Society. Spaces. Screens

Abstract

‘Notes on Blindness’ (2016) depicts theologian John Hull’s journey through acquired blindness. Using archived audio recordings of Hull’s serendipitous reflections, lip-synced and reenacted by actors, the documentary self-reflexively explores vulnerability in aesthetic and existential realms. While explicitly adopting a diaristic form, the film’s implicit narrativization presents Hull as the authorial character, enabling seamless transitions between omniscient and subjective points of view. Primarily identified as an external perspective from which Hull’s blindness is objectively recounted, the filmic space in the reenactment also functions as a reflective surface, where Hull’s recollective and inquisitive voice-over transforms the descriptive space into an imaginative plane of inner subjectivity. The authoritative authenticity in Hull’s personal voice bonds narrative space and mnemonic surface, creating specular narration, vicarious absence, and meta-vulnerability. As a new introspective perception emerges from Hull’s degenerative vision, his narration mirrors not just the visualized memories of the seen world but also unforeseen, revelatory interactions. Alongside the film’s visually obscurative aesthetic, the clarity of Hull’s verbal expressions allows for a vicarious engagement with the absence of sight. Despite the sighted spectator’s limited epistemic identification with blindness, with Hull’s discovery of divine grace in his blindness, the immediate intimacy of Hull’s experiential internality elicits affective alignment with an existential vulnerability. Hull’s vulnerability is conveyed both as a textual effect and an embodied state. In the meta-emotion of filmic sympathy for John Hull, human vulnerability becomes a form of blindness, where beyond external space and internal surface lies a transcendent dependence.