Blindness Arts: a Disability Studies Quarterly Special Issue

Co-organizing the 2015 Blind Creations conference with Vanessa Warne was one of the highlights of my academic career. As this post written in the conference's aftermath shows, the event was memorable above all for the sense of celebratory community it created. Almost as soon as the conference was over, Vanessa and I began making plans to continue the many productive conversations which started during those few summer days in Egham. We did not want or need to produce a traditional 'conference proceedings': our wonderful audio archive means that all the papers delivered at the conference are still available. Instead we wanted to extend the legacy of Blind Creations by publishing new work which responds to questions raised by our speakers in 2015. Just over three years after the conference, we are pleased and proud to announce the publication of a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly which we have called 'Blindness Arts'. In our co-authored Introduction we explain that this title functions "in contrast with and as a companion to ‘visual arts'". This extract from later in the Introduction gives a flavour of the intersections between blindness, creativity, performance and access which the issue explores:

In the first section of our issue, we share a set of essays that explore methods for accessing cultural works. These essays take up a range of media, namely sculpture, film, theatre and the comic book, all of which have traditionally been understood as visual forms. The authors in this section challenge this overly narrow perception and share experiments with both audio description and the role of touch. As Fayen d’Evie’s and Georgina Kleege’s individual contributions to blindness studies are noted by other authors throughout our issue, it is fitting that we begin with their co-authored essay, in which they share their work on tactile interpretations of the collections at the KADIST Art Foundation, and call for new opportunities and methods for touching art. Like d’Evie and Kleege, Hannah Thompson also calls for a collaborative approach to blind access. In her essay on audio description (AD) in cinema, she engages with four films with blind protagonists in order to compare extradiegetic and intradiegetic approaches to AD and to argue for its creative potential. Louise Fryer also explores the possibilities and challenges of integrated AD by sharing her experiences as an audio describer who, in a break with traditional models of objectivity and neutrality, took an active role in a play written and performed by a blind theatre group. Arseli Dokumaci shares a video project and essay that together use an exploration of the everyday travel strategies of two disabled people to propose an AD practice shaped by crip time. The final essay in this section, Brandon Christopher’s comparative study of an audio version of a conventional comic and of Philipp Meyer’s tactile comic Life, explores audio and tactile access questions raised in other essays in this section and extends our issue’s exploration of blindness arts to include the comic book genre. Remaining attentive to questions of access, we turn in the next section to the experiences of artists and to works of art that comment on blindness, either explicitly or through their use of design elements associated with blindness. Sculptor Aaron McPeake opens this section by reflecting on the making, exhibition and reception of his works in bronze, offering insight into the role of sound and touch in experiences of them. The role of touch is also important to the art made by Florian Grond and David Johnson. In the issue’s second co-authored piece, they share their experiences as artists collaborating at a distance and they reflect on the central role of blindness in their creation of accessible art. As blind artists, both McPeake and Johnson have encountered sighted misunderstandings of their practices. In an essay that responds to the misrepresentation of blind artists and their working lives, Catalin Brylla proposes filmmaking methods that challenge supercrip narratives and make possible nuanced depictions of the creative lives of artists who are blind. In an essay on the contemporary proliferation of braille as a design element in creative works, including public art installations, made by and for sighted people, Vanessa Warne explores the appropriation of braille as a visual code. Heather Tilley offers an historical perspective on the visual depiction of blind people, analyzing nineteenth-century images of blind people reading by touch and messages about blindness that the visual record shares. A pair of essays in our final section explores different kinds of performances that have been shaped by blindness. Piet Devos analyzes two non-visual contemporary dance pieces and his experiences of them. He also discusses the practice of blind dancer Saïd Gharbi. Offering a personal reflection on her own vocal practice, Emily K. Michael moves between sacred and secular spaces to map the relationship between blindness, vocal performance and persistent myths of compensatory ability. We close the volume with a co-authored essay by Rod Michalko and Tanya Titchkosky that uses a trans-Atlantic journey and a dialogue between the authors to explore the theme of travelling blind and the ways that blindness transforms sighted understandings of the world when it enters into dialogue with them. The presence in this final essay of a series of ‘excurses’ functions as a kind of crip time, similar to the audio description method proposed by Dokumaci. In both cases, the contents of the narrative are translated into a different format so that an ableist timeframe is replaced with space for creative reflection. 

Unlike much academic writing, this volume is free, open access and accessible. Please read, enjoy, respond and share widely.

Best and Most Beautiful Things

This image is the cover of the DVD: it is a shot of Michelle's legs waiting at a pedestrian crossing in the dark. Her white cane is also shown. She is wearing bright pink ballet pumps and mismatched knee-high socks.

