Reading big books
Oct. 18th, 2016 07:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistI saw Notes on Blindness on Saturday evening as part of the National Media Museum's Widescreen Weekend. Unusually for me, I was by myself since Andrew was too sick to go with me like we'd planned. (Irony of ironies, for a movie about bilndness, the house lights weren't up enough for me to find my seat when I got into Pictureville Cinema, even though I was early and there was a panel discussion before the movie so no reason for it to be so dark. And this was the one time I didn't have Andrew with me to be my seeing-eye human. Luckily a woman who was already helping the mobility-impaired person she was with spotted me and helped me find where I needed to be.)
It's definitely one I'm going to have to watch again (got the DVD on my wishlist already!) but for now I just wanted to remind myself, and tell you guys, of one of the things I found most striking about seeing it in the cinema with a lot of other people (most of whom had the lanyard of weekend-pass festivalgoers and were the kind of people I'm used to seeing at the Media Museum's cinematic events: mostly older, almost all white, chattering about things like what materials different kinds of cinema screens are made of in between movies).
The movie's based on the non-fictional audiotapes of a man, John Hull, a middle-aged academic whose second child was just about to be born, who lost his sight in the early 80s. He started keeping a sort of diary on cassettes as he came to terms with his blindness, and the movie's audio is composed of these recordings, lip-synced by actors but the actual voices are that of John and his wife and other family members on the tapes.
It's very well done -- I really like the way it's filmed so that even after John loses the last of his sight the cinematography makes you feel like you're getting things from his perspective even though there are of course images on the screen throughout the movie. I know I'll have a lot to say about it, but I think I need to see it again before I do (ideally with the audio description, which I don't think the media museum has? or anyway a combination of their staff being kind but not overly well-trained and me being all anxious and brainweasely meant I didn't ask).
In the meantime there's one little anecdote I wanted to tell.
Early in the movie, John has a little sight. He is as anyone would be upset when he learns he will lose that too. "How will I lecture?" he says (all of this is paraphrased from what I can remember!) "How will I read?" He seems to consult a library, whose audiobook collection is all detective-stories and romance. Then he's on the phone to someone asking about this, explaining the contemporary social texts he needs for his work and clearly not getting answers he wants.
Finally he asks in frustration, "How do blind people read big books?"
I had time to smile at the child-like nature of that phrase, "big books" and to mutter out loud, "they don't" before the answer came from the other side of his phone call.
"They don't."
And I was already smiling in that half-recognition, half-rueful, half-I-might-cry (yes that's three halves, yes this is a movie that gave me All The Feels, as the kids say) kind of way before the rest of the audience responded.
They laughed. They chuckled anyway. It didn't sound mean, it sounded more surprised -- which of course was the last thing I was -- and that actually surprised me. Maybe I expected the skewing-older audience of mostly-vintage movies (this was introduced as the one "contemporary" title in the festival) to be a little more sympathetic to sight loss since as people age they are more likely to find it among their peer group if not themselves. Of course things are better to some extent now (though the RNIB library I subscribe to doesn't have the "social history" I really like, but it's keeping me in science-fiction and horror so I think there's still more truth to this than people expect!) but still.
Maybe because I was "blind," albeit as a tiny child, at this time that I remember it. Maybe I recognize this in everything from other kids at the summer camp for blind kids to the steering group I'm leading after the first meeting I attended of it because no one else was going to write the e-mails and make the phone calls that didn't seem like a big deal to me. There's a institutionalization endemic to some kinds of blind people, this sense that they're easiest for sighted people to deal with when they don't do much and that they find it easier not to fight all the time to make things accessible. Stay at home, wait for people to take you places if you must go, listen to some nice cozy mystery from the library.
This part of the story has a happy ending -- John gets people to read books onto cassettes for him, he learns to make audio notes for his teaching, he recognizes his students by voice, all that -- but man. I didn't like being surrounded by people who were laughing at his plight. (And I hope that would've been true even if it weren't to some extent mine as well.)
I wonder what made them laugh. I really do.
It's definitely one I'm going to have to watch again (got the DVD on my wishlist already!) but for now I just wanted to remind myself, and tell you guys, of one of the things I found most striking about seeing it in the cinema with a lot of other people (most of whom had the lanyard of weekend-pass festivalgoers and were the kind of people I'm used to seeing at the Media Museum's cinematic events: mostly older, almost all white, chattering about things like what materials different kinds of cinema screens are made of in between movies).
The movie's based on the non-fictional audiotapes of a man, John Hull, a middle-aged academic whose second child was just about to be born, who lost his sight in the early 80s. He started keeping a sort of diary on cassettes as he came to terms with his blindness, and the movie's audio is composed of these recordings, lip-synced by actors but the actual voices are that of John and his wife and other family members on the tapes.
It's very well done -- I really like the way it's filmed so that even after John loses the last of his sight the cinematography makes you feel like you're getting things from his perspective even though there are of course images on the screen throughout the movie. I know I'll have a lot to say about it, but I think I need to see it again before I do (ideally with the audio description, which I don't think the media museum has? or anyway a combination of their staff being kind but not overly well-trained and me being all anxious and brainweasely meant I didn't ask).
In the meantime there's one little anecdote I wanted to tell.
Early in the movie, John has a little sight. He is as anyone would be upset when he learns he will lose that too. "How will I lecture?" he says (all of this is paraphrased from what I can remember!) "How will I read?" He seems to consult a library, whose audiobook collection is all detective-stories and romance. Then he's on the phone to someone asking about this, explaining the contemporary social texts he needs for his work and clearly not getting answers he wants.
