Blindness

[MacGuffin]

'Blindness' has social ills in its sights
By Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times

SãO PAULO, BRAZIL — Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore are traipsing through a trash-strewn urban wasteland, scavenging for salvation. All around them, dozens of pitiful human beings dressed in filthy, mismatched clothes grope their way past wrecked cars and graffiti-splattered highway ramps, like dancers in some grotesque ballet of the damned.

It's not a pretty sight, but it's impossible to avert your eyes -- which is exactly the point. Director Fernando Meirelles and his camera crew are gearing up to shoot another take of "Blindness," a feature film based on the harrowing 1995 parable about an unnamed city stricken with a plague of sightlessness, by the Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago. Like nearly everyone else in the film, Ruffalo's character, an ophthalmologist known simply as "the Doctor," is afflicted with a terrifying malady in which the eyes appear normal but are coated with a milky whiteness that blocks out vision.

The only person immune is Moore's character, the doctor's heroic, steadfast wife. As the story gathers speed, she must guide her husband and a small group of fellow sufferers (played by Danny Glover, Alice Braga and others) through a perilous obstacle course, in a society where order has collapsed and humans are reduced to living like animals.

Critics heralded Saramago's novel as a brutal but un-put-down-able allegory of the 20th century's house of horrors: the Holocaust, the stigmatization of AIDS patients, the ominous encroachment of Big Brother. First published amid the fin-de-siècle fixation on end-times scenarios, it anticipated pop culture's ongoing obsession with apocalyptic story lines: "I Am Legend," "28 Weeks Later," the Christian/sci-fi "Left Behind" books, Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road."

And if the new film's settingvisually echoes post-Katrina New Orleans or a sub-Saharan refugee camp, that reflects the director's view that the message of "Blindness" is becoming more timely every day.

"Because now, especially with the environment, we're really destroying the planet, but we keep going, keep selling, keep burning. It's like we can't see," says Meirelles, whose 2002 international breakout hit "City of God," about Brazilian youth gangs, stamped him as a skilled action auteur with a social conscience to match.

Filming of the Japanese-Canadian-Brazilian co-production wrapped up last fall in this chaotic mega-city. Miramax has scheduled the English-language film for release in August. Originally published in Portuguese as "Ensaio sobre a Cegueira" (Essay About Blindness), Saramago's international bestseller might've been titled "Eyes Wide Shut." In both book and film, blindness is not only a physical condition but a metaphor for the darker side of human nature: prejudice, selfishness, violence and willful indifference.

Yet Saramago's tenderness toward his characters makes it clear that he's not stigmatizing blindness or blind people per se. Rather, "Blindness" is about how we as humans look but don't always see. It's also about how quickly our seemingly stable lives, even in so-called developed nations, can spiral into anarchy and barbarism.

"Sometimes we read about tribal wars in some countries in Africa and how terrible they are and how aggressive and how violent. And we're exactly the same," says Meirelles, who has made something of a specialty of translating Third World moral quandaries into gripping dramatic narratives with which First World audiences are compelled to identify. In "City of God" he explored the predatory savagery of the drug trade in Rio de Janeiro's slums. In "The Constant Gardener" (2005) he probed the brutal exploitation of Africa by Western drug companies.

On uncertain ground

For the crew and cast, which includes roughly 700 extras, making "Blindness" was alternately frightening, draining and exhilarating. That was especially true of training to act "blind," says Christian Duurvoort, an actor who coached his colleagues in a series of workshops.

First, Duurvoort says, he did research by interviewing blind people, learning how they use their other senses to orient themselves in space and how they perceive the world around them. He then experimented by blindfolding himself. "I went to a park, I bumped into trees, I fell into holes, I got very irritated. I learned a lot of things about me I didn't like," he says, laughing.

Just as important as understanding the physical mechanics of being blind, Duurvoort says, was helping the actors deal with "the emotional state, the psychological state, being vulnerable." Meirelles had emphasized that he wanted the extras to seem like desperate, traumatized human beings, not B-movie zombies.

