“After nearly three years of blindness, I find that the pictures in the gallery of my mind have dimmed somewhat. So I found with great distress that I could no longer remember what my wife looked like.”
In the early 1980's writer and theologian John Hull started to lose his vision. For the next three years, he kept a diary of his deteriorating vision on audio cassette.
In one of a series of “op-docs”, the New York Times teamed up with film-makers and the sundance institute to dramatise of his original recordings.
The final scene of “Notes on Blindness” hints at the larger narrative of the tapes, across which John registers a sea change in his outlook. By the close of the diaries, John finds that increasingly he has to remind himself of the existence of the visual world. Indeed, in an entry from 1986 he even defines blindness as “a dark, paradoxical gift,” around which he will come to redefine his life
