In 1983 John Hull began to dictate a diary on audio tape. In the preceding years, Hull, a university theologian with a wife and young family, had been going blind, and his thoughts, recorded on 16 hours of audio cassettes, formed the basis of an acclaimed book. Now his chronicle has been turned into a haunting, quietly affecting documentary.
Pete Middleton and James Spinney, the directors of Notes on Blindness, have returned to these tapes as a guiding source. John died last year aged 80 but his voice – spoken into a humble cassette machine in, among other places, the quiet of his study nearly 40 years ago – figures prominently on the soundtrack. Reconstructing the years during John’s loss of sight, the film casts Dan Renton Skinner as John,…