In 2013 I was contacted about a crowd sourcing project to fund a documentary about a legally blind student graduating from Perkins School for the Blind. I was pleased to make a donation and a few days ago I received my Kickstarter reward: a free download of Best and Most Beautiful Things. The film, which was released to much critical acclaim, aired on PBS yesterday and is now available to buy as an iTunes download or a DVD with Audio Description. 

Before I watched the film, I was worried that it would be yet another sentimental, 'triumph over tragedy' story about a blind girl overcoming adversity. But knowing that it won 'Best in Fest' at the 2016 International Disability Film Festival 'Superfest' reassured me that I was about to watch a creative and critical depiction of blindness.

'Best and Most Beautiful Things' is indeed a thought-provoking film about blindness. But rather than trying to teach its audience about life with blindness, the film simply shows Michelle going about her daily life. This is a hugely effective way of sharing Michelle's experience without depicting her as victim, object or other. We see her magnifying text on her computer, holding print close to her face and using her white cane. We also see her roller-skating, singing, shopping, getting dressed and skyping. Blindness is part of Michelle's normal. So as we watch the film it becomes part of ours. The film's cinematography helps us share Michelle's way of seeing. Extreme close-ups replicate Michelle's proximity with everything she sees whilst out-of-focus, decentred or jumpy shots echo the world beyond Michelle's field of vision. There are also moments which remind us of the disadvantages and advantages of blindness. I have often experienced Michelle's tearful frustration when fruitlessly searching for a lost object. But on the other hand, her karaoke singing is made more beautiful and more fluent because she is obliged to memorise the lyrics of every song she sings.

This still from the film shows Michelle colouring in a large home-made poster which says 'Unlearning Normal!' in rainbow letters.

In 'Best and Most Beautiful Things' Michelle urges us to 'unlearn normal'. The film shows Michelle's refusal to conform to any of the stereotypes her parents, teachers and acquaintances might have once associated with blindness. Her provocative re-appropriation of the myth of the infantile blind girl is particularly interesting. She challenges some people's tendency to overprotect or talk down to blind people, particularly blind women, by both her proud love of dolls and her discovery and celebration of submissive BDSM age-play. Michelle's sex-positive, non-binary stance is a crucial part of the film's challenge to normal. As the director Garrett Zevgetis puts it in a Q and A for PBS:

Our collective ideas about “normal” can be downright dangerous and thus must consistently be challenged. #HackNormal: The most dangerous and deep rooted normality might be hegemonic masculinity.

We all have a tendency to make assumptions about other people based on our own preconceptions. 'Best and Most Beautiful Things' urges us to rethink how we see others. It is a powerful, touching, yet resolutely unsentimental call for a more tolerant, imaginative and creative society where everyone is valued for who they are.

Watch it.

GUEST POST: Into the Woods

This morning I received an (unsolicited) guest post from one of the students on my new final-year course Blindness and Vision in French Culture. I am delighted to publish it below.

(this photo shows Christine Baranski as Cinderella's stepmother and Tammy Blanchard and Lucy Punch as her two blind sisters, complete with white canes and dark glasses, on set during filming of Cinderella's wedding at Dover Castle)

Into the Woods: A Review

A Guest Post by read_and_dream

While I loved Into the Woods on a superficial level for its fun songs, clever interweaving of various fairy tales, and its gentle mockery of Hollywood stereotypes; I found the sexual undertones of it interesting as well, and the implications of what “into the woods” actually meant. However, there was one thing that I found problematic, something that wouldn’t have bothered me before I started the course Blindness and Vision in French Culture: this was how blindness was presented. I was expecting the prince from Rapunzel to be blinded, as I already knew the original story, but I was not familiar with the Aschenputtel version of Cinderella, in which the two evil sisters are blinded by the birds that Cinderella has at her command. It is not so much that I have a problem with this (although considering blindness as a punishment is problematic), but it is the way in which the sisters are presented after they lose their sight. Their blindness is presented as comic, as they blunder around. Had they suddenly become deaf, or wheelchair using, we would not have felt permitted to laugh, so why laugh at blindness? I think it may lie in the theory that we laugh at things that make us anxious; in this highly ocularcentric world, most of us, deep-down, have a fear of losing our sight, as we perceive it to be our most important sense. Or it could be classed as dark laughter; laughter that comes from a sense of superiority over others who are suffering. Why do you think so many people watch Big Brother?  It is not because it is good television. Going back to the film, I definitely felt uncomfortable at the fact that people were laughing at the sisters. I also felt  uncomfortable at the tragic presentation of the prince’s blindness; yes, it is horrible to fall on thorns and have your sight removed in that way, but he still manages to find Rapunzel using his hearing, and yet we are hardly given time to appreciate this before she has healed him with her tears. He is not given the choice over whether or not he wants his sight back; just like Gertude in La Symphonie Pastorale, it is taken as a given.  For once I would like to see a film where someone is given the chance to regain their sight, but refuses. I think that this would challenge people’s perceptions about the tragedy of blindness and let them see that it is just another way of being. A way of being without seeing.