Practically everyone working on the film donned a blindfold at some point, even the producers and the director. Meirelles says the experience brought him to "a state of peace." But other crew members panicked.

In one exercise, the main actors were blindfolded and told to follow the sound of a bell. Ruffalo particularly had trouble and kept wandering around getting more and more lost. During shooting, in addition to a thick makeup layer to make him appear older, Ruffalo wore special contact lenses that rendered him blind, though his eyes were open.

"At first it's terrifying and then it's frustrating and then it gets quiet," says Ruffalo during a break from shooting. "We're tormented by our eyesight. A beautiful girl walks by, cars, clothes, terrible things on television. We're tormented by our eyes. You don't know this until you go blind. . . . As an actor I suddenly felt free."

The film's distinctive challenges were highly visible one Sunday afternoon on the set. The shoot was taking place beneath a highway near a busy street market, and though the area had been partially roped off for the crew, security measures were low-key. A curious crowd of locals in T-shirts and flip-flops gathered within a few feet of Moore and Ruffalo, snapping photos between takes, while relentless traffic roared by in all directions.

"Ação!" someone yelled. "Let's roll it quickly!" The "blind" actors lurched into position just as a city bus suddenly whipped through a crosswalk, nearly striking five male extras.

For the characters trapped in the Hobbesian purgatory of "Blindness," the seeing are practically as cursed as the sight-impaired. As the growing epidemic spreads panic, hundreds of people, including the doctor and his wife, are rounded up by the government and placed in quarantine, where they are menaced by a gang of thugs led by a very unsavory Gael García Bernal. The movie doesn't shy from depicting the degrading living conditions, though it will spare audiences some of the novel's more excruciating details, such as people slipping on piles of excrement. Rape and revenge killing come into play in the film.

But so do valor, courage and many small, redemptive acts of individual kindness. Through being blind, the principal characters discover (or rediscover) their ability to empathize with others. "It's at times the very best we can be and also the ugliest and basest and worst that mankind has toward one another," Ruffalo says.

Though "Blindness" won't be an easy sell, Meirelles, screenwriter Don McKellar and the rest of the production team are trying to leaven the book's relentlessly grim atmosphere by capturing the mordant wit of Saramago's third-person narrator. (Though Saramago for years resisted selling the movie rights to "Blindness," he has taken a hands-off approach to the adaptation.)

"What allows you to stomach the book is that slightly ironic, distanced literary voice. And it's also what keeps it from becoming a sort of exploitation film," says McKellar, a Canadian who has acted and shared the 2006 Tony Award for best book of a musical for the 1920s pastiche "The Drowsy Chaperone." "I realized I had to come up with a cinematic something that could allow the viewer to have some perspective on what was happening."

McKellar and Meirelles decided that some of that perspective could come from voice-overs supplied by Glover's character, identified in the book only as the Man with the Black Eye-Patch, who functions as a kind of Saramago alter ego. The filmmakers also are infusing "Blindness" with the occasional visual wink or sight gag. In one outdoor scene, a group of blind men staggers past a large landscape painting that's been discarded on a street corner. For a few seconds, their stumbling bodies form a tableau vivant that art-history mavens may recognize as a parody of "The Parable of the Blind" (1568) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The film makes a handful of sly, fleeting allusions to other famous artworks.

"It's about image, the film, and vision," Meirelles explains, "so I thought it makes sense to create, not a history of painting, because it's not, but having different ways of seeing things, from Rembrandt to these very contemporary artists. But it's a very subtle thing."

The movie's greatest visual asset may be its São Paulo backdrop. Though the city is South America's largest, it's mostly unknown to U.S. and European audiences, and doesn't suffer from overexposure. Its relative anonymity fits with Saramago's insistence that the story's location be made as generic as possible. "Blindness" also was shot partly in Toronto and Montevideo, Uruguay.

Meirelles, a native Paulistano, lobbied to shoot the movie in his hometown because of its extraordinary multiethnic mix, underscoring that "Blindness" is a cautionary tale not about a specific society but about mankind.

