Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
After losing sight in 1983, John Hull began keeping an audio diary, a unique testimony of loss, rebirth and renewal, excavating the interior world of blindness. Following on from the Emmy Award-winning short film of the same name, Notes on Blindness is an ambitious and groundbreaking work, both affecting and innovative.
Notes on Blindness is a genuinely singular documentary experience — Hull's audio diary recordings are used as the direct soundtrack, with actors lip-syncing to the real voices in dreamlike, expressionistic reconstructions. The cinematography is strikingly inventive, translating the experience of blindness into visual poetry through texture, light, and abstraction in ways rarely attempted in documentary filmmaking. The novelty of its form is exceptional: it occupies an unusual hybrid space between documentary, drama, and audio art. The plot follows Hull's deeply personal and philosophical journey with emotional authenticity, though the narrative arc is somewhat episodic and contemplative rather than dramatically propulsive. Acting (or performance) is solid but secondary given the real audio drives everything. The ending, while quietly moving, doesn't fully crystallize into a transcendent payoff commensurate with the film's ambitions.