Finally he asks in frustration, "How do blind people read big books?"
I had time to smile at the child-like nature of that phrase, "big books" and to mutter out loud, "they don't" before the answer came from the other side of his phone call.
"They don't."
And I was already smiling in that half-recognition, half-rueful, half-I-might-cry (yes that's three halves, yes this is a movie that gave me All The Feels, as the kids say) kind of way before the rest of the audience responded.
They laughed. They chuckled anyway. It didn't sound mean, it sounded more surprised -- which of course was the last thing I was -- and that actually surprised me. Maybe I expected the skewing-older audience of mostly-vintage movies (this was introduced as the one "contemporary" title in the festival) to be a little more sympathetic to sight loss since as people age they are more likely to find it among their peer group if not themselves. Of course things are better to some extent now (though the RNIB library I subscribe to doesn't have the "social history" I really like, but it's keeping me in science-fiction and horror so I think there's still more truth to this than people expect!) but still.
Maybe because I was "blind," albeit as a tiny child, at this time that I remember it. Maybe I recognize this in everything from other kids at the summer camp for blind kids to the steering group I'm leading after the first meeting I attended of it because no one else was going to write the e-mails and make the phone calls that didn't seem like a big deal to me. There's a institutionalization endemic to some kinds of blind people, this sense that they're easiest for sighted people to deal with when they don't do much and that they find it easier not to fight all the time to make things accessible. Stay at home, wait for people to take you places if you must go, listen to some nice cozy mystery from the library.
This part of the story has a happy ending -- John gets people to read books onto cassettes for him, he learns to make audio notes for his teaching, he recognizes his students by voice, all that -- but man. I didn't like being surrounded by people who were laughing at his plight. (And I hope that would've been true even if it weren't to some extent mine as well.)
I wonder what made them laugh. I really do.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-10-18 06:25 pm (UTC)I don't identify where I work in public posts from this identity, but yes, this is a thing, and it's a thing the different schools and organisations for the blind (and of the blind!) have handled in vastly different ways, in a way I find totally fascinating except for the parts where it's clearly not doing actual real people any favours.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-10-18 11:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-10-19 01:15 am (UTC)I suspect it's easier to laugh than to be horrified. You get similar stuff with physical access - "Why don't you have a ramp*?" "Because no one in a wheelchair ever wants to be in" - and it's so ludicruous that there is a *headdesk* sort of humour there, but there's also a semi-conscious turning away from the difficult questions.
*or the audio narration track running, from your recent experience.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-10-19 08:04 am (UTC)I suspect that's what made me so uncomfortable, yeah. I understood on some level that the people chuckling get to run away from this difficult question, whereas I'm living it all the time.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-10-19 01:49 am (UTC)That sucks. :(
I'm wondering if it was the kind of nervous-laughter-at-an-uncomfortable-truths that you get, say, when a black comedian makes jokes about how racist the world is to a white audience.
Part guilt that they're not doing anything/enough to fix the situation,
and, in the case of disability, part, dear-god-what-if-this-happens-to-me-or-someone-I-love.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-10-19 08:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-10-19 07:57 pm (UTC)Of course it's not actually funny, but a lot of situation comedies manage to coast for years of the same kind of joke-like constructions, so I could understand it getting a laugh — especially given that from the description it sounds like quite a heavy film, so the audience may have been grasping at any straw of light relief to contrast with the general seriousness of the subject.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-10-19 01:49 pm (UTC)Hull explains things in an excellent way and some of the stuff in the book about how academics treat him makes the hairs on the back of my neck rise as I recognise how people treated my blind colleagues in the same way. I have pre-ordered the DVD as I haven't been able to find a subtitled showing of this (which is shocking as they did advertise audio described).
I can't tell as I wasn't there and I definitely don't want to erase, could the laughter have been "with" rather than "at" or nervousness? I suspect the latter, people can't cope, so laugh, sometimes material is designed that way to elicit that response (Jess Thom uses that tactic with her Tourettes outbursts in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jmTlQld2Z8 for example).
I also suspect the idea of "blind people reading BIG books" is as you say a shock to people, they haven't thought it through, haven't realised how much of a MASSIVE barrier to things that is, and how much it is the status quo. Many people don't want to read big-books, but there are other equivalents in their lives they might want to do, but be unable to access. Even now there aren't the systems for full access that there should be, blind people are expected to put up with only having access to suitably popular, worthy or financially worthwhile content at additional expense and hassle to obtain, specialist, niche, subscription only services -- and don't forget, be suitably grateful.
ebooks becoming increasingly popular are certainly an improvement, but as I liked to on your FB earlier that isn't automagic and it's still far from perfect https://accessibility.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2016/03/24/ebooks-disconnect/ and computerised voices are still not-great and not suitable for everyone. I find Kindle reader annoying as it limits the fonts/formats I can use whereas FBreader allows me waaay more flexibility and things like linespacing and so on which helps me hugely.
I must check if individuals can contact publishers for e-copies of stuff, although that's a nightmare of formatting problems in itself as sometimes they send utter bollox formats...
I hope this film gets more mainstream coverage as I have long-used Hull's work to encourage people to learn about blindness from one person who articulates it hugely well and while it's "not all blind people" it's a good start and does good reminding of sighted vs less or not sighted views. It helped me work out what I needed to do, helped me be better with blind and partially sighted people in my life, if nothing else reminding me if appropriate to ask people "what works for you?" "Is there anything I can do just that little bit better?".