Wasn't it dispiriting to be immersed for weeks in this bleak universe, Meirelles is asked. He shakes his head.

"We all thought that we were going to have a very hard experience, that it was going to be a painful experience, but we never had such a great time," he says. "Mark's such a funny guy, and Julianne has this great, huge sense of humor. So it was a very, very good and light experience, which is weird -- such a dark story."

One of the extras, Sarah Negritri, agrees. Sporting a stained green dress, wild reddish hair and body makeup to make her look dirty, the 25-year-old actress has found her brief exposure to the world of the blind to be unusually enlightening.

"We learn to be more sensitive and we care more about the essential, especially about the essence of human beings," she says. "And when I go back home I pay attention to my relationships with my friends and family. You realize that a lot of things aren't that essential."

[MacGuffin]

Teaser Trailer here.

[MacGuffin]

FIRST LOOK: Cannes colors 'Blindness'
A sneak peek at Fernando Meirelles' new film.
By Sheigh Crabtree, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

If eyes are the window to the soul, then Cannes Film Festival organizers' choice of "Blindness" as the opening night film promises a 24-frames-per-second allegory about the fragile state of civil society and the human spirit.

"Blindness," based on the bestselling 1998 novel by Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese writer José Saramago, stars Julianne Moore as an ophthalmologist's wife who ends up as the last survivor with sight in a city racked by a sudden onset of mass vision loss.

Fernando Meirelles' third film, after his heralded 2002 thriller "City of God" and 2005's "The Constant Gardener," landed the coveted opening night slot at the 61st annual festival on the French Croisette starting Wednesday.

Julianne Moore's character's husband, played by Mark Ruffalo, is an eye doctor who is one of the earliest to be infected with the epidemic known as "white blindness." In an exclusive first look provided by Miramax Films, we see Ruffalo's character examine "patient zero" (Yusuke Iseya), the first carrier of the inexplicable epidemic. He is accompanied by his frustrated wife (Yoshino Kimura) who is forced to guide her suddenly helpless husband.

As the epidemic spreads, and those with sight begin to prey on the sightless, Moore's and Ruffalo's characters travel to a state-mandated quarantine through an unnamed capital city reduced to savagery. Once inside a gravely mismanaged government containment facility, the two encounter Gael García Bernal, a former barman and current "king of dormitory 3."

"Blindness" is narrated by Danny Glover, a late addition to the film, Meirelles said, because the director wanted to weave Saramago's actual prose and reflections into the action, adapted from the novel to the screen by screenwriter Don McKellar.

Although Saramago's book was published 10 years ago, it was not for lack of trying that the film adaptation took so long to wend its way to the screen.

By his own account, Saramago declined to sell rights to the book for years, turning away a host of suitors, including the Weinsteins, Whoopi Goldberg and actor García Bernal, who ended up co-starring in the film. The author has said at various times that he resisted because it's a violent book about social degradation and rape, and he didn't want it given the typical Hollywood horror treatment.

Meirelles convinced Saramago only after his producer and screenwriter traveled to the Canary Islands and spent two days with the novelist discussing the potential of a new visual allegory about the fragility of civilization.

The difficult paradox of telling a visual story about sightlessness seems to be a theme that speaks to festival programmers.

Last year's Cannes darling, Julian Schnabel's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," which took home the festival's director's prize and a technical award for cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, followed a magazine editor paralyzed from head to toe with the ability to move only one eye. In an unforgettable scene for ommetaphobes, the audience watches as its protagonist's eyelid is sewn shut from the inside.

Cannes organizers must have a soft spot for films about vision loss, inasmuch as they provide the opportunity to revel in the delicate gift of sight.

[MacGuffin]

Foresight pays off for 'Blindness' director
Fernando Meirelles always wanted to film José Saramago's novel. He finally got the chance.
By Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

CANNES, FRANCE -- WHEN Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles was told that the Festival de Cannes wanted his new film, "Blindness," to open this year's event Wednesday night, he was "surprised, to be honest." Not because of a lack of faith in what he'd done but because of the nature of his accomplishment.

