Notes on Blindness review: a beautiful, accessible and thoughtful one-off

After theologian John Hull lost his sight in the early 1980s, he began to document his observations on blindness on hundreds of cassette tapes. An academic dedicated to deep thinking, he spent years recording vignettes in a melancholy Australian lilt. This does not sound like the stuff of era-defining documentary, but Peter Middleton and James Spinney have made a miraculous piece of work that combines lip-synced recreations of Hull’s verbal adventures with stagings of Hull’s vivid dreams of sightedness.

Over 85 minutes, we dip in and out of the life of a man trapped in visual darkness, but whose imagination is ravishingly bright. Hull’s immaculately recorded tapes feature cameo appearances from his wife Marilyn and five children, documenting his gradual acceptance of blindness, understood through the comfort and routine of home and family life.

The lip-syncing from Dan Skinner (Hull) and Simone Kirby (Marilyn) is naturalistic and immaculately performed, without the intentional artificiality of the same technique in The Arbor, the documentary to which it’s most usefully (if superficially) comparable. Where that was all anger and provocation, this is all poetry and love. You’ll quickly forget that this isn’t the real John and Marilyn in front of you – Middleton and Spinney have us rooting for them. A slow dance between them to Dedicated to the One I Love is a moment of tearjerking twilight-lit closeness, undercut by the following bizarre dream sequence of a flooded supermarket where the two lovers are unable to connect. Throughout the film we fear they could drift apart, but moments of closeness and love keep coming back.

These aesthetic flourishes could take the film too close to fiction for documentary purists. But it’s Hull himself, who died in 2015, that is the documentary element here, a pioneer of selfies decades before the word was invented. Arguably Hull isn’t only the writer of every word we hear, he’s a co-director of the film. He offers moments of startling and sudden emotional rush, including a very funny and very beautiful scene where Hull outwits a faith healer and reflects on the experience, and a sad Christmas where Hull struggles to maintain his spirits as presents are opened.

Hull’s son Thomas grows as a character, performing entertaining verbal shows for him, participating in a school gate farewell routine, and accepting Hull’s blindness with the confused indifference only a small child can. The documentary could take a turn for the saccharine but a trip to Australia halfway through the film offers a different path. We see Hull/Skinner retracing the steps of his youth in changed or abandoned locations, there’s a terrifying moment of family panic, and Middleton and Spinney turn up the dial on Hull’s sense of losing his visual memories. Goodbye not only to Australia, but to his parents and the details of decades of his life.

Documentaries reliant on recreation can be embarrassingly literal, but the genius of the film is in allowing us to understand and visualise the world of blindness without having to be patronised. To that end, the documentary is touring in some locations with a magical VR experience that expands Hull’s limited visual world into an experience of ghostly figures and floating bodies. As documentary VR, this is a major leap forward in the form that’s exciting to see – seeing documentary without VR experience or vice-versa means audiences miss the complete experience of Hull’s blindness.

Hull’s is a one-off story. It’s entirely appropriate that he’s got a one-off documentary treatment that pushes the form. This is a beautiful, accessible and thoughtful work of art.