Blind Creations conference - CFP issued

I am very excited to be co-organising the Blind Creations conference with Vanessa Warne (University of Manitoba, Canada). This three-day international conference, which will take place between 28 June and 30 June 2015, seeks to explore the relationship between blind people and artistic creation. Our definition of ‘blind person’ is broad, encompassing anyone who might be defined as having ‘non-normative vision’ and / or who relates to the world using senses other than sight. It welcomes interventions from blind and non-blind academics (with or without institutional affiliation), practitioners, advocates, writers and artists (also broadly defined to include musicians, dancers and sculptors as well as visual artists). It sees blind people not only as subjects in their own right, but also as active creators; as such it rejects the ‘medical model’ of disability which posits blind people as passive objects of medical investigation and rehabilitation. In so doing it hopes to challenge and reconceptualise the myths and stereotypes of ‘blindness’ which continue to circulate by recasting ‘blindness’ as a multi-faceted and positive creative force which might be usefully explored by both non-blind and blind people.

The conference will take place at Royal Holloway’s campus in Egham, Surrey, UK, We are pleased to announce that the conference will feature two plenary speakers: Prof Georgina Kleege (UC Berkeley) and Dr Zina Weygand (Paris). During the conference, we plan to host a number of cultural events, including a Blindness in Fiction Writers’ Roundtable (featuring novelist and poet, Naomi Foyle), a tactile museum tour, and an audio-described film screening.

The conference Call for Papers can be found here and more information about the speakers is available here. 

Disability Studies in the Classroom

Earlier this week I ran a workshop at the Higher Education Academy Arts and Humanities Teaching and Learning Conference at the Lowry Centre, Salford Quays. In the session I explained how I argued that disability (and Disability Studies) can offer much to non-disabled students and teachers.. Then my friend and colleague Sherie Griffiths explained how in her work with businesses, she emphasises the importance of audio (rather than visual) communication.

Here is the paper I gave:

When Monsters Talk Back: 

How Disability Studies Can Enhance (Mainstream) Teaching and Learning Strategies

In her 1998 essay Claiming Disability Studies, Simi Linton argues that Disability Studies is an essential component in liberal arts degree programmes. Whilst disability has existed for some time as a module or option on courses in what we might call the applied arts and humanities such as social work, music therapy and teacher training, it is only very gradually beginning to appear in traditional arts and humanities subjects like English, History and Modern Languages. Where it does exist in a university setting is in the student support departments dealing with pastoral issues, extenuating circumstances, special teaching and assessment arrangements. But just because universities are able to support disabled students does not mean that they are working within the framework of Disability Studies. Indeed some support services can unintentionally reinforce negative stereotypes or create unhelpful myths of disability because students seeking such support are always seen as deviating from the norm. Consequently, students with disabilities are often reluctant to ask for help or declare their disability because of fears that this will adversely affect their studies and, more importantly, their career prospects. Disabled staff in HE are even less visible than their students.

Yet Disability Studies is hugely relevant to the humanities because it addresses questions which are central to the ways we understand the world. Its challenge to notions of normality, beauty, perfection, value and usefulness are relevant to everyone, disabled or non disabled.

Today I would like to discuss ways in which content, methodologies and approaches inspired by Disability Studies might be productively used in HE learning and teaching more generally and the impact this might have on both non disabled and disabled students. In so doing we would like to encourage you to question assumptions about ‘normality’ and embrace the 'monstrous'.

I have been registered blind all my life but because I have what ophthalmologists like to call ‘some useful sight’, in one eye, I have, until recently, always operated in a sighted way and done my best to ‘pass’ as a fully sighted person. Whilst at an academic conference two years ago I realised that it was time to embrace my identity as a partially-blind university lecturer and place it at the centre of my academic career. As I read Georgina Kleege's important book Sight Unseen, I realised that blindness was not something to be ashamed of or hidden, but something to be claimed, embraced, celebrated. I gave up trying to 'pass' as a sighted academic and 'came out' as blind to my students and colleagues. 

