OT: blind filmmakers

[Scottie]

Well, I guess it's on topic.

My question is more of a musing than a full 'I need help' kind of question, but do you think there are any blind people who have made movies? Obviously they wouldn't be the one operating the camera or, like them, we wouldn't be seeing much of anything (what with them not being able to set proper exposure, focus correctly, or not knowing where the subjects are), but do you think there has been a blind person with a "vision" of a film they have always wanted to make. I use "vision" liberally to mean an idea of course, but maybe somebody who once had vision and then lost it who still retains the images he once had and has been stewing over them for so many years. It's been an idea he has wanted to make into a movie and then he finally made it. It's been said that blind people dream in whatever visions they might have had before they went blind, or if they never had vision, they dream in sounds. How much of the movie would be dominated by visuals, or would it be a movie primarily expressed through aural stimulation? Would they create the kinds of hypnogogic visions (such as what you see when you close your eyes and then press your fingers to them) that Stan Brackhage created in his countless paint-on-film films where bright colors swrl uncontrollably around on screen, or would their ideas be more coherent and symbolic, something more like a setting sun behind two people kissing or a flower blooming on someone's hand?

It wouldn't be the first case of someone lacking a particular sense who was able to do something that requires their missing sense: there are people who have driven cars blind or painted blind. It's just that filmmaking is such a technical medium that almost demands a certain amount of insight to it before anybody will want to sit down and watch what you have made. Do you know of any people out there who have done this very thing? I would very much like to watch their films and see what a blind person wants reality to be represented as.

-Scott

[Inyarear]

I suppose with today's technology, a blind person could at least produce a decent script for a film, or do some of the post-processing. Someone would still have to do all of the visuals for him, however.

One idea I've had concerning blindness in films is the idea of translating a blind person's point of view into something sighted people can see on the screen. The way I figure you'd do it is, you make everything the blind person touches appear as a grayscale line drawing, with the stuff he actually feels portrayed in bright white and the stuff he merely surmises to exist (from memory and/or speculation about the dimensions of the objects he's touching) portrayed in fading grayish lines. In the background, in primary colors, things he surmises about his surroundings from what he hears might also appear as kind of vague shadows. Whenever his perceptions about something he's touching suddenly prove wrong, one could show the flash of light from bumping into things, and the immediate adjustments of his mental picture of things to fit the new sensory data in the form of morphing line drawings.

This would almost certainly have to be an animated feature, of course, though maybe a really clever animator would know some way to translate live action into this medium of perception. Having known a blind woman myself, I've seen that exaggerating how perceptive blind people really are might be more difficult to do than you might think: some shady guy once hassled this blind woman I knew when she was out walking around the city on some errand, and when the police later asked her about it (looking for a suspect--possibly the same guy--believed to have raped another woman shortly after this), she was able to give a fairly accurate description of his height, build, and approximate weight from the sound of his voice and the tread of his feet. She also had an exceptionally good sense of smell. (In a film, I suppose various odors and fragrances could be portrayed as clouds of primary-colored vapor of different thicknesses that either cling to the blind person's nose or dissipate quickly, depending on what they are.)

Beyond that, if anyone could ever find a way to record physical sensations from touch and smell in a way such that they could be played back to someone else's senses, it might make for a whole new medium of entertainment--"feelies" maybe?

[Mr_Vindictive]

One might argue that Uwe Boll is blind....

[Neville]

A funny coincidence: I recently saw on the news that as a result of some iniciative several blind people had been given videocams so they could experiment and that they were showing / studying the results. The wouldn't show any footage, but the blind themselves mentioned that the biggest problem they had to face was how to frame anything they wanted to show.

And also related to this topic, I think there's at least one mainstream film that deals with blind people perceive things. It's called "At first sight" and stars Val Kilmer as a blind man that undergoes surgery to recover his vision and as a result must deal with a whole new universe.

[Shadowphile]

One of the first ever three D movies was filmed by a one eyed director.  He wouldn't see what the audience was seeing....

[Neville]

For some reason, there are (or were) lots of one-eyed directors. Fritz Lang comes to mind, but there were many others.

[Shadowphile]

Sacrificed an eye for 'vision'?

[Neville]

I hope they didn't...

[BoyScoutKevin]

I believe you are refering to Andre de Toth and "The House of Wax" w/ Vincent Price, which was in 3-D.

[BoyScoutKevin]

Another one would be director Raoul Walsh who would lose an eye in 1928, when a jack rabbit jumped through the windshield of the jeep in which he was riding. But, in a career that would last another 36 years, he would direct over 70 more films.

[Mitch McAfee]

From memory, Ernest Schoedsack was legally blind at the time of directing the original MIGHTY JOE YOUNG.