Janela da Alma

The Portuguese writer and Nobel Prize winner José Saramago was once sitting on the upper balcony of the opera, with a good view of the chandelier that looked so dazzling from the ground. From the balcony, he suddenly saw the true nature of the object, complete with cobwebs and dirt. It was a lesson he would never forget, he tells the directors João Jardim and Walter Carvalho, who took the subjective experience of seeing as the theme of their documentary. Wim Wenders again unfolds his obsession with watching and being blind: he argues in favour of spectacles, which unlike contact lenses frame the world. Wenders sees the benefits of this limitation. Neurologist Oliver Sacks stresses the importance of the imagination: people can deceive themselves into thinking that they see a magnetic field above an object with ‘the eyes of the mind’. Furthermore, Agnès Varda, Hanna Schygulla and a number of Brazilian writers, poets and musicians talk about their personal experiences with blindness and short-sightedness. For example, a blind bus passenger knows exactly where on the route he is at a given moment, because he knows the map of the area with all its bumps and turns by heart. Blindness, too, is relative: criticism is passed on the bombardment of images that is poured out at the contemporary viewer, leaving him behind senseless: ‘blind’ (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)