It is a challenge to recreate the way that blind people perceive the world in film. Johan Van der Keuken tried his hand at it by making a documentary film in 1964 about children and teenagers at a special school in Holland.
The sequence begins with a series of shots of hands touching and groping for objects. The soundtrack, almost saturated, combines all the ambient sounds of the room: the hubbub of the other children off-screen, the clear voices of the blind people saying out loud the names of the objects once identified. These close-up shots combined with this saturated soundtrack plunge the viewer into a harsh universe: that of those who, deprived of a sense, are locked in a world whose contours stop at their fingertips.
Then, through slow pans upwards, revealing the faces of the concentrated children, their eyes wide open yet devoid of gaze. We are disturbed: they are unaware of the show they are putting on, but we watch them attentively. Then music comes on, very soft, which takes us away from this almost unpleasant experience and gives birth to characters before our eyes. Beyond the devices that are proposed to them, they invent their own means of appropriating the world: putting objects in their mouths, shaking them, playing with an insect that crosses the work table. Then the sequence shifts: the director tries to share with us the dizzying joy of a little girl at the end of a learning sequence. He combines several shots of the process, taken at different times and perhaps on different days. The girl, facing us, touches a stuffed pigeon. In the editing, the rhythm of a slow waltz, played by hands that are sometimes hesitant, follows the stages of her journey and takes us into her interiority. When she finally caresses the living animal, she holds it close to her heart and smiles when, at the end, it almost flies away... The end of the extract is also deeply moving: a child, with the help of a machine, types a text. Another child deciphers a map.
Those who are deprived of sight are also deprived of access to language, whose signs they cannot interpret: when we say the word mountain, the meaning is immediate and gives rise to an image. What inner images are born in the blind child who deciphers it from a book or braille?
Throughout the sequence, Johan Van Der Keuken invents and experiments: through editing, the repetition of motifs, the use of music, he tries to translate the experience of a young person deprived of a primary and fundamental meaning, who slowly and patiently makes his way towards apprehending the world. By also attempting, in the same movement, to film the mystery of their perception of the world, he also questions the very power of cinema.
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It is a challenge to recreate the way that blind people perceive the world in film. Johan Van der Keuken tried his hand at it by making a documentary film in 1964 about children and teenagers at a special school in Holland.
The sequence begins with a series of shots of hands touching and groping for objects. The soundtrack, almost saturated, combines all the ambient sounds of the room: the hubbub of the other children off-screen, the clear voices of the blind people saying out loud the names of the objects once identified. These close-up shots combined with this saturated soundtrack plunge the viewer into a harsh universe: that of those who, deprived of a sense, are locked in a world whose contours stop at their fingertips.
Then, through slow pans upwards, revealing the faces of the concentrated children, their eyes wide open yet devoid of gaze. We are disturbed: they are unaware of the show they are putting on, but we watch them attentively. Then music comes on, very soft, which takes us away from this almost unpleasant experience and gives birth to characters before our eyes. Beyond the devices that are proposed to them, they invent their own means of appropriating the world: putting objects in their mouths, shaking them, playing with an insect that crosses the work table. Then the sequence shifts: the director tries to share with us the dizzying joy of a little girl at the end of a learning sequence. He combines several shots of the process, taken at different times and perhaps on different days. The girl, facing us, touches a stuffed pigeon. In the editing, the rhythm of a slow waltz, played by hands that are sometimes hesitant, follows the stages of her journey and takes us into her interiority. When she finally caresses the living animal, she holds it close to her heart and smiles when, at the end, it almost flies away... The end of the extract is also deeply moving: a child, with the help of a machine, types a text. Another child deciphers a map.
Those who are deprived of sight are also deprived of access to language, whose signs they cannot interpret: when we say the word mountain, the meaning is immediate and gives rise to an image. What inner images are born in the blind child who deciphers it from a book or braille?
Throughout the sequence, Johan Van Der Keuken invents and experiments: through editing, the repetition of motifs, the use of music, he tries to translate the experience of a young person deprived of a primary and fundamental meaning, who slowly and patiently makes his way towards apprehending the world. By also attempting, in the same movement, to film the mystery of their perception of the world, he also questions the very power of cinema.