Taken from the novel by Portuguese Nobel Prize winner José Saramago and starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Danny Glover, "Blindness" is in large part a disturbing, unnerving parable about the horrific ways society disintegrates when everyone in it (except Moore's character) goes inexplicably blind. It is not exactly a pretty picture, and, Meirelles says with a smile about opening night, "there's a dinner afterwards, it's not good for the digestion. In France, they like to boo, so I'm a bit worried."

In truth, only a director of Meirelles' particular combination of gifts could have brought that book's combination of despair and hope successfully to the screen. As demonstrated by his best-known features, "City of God" and "The Constant Gardener," which between them earned eight Oscar nominations, Meirelles joins the flair of commercial filmmaking with a socially conscious sensibility.

A latecomer to feature films at age 42, after nearly two decades of making independent television and commercials in Brazil, the still-youthful 52-year-old Meirelles says with typically disarming frankness that his choice of subject matter comes from "the advantage of starting doing films when I was very old.

"I had had a career as a commercial director, I had enough money to live on, and I thought it was such a waste of time to work only for money, for box office. If I'd been 29, 30, 35, maybe, but I was too old for that. A lot of money wasn't going to change my life, so what's the point? I was going to deal with subjects I was interested in."

Involving the audience

Yet, and this is one of the things that characterizes Meirelles and helps make "Blindness" a success, "being concerned with and including the audience" is a key part of what motivates him. "Some of my colleagues work for themselves, expressing ideas, but I want to bring the audience to the experience. For me, film finishes in the room it's shown in."

So while "Blindness" remains a harrowing piece to experience, Meirelles, who worked closely with Canadian screenwriter Don McKellar, reports that he softened the film's disturbing (but not graphic) scenes of sexual violence after "the audiences didn't react well at the first test screening; some people even walked out.

"When I shot and edited these scenes, I did it in a very technical way, I worried about how to light it and so on, and I lost the sense of their brutality. Some women were really angry with the film, and I thought, 'Wow, maybe I crossed the line.' I went back not to please the audience but so they would stay involved until the end of the story. You want the audience with you."

Ironically enough, Meirelles tried to buy the rights to Saramago's novel when it first came out, before he'd made any features. "I like the idea of the fragility of society, of how primitive we are as human beings. We have a little cover of sophistication, and without it it's all about survival."

Meirelles was turned down, as were many others. "He said no to eight or nine offers, even big offers from studios," the director reports. The novelist felt that his story wasn't appropriate for images. "Cinema," Saramago told Meirelles, "destroys imagination."

Finally winning the rights to the book -- whose characters have no names and exist in no specific place and time -- was Canadian producer Niv Fichman, who flew to Saramago's home in Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands, to persuade him. The only thing the author told Fichman and screenwriter McKellar was "don't set the story anywhere specific," and he was equally elusive when Meirelles spoke to him before directing.

"I asked him a lot of questions about the characters, and he wouldn't answer anything," the director reports. "The only thing he said was that the dog in the story, called the Dog of Tears, should be a big dog, not a small one. I read recently that when a journalist asked him which of his characters he liked the most, he said he could kill everyone except the Dog of Tears."

One change Meirelles made to the book was to do what he calls "adding gray," especially where the film's villain, played by Gael García Bernal, was concerned. "In the book, he is really a mean guy, terribly evil from the beginning . . . but I thought it was more interesting to have him be not evil but more like a child with a gun."

That notion came in part from advice he got years ago from celebrated Brazilian stage director Antunes Filho. "He told me, 'When you are creating characters, try and include a scene that does the opposite of what you are trying to establish. That gives the character humanity.' I always try to take this lesson."

English, not Portuguese

While Meirelles had envisioned shooting the film in the novel's Portuguese when he first tried to acquire the rights, the realities of today's international film market mean that "if you do it in English you can sell it to the whole world and have a bigger audience." And while the film is in many ways an ensemble effort, Moore, whom the director praises for being "at the same time very economical and very expressive, with such a range," gives an exceptional performance as a character who metamorphoses in front of our eyes.

