José Saramago vs. Fernando Meirelles: Blindness

In 1995 José Saramago wrote Ensaio sobre a cogueira, a novel which tells the story of a society faced with the loss of the one thing most precious to it - its sight. The unexpected and unexplainable epidemic of blindness soon leads to a breakdown of institutions and social norms, bringing the world into a state of absolute chaos and anarchy.

Three years after the book was published in Portugal, Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize. It was only a question of time before his allegorical story found its way to the silver screen. However, anyone who wanted to make a film about it was confronted with several problems - its brutal descriptions of physical and moral degradation, and the fact that the feeling of blindness should be expressed in an art form that mostly depends on visuals.

Fernando Meirelles has kept the dark tone of the novel, not avoiding the naturalism of the scenes depicted in the original. He has also accomplished something much more demanding - showing the white blindness by using a purely cinematic language. The art direction by Tulé Peake complements César Charlone’s brilliant camera work and Danil Rezende’s editing. The light that fills the cinematic space creates a feeling of a world fading away, and together with the white fade-ins and fade-outs, blurred photography, double expositions and merging glass reflections, it mirrors Saramago’s writing style of long sentences without punctuation or question marks. Whilst the reader can’t be sure of who’s talking, the viewer’s faith in what they see is challenged.

Although his film is sometimes too literal and its semantic charge becomes exhausted after the first half, Meirelles manages to deliver an interesting allegory of the human condition – its emotional, social and ideological blindness.

Mario Kozina