Notes on Blindness

Sort of a documentary, kind of a drama, an essay of sorts, Notes on Blindness isn't quite like any film you've ever seen, unless of course you've seen Clio Barnard's wonderful, similarly sui generis work The Arbor which, like this, features actors lip-synching to audio recordings of real people talking about their lives. The life and voice at the centre of this richly evocative and thought-provoking film is that of John Hull, an Australian academic theologian living in the UK who went blind in 1980, and died, aged 80, in 2015. Determined to make sense of his experience, he started an audio diary on an old-school cassette recorder and those musings - some mundane, some funny, and some deeply profound - play out here with Dan Renton Skinner as Hull, and Simone Kirby his wife Marilyn. Although the transcript of his diary was eventually published under the title Touching the Rock, after seeing this it's almost hard to imagine that any medium other than cinema could so evocatively capture the strangeness of Hull's experience, especially when moments of surreal beauty like a rainstorm indoors capture the disorientation of its subject.