real John and Marilyn Hull, arm in arm on a walk on the seashore, before the screen whites out. Brief closing legends record the publication of Touching the Rock; that in 2012 Hull received an RNIB Lifetime Achievement Award (‘for Services to the Literature of Blindness’); and that he died in July 2015. Neither this closing summary, nor anything else in the film, conveys the extent of what Hull did subsequently. If I understood him correctly, his determination to be as active as possible reflected a belief that this was what God wanted of him; his Wikipedia entry and website – http://www.johnmhull.biz/ – give a picture of his remarkably sustained activity and productivity. Of course a film isn’t the place for a bibliography; but, if the interviews with the Hulls took place in John’s final years, it’s frustrating not to hear more of his retrospective thoughts about how he used what he thought of as his gift. (Hull’s commitment to agency offered, for me, an interesting contrast with the core theme of a book I read recently by another theologian. In The Stature of Waiting (1982), W H Vanstone explores and insists on the spiritual importance of enforced dependence and passivity.)
Pete Middleton and James Spinney have an important subject and an admirable protagonist – both these things will discourage reviewers from having a bad critical word to say about the film. I have to be honest that minor sensory difficulties of my own – ‘night blindness’, sensitivity to bright or moving lights, slight loss of hearing – made Notes of Blindness a challenging experience in the wrong way. Middleton and Spinney, with their cinematographer Gerry Floyd, have understandably created images that often illustrate John Hull’s field of vision and mind’s eye: the viewer is confronted by many shots in deep shadow or encroaching darkness, a few in contrasting, dazzling white. It seems Hull made his diary on a humble audio-cassette recorder and the sound quality isn’t great. I found that shutting my eyes helped me to avoid getting a headache and to hear the words better; so I did this several times – even though it made me feel guilty that I could then open my eyes and see the screen again. It was a relief that Simone Kirby occasionally (and touchingly) suggested a hint of guilty conscience on the part of Marilyn Hull too: when she expresses an emotion through her face rather than her voice, she looks to experience it as going behind her husband’s back. I should also admit that Notes on Blindness was one occasion when I wished my ability to recognise familiar actors had deserted me. Dan Renton Skinner does well enough as John Hull but I kept seeing him as the Vic and Bob protégé he’s been until now – Angelos Epithemiou in Shooting Stars, Bosh in House of Fools …
5 July 2016