notes on cinema #0001

hopefully this will be the first of many weekly posts. i apologize in advance if the text below is below standard. i was a decent enough writer until i shut down completely, wallowing in nothing but an unfounded despair, and wrote so little that it might as well be nothing. here i am, stretching my muscles of cognizance, consciousness, empathy and lyricism, hoping to be back. i shall ramble no further.
before we begin, let me explain what this is. i watch a few movies and television shows every week. every week, i shall take a film or a piece of television that moved me and write a few lines about it. there's no special significance to my date of writing this. it is just a decision that i have made, like most of my decisions these days, quite impulsively. 
without further adieu, here are my thoughts on the film of the week : 

James Spinney and Peter Middleton's Notes on Blindness is about John M Hull, a professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham, who found himself losing his eyesight halfway through his life. Hull contends with this new circumstance by recording notes on his experience of slow descent into blindness.
The film is practically a documentary, utilizing these recordings as well as interviews of Hull and his wife. However, this audio documentary is accompanied by visuals performed by actors who lip-sync to the actual recordings of Hull and his wife. It is not, as one would expect, a mere gimmick, but the raison d'etre of the film itself.
Hull mentions in his recordings that the loss of his sight weighs heavily on his very consciousness, he finds himself losing memories strongly attached to visual perception, he finds himself unable to recollect his wife's face. He finds himself in alien territory. The visuals of the film, if not the structure, too exist in such alien territory. The camera shows you little - just enough to echo Hull's state of mind. Emotions are reduced to glances and smiles, and the occasional offhand laughter. Action is obscured behind curtains, glass or rendered beyond the len's depth of field. The camera often frames characters from below their noses, depriving us, like Hull, of the precious human epithet of eye contact.
Before watching this film, I saw, thanks to my brother's VR rig, a 360 degree virtual reality "Notes on Blindness" experience, a sort of companion piece to the film wherein one of Hull's recording plays as we experience his visualisation of a park through the sounds he hears. We find ourselves in a dark space that slowly comes to life with Hull's description of the sounds he hears and how he perceives them, every new sound being represented with a glowing rendition of the object. I was not surprised that the film moved me more than that immersive presentation could. The film transmits Hull's experiences to us through an emotional lens. No amount of physical or virtual immersion can faithfully depict the agony and the existential crisis Hull goes through. Only cinema can.
Hull, from what I've read of him, was a believer of empathy. Notes on Blindness makes you startlingly empathetic, like the best films do.

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now that the normies are gone, let's talk about world domination