As well as beginning to focus on disability-related texts and issues in my teaching and in my research, this also meant thinking about alternative strategies for engaging with my students in the classroom. I was finding it difficult to keep my classes focused and make sure that everyone was contributing when I couldn’t make eye contact with my students or see who or where they were. So I began developing alternative techniques: I started asking students to break the habit of a lifetime by shouting out questions and comments rather than putting their hands up. I asked them to call on each other when they could see that someone had something to say, and I got them to say their name before they spoke. At first I found them incredibly reluctant to engage with me in this way but they have gradually become more confident about this interactive and student-led way of learning. As a result we’ve had some great discussions, both inside and outside seminars, I feel like I know them much better than I used to and I've found that they are much more willing to accept that sight-based communication is not the only way of interacting in a classroom – or indeed in life. Consequently they are learning that blindness in particular, – and disability in general - is not necessarily a negative or tragic experience: it is simply a different way of being in the world. They feel more confident about expressing their own needs as learners and they are more accepting of other peoples’ differences. What started as a set of practical solutions to deal with the impact my blindness was having on my teaching has become a whole new approach to difference, ability, the hierarchy of the senses, identity, authenticity, acceptance and even personhood.

One of the advantages of being open and honest about my blindness in the classroom, on twitter and in my blog ‘Blind Spot’ (which I encourage students to read), is that students feel empowered to apply what they have learnt from me and my teaching methods to the materials we study. More broadly, looking at sight and vision differently often helps students to question attitudes to related notions like normality, beauty and perfection. Such discussions also call into question the supremacy of the visual medium of film. After being taught by me, students tell me they feel able to challenge the widespread assumption that disability is about tragedy, struggle, suffering and pity. Not only can I encourage my students to see disability in a positive way, I can also help them question their own preconceptions as well of those of society in general.

One example of the way I use course content to encourage my students to think critically is the film Amélie which I teach as part of a final-year course on representations of Paris in fiction and film. In Jean-Pierre Jeunet's 2001 film, the eponymous heroine devotes herself to a succession of fairytale-Godmother-like good deeds. One such endeavour consists of guiding a blind man across a road and along a busy street before depositing him at the entrance to the local metro station.

As they go along, Amélie gives him a gossipy audio-description of the people and shops they pass. On one level, this episode is a piece of harmless fun. It demonstrates the vibrancy of the rue Lepic area whilst highlighting Amélie's eye for amusing detail and flair for language. But this extract is also problematic when viewed from a Disability Studies perspective. Not only does Amélie fail to ask the blind man where he wants to go, she doesn't give him the chance to get a word in edgeways. She points out the smell of the greengrocer's melon (a smell the man would surely have recognised for himself) without bothering to grab a piece for him to taste. She tells him what is on sale at the butcher's without checking that he has already done his shopping. And she describes delicious-sounding cheeses to him without asking him if he'd like to stop and choose some. I find food shopping in France a beguiling yet frustrating business: there is just too much choice and it all smells so wonderful. I love French cheese but always feel like I am missing out by not being able to read all the labels and make an educated selection - if I met Amélie in Montmatre, I'd insist (if she ever stopped talking) that she describe the cheese to me in mouth-watering detail rather than rushing me past the shop at dizzying speed. But here she keeps the blind man trapped in his own passivity, thus perpetuating the myth that the blind are helpless and vulnerable.

Amélie's actions are certainly well-intentioned, and the dazzling way that the blind man's face is lit up at the end of the clip suggests that Jeunet too thinks that this must have been a genuinely wonderful experience for him. But this way of thinking suggests that the blind are lacking something in their relationship with the world which they must rely on the kind-hearted to give them. That a world without sight is a world without knowledge, sensation and community. That sight is better than no sight. This is perhaps not a surprising reaction from a film-maker. But what if this blind man relates to the world in a wholly different way? What if the pictures he gets from hearing, touching, smelling and tasting the world are just as fulfilling as Amélie's and Jeunet's fetishization of vision? Or, more worryingly, what if Amélie's unsolicited arrival in his life has shown him a world that he was not even aware of? Will he be left happy and grateful to have experienced more fully the world around him? Or will he be left feeling miserable and inadequate, having discovered that others prize most highly a sense that he does not share.

My students only noticed the more problematic elements of this scene after I’d talked to them about my own blindness and used my non-visual communication techniques with them. Where they had once unquestioningly accepted the episode as an example of Amelie’s Princess-Diana-like goodness, they now began displaying impressive levels of critical analysis in their responses to it.

This dual approach, where I talk to students about the practicalities of how their learning will be a different experience because of my blindness, and then ask them to rethink their own understanding of disability through course content, means that they are much less ready to accept the stereotypes and clichés of disability with which popular culture surrounds us.

The LEGO Movie: Being Blind is Awesome!

[Spoiler Alert: Read with caution if you haven't seen the film]

The LEGO Movie is one of the best films I have ever seen. It is clever, funny and beautifully designed. It is also a wonderfully surprising celebration of the power of blindness.

