Notes On Blindness

2015, 90 minutes

Feature Film version of award winning short film of the same name

John Hull developed cataracts at the age of 13, which left him blind for months at a time. The restoration of his sight was followed by a series of retinal detachments. After a number of operations, in 1980, at age 45, John’s vision was so poor that he was registered blind. He and Marilyn were newly married and she had just given birth to a son, Thomas. John was working as a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, England, and he recalls that this initial period was dominated by the practical challenges of adaptation, which left little time for reflection. It wasn’t until 1983, when John had lost the final traces of light sensation, that he began to confront the enormousness of this loss. “I knew that if I didn’t understand it,” he now recalls, “blindness would destroy me.” In June of that year John made his first diary recording. “The world into which I am being dragged with my loved ones will engulf us. There will be no return. Blindness is permanent and irreversible... My life is in crisis.” Over the next three years John recorded over 16 hours of audio diaries, excavating the interior world of blindness. They document a purging period of grief, but eventually of renewal, in what John describes as the discovery of a “world beyond sight.”