Notes on Blindness takes an unflinching look at life without sight through the audio tape chronicles of theologian John Hull. To find out more about this immersive and uniquely shot project, our Director of Film Jason Wood spoke to directing duo Pete Middleton and James Spinney…
JW: Your relationship with John Hull stretches back some way to collaborations that took place before Notes on Blindness. Can you talk a little about this relationship (and your relationship with his wife Marilyn)?
PM/JS: We first met John at the end of 2010, when researching first person accounts of blindness for a different project. We came across John’s remarkable book, Touching The Rock, which was published in the 1990s. In the foreword it mentions that the first draft was transcribed from the audio diaries John had kept over a three-year period after he lost his sight in the early ‘80s.
After a few months getting to know John and Marilyn, he was kind enough to share his archive with us – a dusty box of C-90 cassettes that had previously been stashed away on a shelf in his study, undisturbed for over quarter of a century. It was the start of a five-year collaboration, beginning as a series of short films and which developed into the current feature film and virtual reality project.
Those years were marked by regular visits up to Birmingham to see John and Marilyn, spending hours talking over cups of tea and long dinners. Looking back, it’s hard to believe quite how welcoming they were of these two unproven young filmmakers! Nor how trusting and generous they were in sharing these experiences. Of course, John’s diaries document an often painful period of their lives, that was many years in the past. John and Marilyn described it as like ‘reopening an old wound’. And increasingly, this idea of reprocessing and reinterpreting memories became something that it felt important to incorporate into the film. Ultimately, however, our memories of our time with John and Marilyn are actually of what terrific fun they were to be around – their great warmth and laughter.
JW: I saw the film in Rotterdam and the cumulative effect of the film is undoubtedly one of my foremost digital experiences. Were you keen, and considering the virtual reality project that will accompany the release of the film, that Notes on Blindness was to be a truly sensory and multi-platform experience?
PM/JS: Reading or listening to John’s account gives you a heightened awareness of your senses. There’s a particularly memorable passage from John’s diaries in which he describes how the sound of falling rain can bring spacial dimension to an environment. It felt important that these moments be sensory, cinematic experiences. They’re certainly on a different level in an auditorium, where the sound envelops you.
And the idea of experiencing space through acoustics is something that virtual reality can explore in a really interesting way. Binaural sound gives the impression of being within a three-dimensional environment, in which you feel present within the panorama of sounds that surround you – as you move your head they move the other way. So the virtual reality offers an engagement with John’s ideas that is more of a personal, meditative experience. We’re really excited about how the two sides of the project offer very different entry points to John’s account.
JW: The approach to the material that you take has echoes perhaps of Dreams of a Life and The Arbor. Were these films an influence at all in terms of having actors lip sync the words of living people and, the aforementioned films apart, was this lip syncing approach and straddling of the world between fact and fiction an approach that struck you as being best suited to the material from the outset?
PM/JS: We didn’t go in with any pre-conceived ideas. But listening to John’s recordings, we immediately knew what we didn’t want to do. We didn’t want to use talking heads or observational footage, but nor did we want to lose the power and authenticity of John and the family’s voices. The recordings needed to be front and centre. So we felt we needed to find an approach that used elements of adaptation, but rooted in the documentary materials. This seemed to us the only way to follow John on this very internal journey, which explores memory, imagination and the senses.
At the start of the film it felt important to explain the relationship between the documentary audio material and the more interpretive visual approach so that you have a clear understanding of the constituent elements. And the ethical principles that governed the structuring and arranging of the audio material resembled any other documentary process. But certainly the process of conceiving and filming the visuals had more akin with an adaptation, and the production process in the final stages resembled a narrative feature, albeit a rather peculiar one!
Having said that, every type of filmmaking has its own peculiarities that become strangely normalised – one reviewer referred to the lip-synching technique as a kind of ‘visual dubbing’. In any case, lip-synching became the interface between the documentary and more creative sides of the project.
In this respect, The Arbor was a huge influence. Ultimately, we knew that the success of this kind of approach rested on the strength of the performances, which is partly why we sought out the casting director Amy Hubbard, who also worked on The Arbor. She helped pair us with Dan and Simone, who were not only able to master the lip-synching but also subsume the technique into much greater performances.There were also a number of films emerging as we developed the project – ‘Stories We Tell’ and ‘The Possibilities are Endless’ – which probably emboldened us and our supporters in terms of thinking about the power of creative approaches to documentary.
JW: I read in an earlier interview of your desire to explore the interiority of blindness through the film’s aesthetic. How did you work with key crew such as Gerry Floyd, Damien Creagh, Julian Quantrill and the sound department to achieve this?