One of the film's main characters, Vitruvius (voiced by Morgan Freeman), is a wise and heroic wizard who guides the other 'Master Builder' characters, in particular the troubled hero Emmet, through the film. Like Dumbledore, (who in fact makes a cameo appearance in the film) he even returns in ghost form to help his charge. Vitruvius loses his eyesight early on in the film and as well as containing elements of Dumbledore (and his alter ego Gandalf), he is clearly created as a homage to Tiresias, the 'blind seer' whose lack of actual sight gave him clairvoyant powers. Some Disability Theorists might argue that this association between blindness and insight (an association which we also find in Victor Hugo's character Déa from L'Homme qui rit), downplays or even denies the physical experience of being blind by privileging blindness's symbolic meaning above its lived reality. And it is true that aside from his glowing eyes, it is hard to tell that Vitruvius is blind. He does not have a guide dog or a white cane (although his lollipop-stick staff might double as the latter) and his blindness is conveniently forgotten by the film-makers during a visual gag when he confuses Dumbledore with Gandalf because they look so similar (but importantly sound completely different). Perhaps this is why members of the LEGO online community fail to appreciate the positive side of blindness when they describe Vitruvius as 'a talented piano player, despite being blind'.

Braille cell or LEGO brick?

If the film's central blind character may not immediately appear to function as a celebration of the positivity of blindness, the overall message of the film is resoundingly anti-sight and pro-touch. Like 'The Man Upstairs' (Finn's father), the film's evil villain, Lord Business, wants to create a perfect LEGO world where each construction is permanently glued into place. This idealised LEGO landscape is adorned with 'Do Not Touch' and 'Hands Off' signs. In this impossibly perfect universe everything is made exactly according to the instructions, touching is not allowed, LEGO is to be admired not handled, the visual is celebrated and the tactile scorned. On the other hand, the Master Builders - who are of course led by Vitruvius - believe that LEGO is made to be played with, not glued into perfection. As Vitruvius's presence reminds us, you do not have to be sighted to enjoy LEGO. Indeed LEGO is essentially a tactile medium. Surely it is no coincidence that the iconic 2 x 6 LEGO brick has the same pattern of dots as the Braille cell. Despite the film's failure to produce a positive blind role model in Vitruvius, the LEGO Movie's celebration of the potential of tactility certainly suggests (to paraphrase the film's catchy soundtrack) that 'Being Blind is AWESOME!!!'.

Notes on Blindness

How can the medium of film illustrate blindness? British cinema adverts for audio description (such as this one), depict blindness as a blank screen where the soundtrack alone indicates what film you are missing. Going to the cinema with your eyes closed would have the same effect.

These ads might make a valid point about what audio description can add to the cinematic experience, but they do not give a very realistic representation of what it is like to be blind. Blindness is not at all like living with your eyes shut. Most blind people have some kind of visual perception and all blind people experience their lack of vision differently. Sight is one of five senses: but most sighted people have no idea how their other senses contribute to their perception of the world. A blind person's world is not a bleak world of darkness or blackness but a multi-faceted landscape informed by sounds, textures, smells and tastes. Blindness can sometimes feel like entrapment, but it can also sometimes feel like freedom. This is something that the makers of new documentary short Notes on Blindness have worked hard to capture.

Notes on Blindness, which premiers at the Sundance festival and on the New York Times website today, is a dramatisation of some of the original recordings of blind academic and writer John Hull. Hull lost his sight in 1983 after a long period of deterioration and his writings chart his responses to his own blindness. Notes on Blindness is a thoughtful and sensitive attempt to create a sense of what going blind might feel like. It would have been very easy to make this film into a heart-wrenching and tragic tale of Hull's descent into darkness. Instead, the film makers reject sentimentalism - even at the most poignant of moments - and (somewhat paradoxically) use the visual medium of film to emphasise both the bewilderment and panic felt by Hull, especially in the early days, and the subsequent richness of sense impressions which he comes to appreciate.

As the film progresses, blurry and disorientating images of pitch black coal mines and dizzying white snowstorms are replaced by scenes whose striking visuality is nonetheless secondary to their multi-sensory impact. My favourite part of the film is the rainfall sequence. Hull's words describe how he loves rain because he can use the sound it makes on objects to create an aural landscape where he gains a sense of size, shape and texture through sound. When he expresses the wish that rain could fall indoors, in a kind of constant watery audio description of sorts, we are shown a striking image of rain falling in his kitchen. This astonishing segment challenges the viewer's perception by asking her to think about rain - and thus about the blindness with which it is now associated - in a profoundly different way. 'Cognition is beautiful' says Hull at the end of the film. And this is a beautiful film which engages with blindness in a thoughtful and provocative way.

