New Article from Cinema Scope

As I was searching through cinema-scope.com one day, I came across a very interesting article. It was called “The Art of Not Seeing: On Blindness and blindness by Jason Anderson.” The article started off by talking about a recent book by Alberto Manguel, a man who spent several years being a reader and a viewer for Borges. Borges was a film critic for an Argentinean magazine in the late forties and early fifties, until he went blind. A few years after going completely blind, Borges met Manguel in a bookstore in Buenos Aries. However, the two occasionally attended films and Manguel would describe the images to Borges. The author of this article states, “ Nevertheless, the writer—a film critic for the Argentinian literary magazine Sur from 1931 to 1944—remained an enthusiastic moviegoer, especially when it came to gangster pictures and musicals.” Alexander writes about how it was absolutely incredible for Manguel to sit and hear what Borges reaction was to the films. He states, “ He comments on the epic quality of the rivalry between the gangs, on the role of the women, on the use of the colour red.” There is an irony to that though, Borges always stated that the first colors that were robbed of him were red and black. I think its extremely interesting that he comments on the use of red when that is the color he was robbed of first. I think that there was something in his mind that from the moment he lost it, made him understand the color better. He developed a fondness to it and felt he knew more about the intimacy of the color and how it was represented and what it stood for. Alexander then goes into describing, for a sighted person, what Borges viewing of films must have looked like. He then uses that idea to begin to review that latest adaptation of José Saramago’s novel, by Fernando Mereilles, about a city’s collapse after all the people in the city go blind except one. Alexander goes about reviewing this movie in a strange way, he compares elements of it to other films. He goes on to state that “Blindness may also belong to a category of literary adaptations—including Gus Van Sant’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993), Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), and Alan Rudolph’s Breakfast of Champions (1999)—whose dogged faithfulness to their sources inadvertently prove just how unfilmable the books were in the first place.” I chose to read about this article for this reason actually, I was completely entranced by the comparisons that Alexander was making. I have really seen anybody review like this before, I’m more used to critics commenting on how a film is like another, on the whole. It was fascinating to read how elements were similar to elements of other films and not just to hear how a film is going to be film this other film that has already been compared to other films. It gets confusing, like my last statement, but confused is usually how I feel after reading a review and I wasn’t confused after reading this. I understood what Alexander was and saying and how he said it. I believe that Alexander was not only trying to say how he felt about “Blindness,” which I believe he didn’t like the film, but he was trying to get across another point using Borges as a reference. Borges began to see a rather dull and strange nighttime after he lost the ability to see the color black. It went into a bluish-green color, that was rather drab. Alexander states that “maybe what he saw was more like the milky, slightly blue-tinted whiteness that continually swallows up the frame in Fernando Mereilles’ new adaptation of Blindness.” Films are becoming a bit drab in there design and execution as well and I believe that is what Alexander is trying to communicate. Films are in danger of losing their appeal because so many things are like so many other things that have already been done in the movies. Which I believe is true, most of the movies that come out now aren’t very good. They’re just trying to something that another film has already done. In some cases, new films come out and try to copy the idea of a film before it and completely ruin what was special about the idea behind the film. Whether that be humor, drama, action, romance, etc. The article felt very natural to me and I thought it was very clever of Alexander to use the failing sight of a film critic as the basis to write his review of a film.