PM/JS: We were very fortunate to collaborate with some extraordinarily talented people throughout the project. Gerry, Damien, Jules and Joakim were all involved in the short films as well, so by the time we came to shoot the feature we’d developed a close working relationship. With our cinematographer Gerry, we talked a lot about limitations. Again, it was more a case of what we didn’t want to do. It felt wrong to use establishing shots, so we used longer lenses, following hands, framing supporting characters in fragments. We avoided fill light, instead trying to use deep shadow with only pockets or fringes of light.
A lot of our conversations with our production designer Damien were about colour. As well as what degree of set dressing was fitting – again there was a lot of stripping things back. We wanted to create something of a mental environment. Damien knew from working with us on the short film that there was the possibility that we would only end up shooting a tiny proportion of the set! But he still produced magnificently textured 360 degree sets that gave us the freedom to explore and find those unusual frames.
The process with Jules, our editor, was bringing all these elements together and trying to find a balance of tone. Some of the more creative approaches, to be honest, fell away at an early stage, including some of the more whimsical approaches to John’s imaginative world. A lot of it was about rhythm and balance. The mock radio shows and weather reports presented by John’s daughter Imogen, which bring so much warmth to the film, were something that largely grew in the edit. And in fact our only additional shoot days were to film more with of these moments with Miranda, who plays Imogen, an unexpected master of lip-synching.
We didn’t record any sound on set, so the sound department, Joakim Sundstrom and his team, constructed all the non-documentary elements in post-production. Which means that when you step back, the actors had matched their movements to the documentary audio and then the foley artists were matching sounds to the actors movements. As well as working out how to layer these textured, twenty-five year old tape recordings within the greater sound world of the film.
JW: Notes on Blindness is incredibly important both in terms of offering a truly accessible experience for blind viewers and in terms of representing how loss (in this case sight) affects people on an individual and more collective level. Were you keen to ensure this notion of accessibility and how did you undertake work with blind related organisations before you embarked on the project?
PM/JS: Absolutely. Throughout the film’s release, we’re partnering with the Royal National Institute for the Blind to try and start a public conversation about how cinema can be a rewarding and inclusive experience for all audiences.
We’re working with experts in the field of audio-visual translation to create alternative soundtracks for the film, showcasing some of the latest approaches to audio description and accessible filmmaking. As well as a wonderful audio description track by Louise Fryer, we’ve made a version of the film that is made more accessible by editing in more narration from John and Marilyn, as well as additional music cues and sound design. These multiple soundtracks are available through a free smartphone app that can synch up with screenings of the film, or to select as options using On-Demand players.
It’s a rare thing that the creative team have the opportunity to be so hand-on in the production of these accessibility materials, or indeed the creation of the foreign language subtitles. It’s something that surprises us given the enormous responsibility involved in communicating the creative nuances and complexities that go into every aspect of making a film. It’s something we’re trying to address by encouraging a more integrated approach to audio-visual translation, rather then relegating it to an afterthought at the end of the production process.
JW: The film has been incredibly well received at the numerous prestigious festivals where it has played. Can I ask about some of the responses you have been getting from the blind community and also the reaction from John’s wife and immediate family?
PM/JS: It’s been an amazing experience touring the film around the world – from Sundance, to Sheffield, to Sydney – and the reception has been overwhelming.
As you would expect, speaking to blind and partially sighted people after the screenings so far, the responses have been individual and nuanced. John was always keen to stress that his experience of blindness was just that – his own subjective account – he didn’t claim to speak on behalf of the wider blind community. Rather he hoped that by sharing his story it might serve to help those undergoing similar experiences and bridge an understanding between what he called ‘different worlds of experience’. And quite aside from the variety of physical experiences of sight loss, we all of course interpret experience in very different ways.
For Marilyn and the family, seeing your recorded voice re-embodied by actors must be a very peculiar process, and probably not one that they share with many other people in history. And the events of the film are now thirty years in the past. Of course, the project takes on a much greater complexity for Marilyn and the family in the wake of John’s death last year. We’ve been blown away by the support that they’ve given to the project.
JW: I have seen the film described as a tale of grief and loss. The film does deal with both of these subjects but it is also about love, readjustment, reconfiguration and realignment. Are you keen that the more positive elements of the film and the inspiration that it may give do not go unnoticed?
PM/JS: Though John began keeping the diaries as an attempt to understand his initial sense of loss, and his process of readjustment is at times a purging experience, his recordings come to document a kind of rebirth. Partly through his decision to no longer live in the ‘nostalgia of a visual world’, partly through an unconscious neurological rewiring that takes place over a number of years, by the end of the diaries John finds that ‘the things which once one took for granted, then mourned the loss of, then tried desperately to compensate for, in the end cease to matter’. His work takes on a new focus that he doubts would have been possible had he retained sight. Having feared that he and Marilyn might be drifting ‘into different worlds’, they ultimately describe the experience as a binding one. We hope that the film and the virtual reality experience communicate John’s eventual conclusion, found ‘on the far side of despair’, that ‘being human is not seeing, it’s loving’.
Notes on Blindness is showing now. Watch the trailer and book tickets here.
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