Daunting as starting Cannes with this film is for Meirelles, what is to come is even more so. Saramago had wanted to be at the festival for the premiere, but his doctors hadn't allowed him to travel. So the director is flying to Lisbon on Saturday to show him the film. "That's the screening I'm really afraid of," he says. "Two thousand people at the Grand Palais is not a big thing compared to Saramago's opinion."

[squints]

Just ordered the book. This sounds great.

[MacGuffin]

[squints]

Just read the book. This will be very hard to turn into a good movie. If they followed the book directly it'd have to be NC-17. The dialogue doesn't translate that well. I don't see Gael Garcia Bernal in this role he should've been cast as the car thief (that's the way i pictured it when i was reading). It should've been in Portuguese. Its an amazing and heartbreaking story that everyone should read at some point but it seems like an incredibly difficult film to adapt. Here's hoping for the best.

[matt35mm]

The reviews from the Cannes screening aren't good.

[ElPandaRoyal]

The reviews from the Cannes screening aren't good.

, and he's not one to say so if that's not what he thinks. A rough translation: Saramago says "I'm so happy for having seen this, just like I was right after I finished writing the book". Meirelles then says that makes him very happy. I'd say that's the best review Meirelles could get.

EDIT: Oh, .

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer here.

[MacGuffin]

'Blindness' looks for second chance in Toronto
Director Fernando Meirelles to premiere re-tooled picture in North America.
Source: Los Angeles Times

Will a newly retooled version of "Blindness" survive its bumpy ride on the Croisette to become the eye-opening experience of the Toronto Film Festival?

That's what Miramax and director Fernando Meirelles are hoping.

About halfway thru the film's Cannes opening night screening last May, Miramax president Daniel Battsek started to get the queasy feeling that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to have his film launching the world's most famous film festival after all.

"I was thinking to myself 'maybe we shouldn't have done this.' There's an enormous amount of pressure that goes along with opening night," Battsek says now.

Perhaps the fact that he had so much success at Cannes 2007 with "No Country For Old Men" and "The Diving Bell And The Butterfly" had something to do with the decision to accept the daunting task of opening the 2008 edition.

Certainly the history of Cannes is littered with opening night critical disappointments. "The Da Vinci Code," anyone? How about "Vatel?" Anyone remember 2003's "Fanfan la Tulipe?" (It never even got a US release).

Critical response to "Blindness" at Cannes was mixed at best, including a good notice from The Guardian, but the Hollywood trade papers weren't kind.

"The personal and mass chaos that would result if the human race lost its sense of vision is conveyed with diminished impact and an excess of stylish tics," said Variety's reviewer.

"Provocative cinema. But it is also predictable cinema," wrote the Hollywood Reporter.

Despite the naysayers, the film was still received with the usual standing ovation from the opening night audience but for director Fernando Meirelles who rushed post-production to make the date, he knew then the movie still needed work.

"The first time I watched the film, as unbelievable as it sounds,was in Cannes! We were really rushing to finish the film by May 23rd but they said 'No, you have to come to the opening night on the 14th' which took ten days out of our schedule, " he told us by phone from Sao Paulo Brazil just before boarding a plane for Toronto on Wednesday. "It was a pity because I didn't have time to finish the film and really see it before it showed."

He points out that Walter Salles finished his competition entry just the night before its showing and the previous year Wong Kar Wai only completed his film the DAY of its premiere. Another 2008 Cannes entry, Steven Soderbergh's "Che" has reportedly been cut by 17 minutes pre-Toronto (which many critics who panned it on the French Riviera might hope is just the beginning of trims for the bloated two part epic).

In Meirelles' case the Cannes experience convinced him to take "Blindness" back into editing for another three weeks of work, remixing the soundtrack, doing extensive color correction and adding scenes to the beginning of the film where all the characters start to go blind. He has also jettisoned what Variety referred to as Danny Glover's "incessant voiceover narration" which gave the film a different vibe.