My thanks to the film's production team for letting me see an advance preview of the film and for sending me some stills to use in this post. A feature-length version of Notes on Blindness is now being made and you can keep up to date with developments on twitter (@intodarknessdoc) or on facebook.com/intodarknessdoc.

Happy Birthday Blind Spot Blog!

When I created this blog a year ago I had no idea what an adventure it would be. It started as a place to chart my research into French representations of blindness, but quickly blossomed into a way of commenting on the place of blindness - and then disability - in modern society more generally: the posts on audio description, the Paralympics and Tina Nash continue to attract interest from around the world. Alongside these current-affairs-related posts, there are also posts on my own way of living with blindness. This blog has given me a place to work out what I think about using a white cane, the shape and size of my eyes and what reading in detail really means.

But in this birthday post, I'd like to look again at my original research project. I have been spending a lot of time in the past year at the Association Valentin Hauy in Paris. Their library contains a vast collection of literature in French either by or about the blind. By gradually reading all the nineteenth-century novels they possess, I am building up a picture of how nineteenth-century France saw blindness. At first I was disappointed by what I found. Novels by blind novelist Therese-Adele Husson seemed to confirm my fears that blindness would be seen as a pitiful state characterised by emotional, financial and intellectual deprivation. As this blog has shown, this is the image of blindness usually found throughout cultural representations, from Madame Bovary to contemporary advertising and children's fiction. But as I delved deeper into the world of the nineteenth-century French novel, I found some examples of novels where the blind protagonists are capable and likable role-models. In the published work which will be the eventual fruit of this research, I will be arguing that these novels - by relatively unknown writers like Berthet and Pont-Jest - embrace the 'personal non-tragedy' approach which twentieth-first-century Disability Studies is only just engaging with.

I hope that my research will bring these neglected works out of obscurity and encourage readers to think again about literary representations of blindness.

The Legacy of Helen Keller

Helen Keller is without doubt the most famous blind person alive or dead. But it is astonishing how many blind people have very mixed feelings about her legacy. I remember when we studied her at primary school along with other 'inspiratinal figures' like Florence Nightingale and Martin Luther King. I was embarrassed  and upset by her story of triumph over tragedy. She made me feel at once inadequate and angry: inadequate because I knew I'd never have her patience or tenacity, and angry because her story was told with a sentimentalising pity which assumed that blindness was a horrific affliction which only superlative amounts of courage and determination could help you escape from. Yet at the same time it felt confusing and disloyal not to like her when her story seemed to be saying that all blind people (myself included) should try to be like her.

When I started encountering other blind academics last year I realised that I was not alone in my misgivings. Both Cathy Kudlick and Georgina Kleege have written about the problems of the Helen Keller Legacy.

So when I was asked to write a blog post about a Kickstarter Fundraising Campaign which is making a film inspired by Keller's essay 'Three Days to See' I wasn't sure how to respond. The film aims to raise awareness about the nature of blindness and the difficulties faced by young blind and partially sighted adults as they leave the protected world of education and head out into the sighted world. I have no doubt that the film will present a more positive image of blindness than other recent films. And of course it is crucial to raise awareness of the reality of blindness by showing the general public that blind people are not deficient or lacking individuals who should be pitied, saved or cured. But I was worried that the film would (unknowingly) reproduce some of the insidious myths of triumph and tragedy which continue to haunt representations of disability.

The film will only be made if enough money is raised, but a trailer already exists. As I watched I was relieved to see that the film-makers seem to have avoided (almost all) sentimentality. They focus instead on the articulate and thoughtful blind student whose story structures the film. We hear her thoughts and fears alongside images of her and her classmates studying, relaxing and exploring the world around them. What comes across most strongly is the sense that these adolescents are just like millions of adolescents all over the world. They are individuals on the brink of adulthood. Their blindness does not define them: it is part of who they are, like hair colour or body shape but it is not a limit or a hindrance. It is a way of relating to the world which is just as valid as the more well-known sighted way. It turns out that blind people are not all the same.

The film combines images of today's teenagers with Helen Keller's words. Some of these quotations, particularly those that focus on humanity, made me think that I had judged Keller too harshly. Or perhaps I was only shown one side of her at school. I am still uneasy about her insistence that she is missing out on something by being blind, but in the end her legacy must be a good thing if it creates confident and articulate adolescents who have perceptive opinions about their place in the world.

This is a film that needs to be made because it will show the world that blindness is not a disabling affliction. It is people's attitudes to the blind that disable them, not their blindness. To help make this film happen go to their fundraising page.

La Ligne Droite

Régis Wargnier's 2011 film La Ligne droite is a thoughtful and sensitive portrayal of how young athlete Yannick (Cyril Descours) learns to run with a guide after losing his sight in a car accident.

It is extremely rare to find positive responses to blindness in film. As my comments on Amélie and Les Amants du Pont Neuf demonstrate, blind characters are most often portrayed as victims to be pitied, looked-after and eventually saved.

In this film, Yannick's over-protective mother embodies the patronising attitude illustrated in Jeunet's and Carax's depictions. She treats Yannick like a sick child, denying him any autonomy and refusing to let him take responsibility for his own actions. More despicably still, she uses his blindness to trick him into unknowingly becoming complicit in her kindnesses: in one scene she lies about the dice he has thrown so that he can win the game they are playing; in another she secretly pays a prostitute to seduce him.  Wargnier's depiction of these duplicitous actions offers us an extremely well-observed account of how those who do not understand disability treat the disabled. Yannick's mother means well and thinks she is acting kindly. But her behaviour is in danger of imprisoning Yannick in a muted world of caution and care. 

Unlike Carax and Jeunet, Wargnier embeds a critique of this attitude in the film - indeed it is this, even more than the exhilirating race scenes (filmed at an actual Diamond League meet at the Stade de France) that makes the film so compelling. Yannick's encounter with runner Leila (Rachida Brakni) signals the beginning of his liberation from his overbearing mother. It also marks the point where the viewer begins to understand that pity and over-protection are not the most helpful reactions to blindness. It is no coincidence that Leila has just come out of prison: this is a film about liberation. We, like Yannick, spend the film learning how to break free from the negative images of blindness which are still commonly found in both fiction and reality.

La Ligne droite was shown by the Institut français de Londres as part of their Beyond the Body season timed to coincide with the London 2012 Paralympic Games. My thanks go to the Institut français for inviting me to this special screening and giving me the chance to question Cyril Descours (and meet the French Paralympic Judo team).

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf

Depictions of blindness are surprisingly common in film. But they almost always have a symbolic function. If cinema is a celebration of the visual, then blindness represents its opposite. It is a resoundingly negative state which stands for lack (usually of insight or understanding), marginality, exclusion.

 At first glance, this indeed seems to be the case with Leos Carax's 1991 film Les Amants du Pont-Neuf. Michele (Juliette Binoche) is losing her sight. The apparently incurable deterioration of her vision, and a failed relationship (whose end may or may not be related to her sight loss) have led to her living rough on the streets of Paris. As Michele's sight worsens, so does her physical state: she becomes dirtier, shabbier and more reliant on her vagrant boyfriend Alex (Denis Lavant).

Alex uses Michele's failing sight against her to keep her with him on the bridge. When a cure is found for her condition, and radio stations start broadcasting appeals about her, Alex deliberately moves the radio so that she will accidently knock it into the Seine. Michele angrily blames her worsening sight for this mishap: the viewer, who, like Alex, can see more than Michele, knows otherwise. Michele's blindness is transforming her into a lost and dependant victim who relies heavily on her selfish boyfriend.

If Michele's sight loss is equated with misery and abjection, the regaining of her vision marks her reinsertion into bourgeois society: after her operation Michele is prettier, richer, happier and once again in a successful long-term relationship - this time with her saviour-eye surgeon.

If the film had ended there it would be easy to criticise it for continuing the tradition of negative filmic portrayals of blindness. Blindness is something to be cured, eliminated, overcome. And what could be more natural than marrying the man who gives you back the gift of sight?  But when Michele meets Alex on the bridge at the end of the film, she throws away her stable middle-class lifestyle in favour of an unknown future with him. We cannot escape the uncomfortable fact that Michele's life is better when her blindness is eliminated. But the film's surprisingly impulsive ending does encourage us to question the assumption that regaining her sight will solve all Michele's problems.

This potentially positive (or at least not necessarily negative) depiction of blindness is substantiated by the film's interest in how and what Michele sees. It is rare to find films which show the viewer the world as a blind or partially blind person sees it. No cinema viewer wants to look at a blank screen or a series of blurry and fragmented images for any length of time. And film makers (for obvious and understandable reasons), are deeply invested in the primacy and the perfection of the visual. But it is precisely Carax's interest in the visual, and in what happens when the visual becomes impaired, which allows him to show us the world from Michele's point of view. One example of this is the scene in which Michele watches Alex performing his fire breathing display. Michele's eyes are dazzled and hurt by the sudden irruptions of bright flames into the night sky. Not only do we see her reactions to this discomfort, we are also shown, through the jerky camera movements and disorienting effect of the flames, what it might be like to see with her eyes.

My favourite example of Carax's clever approach to Michele's sight comes in the scene after she may or may not have shot her ex-lover Julien in the eye because he won't let her paint him one last time. It is Bastille Day 1989 and the streets of Paris are lined with spectators waiting for the traditional 14 July military parade. As Michele runs back to the bridge we are shown a military helicopter flying overhead which transforms into a flock of birds and then back into a whole squadron of helicopters. I had always read this scene (ignore the dubbing: dialogue is not important here) as a manifestation of Michele's guilt. If she has indeed just murdered Julien, she is imagining that she is already being pursued by the police, seeing threat where there is none.

But recently, I have realised that this scene demonstrates a crucial way that the partially blind relate to the world: instead of immediately knowing what things are, I see a vague shape and then use a mixture of guesswork, context and intuition to work out what it probably is. I do this instantaneously, almost without noticing, and most of the time I am right. If I see a tall dark shape standing on the pavement, I usually think it is a person. As I approach I get ready to give hm or her a friendly smile, until I realise it is in fact a wheelie bin. If I notice a small, round, black object in the bath I always assume it is a spider. I sumon my husband to rescue me from it and then try to laugh at myself when he points out that it is just a clump of hair. Michele sees some fast moving, dark specs in the sky. The context of Bastille Day, perhaps coupled with her guilt, makes her think they are helicopters. But the viewer thinks that they are more likely a flock of startled pigeons (especially as the traditional flight-past has already been shown in a previous scene).

The beauty of this scene lies in the fact that both images are allowed to co-exist. Through the way they merge into each other Carax asks us to think about how different people see. He reminds us that seeing is not just about looking, it is also (maybe mostly) about interpreting. This is certainly the case in the cinema. But Carax shows that it is also the case in life. Filmakers who, unlike Carax, simply perpetuate the tired stereotypes of blindness are surely missing the whole point of such a visual medium. Imagine how different Amelie would be if the world was (also) seen through the blind man's eyes.

The Fabulous Kindness of Amelie Poulain?

In Jean-Pierre Jeunet's 2001 film Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain, the eponymous heroine devotes herself to a succession of fairytale-Godmother-like good deeds. One such endeavour consists of guiding a blind man across a road and along a busy street before depositing him at the entrance to the local metro station.

Watch video (in French)

As they go along, Amélie gives him a gossipy audio-description of the people and shops they pass. On one level, this episode is a piece of harmless fun. It demonstrates the vibrancy of the rue Lepic quartier whilst highlighting Amélie's eye for amusing detail and flair for language. But this extract is also problematic. Not only does Amélie fail to ask the blind man where he wants to go, she doesn't give him the chance to get a word in edgeways. She points out the smell of the greengrocer's melon (a smell the man would surely have recognised for himself) without bothering to grab a piece for him to taste. She tells him what is on sale at the butcher's without checking that he has already done his shopping. And she describes delicious-sounding cheeses to him without asking him if he'd like to stop and choose some. I find food shopping in France a beguiling yet frustrating business: there is just too much choice and it all smells so wonderful. I love French cheese but always feel like I am missing out by not being able to read all the labels and make an educated selection - if I met Amélie in Montmatre, I'd insist (if she ever stopped talking) that she describe the cheese to me in mouth-watering detail rather than rushing me past the shop at dizzying speed. But here she keeps the blind man trapped in his own passivity, thus perpetuating the myth that the blind are helpless and vulnerable.

Amélie's actions are certainly well-intentioned, and the dazzling way that the blind man's face is lit up at the end of the clip suggests that Jeunet too thinks that this must have been a genuinely wonderful experience for him. But this way of thinking suggests that the blind are lacking something in their relationship with the world which they must rely on the kind-hearted to give them. That a world without sight is a world without knowledge, sensation and community. That sight is better than no sight. This is perhaps not a surprising reaction from a film-maker. But what if this blind man relates to the world in a wholly different way? What if the pictures he gets from hearing, touching, smelling and tasting the world are just as fulfilling as Amélie's and Jeunet's fetishization of vision? Or, more worryingly, what if Amélie's unsolicited arrival in his life has shown him a world that he was not even aware of? Will he be left happy and grateful to have experienced more fully the world around him? Or will he be left feeling miserable and inadequate, having discovered that others prize most highly a sense that he does not share.

The Association Valentin Hauy has recently produced a series of short films about how the sighted can best relate to the blind. I'd like to think that these films were made as a reaction to Jeunet's film. I like them for their humour and common sense. They deal with everyday situations in which the sighted might interact with the blind: on the street, at a restaurant, at work. Unfortunately these are in unsubtitled French but the message of these films is simple: treat the blind as independent and autonomous individuals rather than assuming that you know better than they do how best to relate to the world.