"The book is so open I originally thought with V.O. it would add a second layer to the images but there was a lot of doubt about it. The screenwriter Don McKellar didn't like the idea but we tried it anyway. Now I feel the film is more true to the ( Jose Saramago) book," he says.

Meirelles also noted that because the audio was done in Brazil and the original color correction work in Toronto, that all the elements of the movie came together in Cannes at the very last minute. When he saw it projected in the Palais that glamorous May evening he was shocked at how dark the print was.

The new version is only about 30 seconds shorter but that's because the added scenes and deleted scenes (due to the excision of the narration) pretty much cancelled each other out.

The director is hoping Toronto film fest critics and audiences will appreciate it more with the changes.

"It recently premiered in Brazil with positive reviews and response and will be going to the Tokyo Festival too. It seems to be a totally different film. The audiences don't see it as politic or a thriller. They understand it's a metaphor about our universe," he said.

To ensure the press corps gets it, critics are being invited to Saturday night's North American premiere (at the Elgin) instead of the usual press screening. Meirelles thinks there's a certain emotional energy that you get in a packed movie house that critics don't normally have in small screening rooms.

For his part Battsek is very hopeful the reception in Toronto will be warmer than Cannes and helps launch "Blindness" which opens in the U.S. on September 26th into the fall awards season. He says the studio will campaign it , especially for Julianne Moore's fearless and luminous performance.

But Meirelles, who was nominated Best Director for "City Of God" and saw his "The Constant Gardner" win an Oscar for Rachel Weisz, isn't thinking about that.

"Awards are like a bonus. I don't do films to get awards. I work in Brazil. It's not like it is in L.A. American press starts talking about ( Oscars) in August. It adds pressure. That's not a good thing," he says.

Pressure is something Fernando Meirelles knows well.

[MacGuffin]

How 'Blindness' director Meirelles is a movie poster
While making 'Blindness,' adapted from José Saramago's novel, he blogs about the process.
By Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times

SãO PAULO, BRAZIL -- WHEN Fernando Meirelles began filming "Blindness" many months ago, he did what any savvy auteur would do these days.

Hire a top-notch director of photography? (Well, yes, he did that.) Bone up on a few back issues of Cahiers du Cinéma? Invite Harvey Weinstein to a set visit?

Naw. He started a blog.

Over the months that followed, Web surfers and cinephiles got an unusually candid look at how Meirelles and his production team made a film out of José Saramago's novel about an unnamed city stricken with a plague of sightlessness. The Miramax release, starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, Alice Braga and Gael García Bernal, will open Sept. 19.

Meirelles, a native of this South American metropolis of 10 million, where parts of the movie were shot, said that, among other objectives, he hoped his blog would encourage budding filmmakers to follow their personal muses.

"[When] I'm writing the blog, I always think about film students," he said during shooting last fall.

The director, who earned his international breakout in 2002 with the violent Rio de Janeiro shantytown saga "City of God" and followed it up in 2005 with a well-received adaptation of "The Constant Gardener," thinks most film schools have too many rules. Students need to learn to trust their intuition, improvise, not over-plan, he believes, so as to stay open to a serendipitous camera angle or an actor's inspired ad-lib.

"I've many times filmed like a clarinet player who follows the music sheet but today I think I film more like a jazz musician," he wrote in one blog post.

Meirelles' blog covers the first day of filming, in July 2007, through March. Besides practical professional tips, the director regularly posted his feelings, impressions and occasional frustrations as filming on "Blindness" progressed. "There is a little bit of Sisyphus in this job of mine," he wrote.

He also posted about meeting Saramago and his wife for the first time at a Lisbon restaurant to discuss the adaptation. Meirelles found the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author to be "intimidating" but "amiable" and "affectionate."

In yet another post, Meirelles offered a long description of Moore preparing to do an especially grueling scene. (Saramago's harrowing tale involves numerous apocalyptic episodes, including murder and gang rape.) "The scene made everybody on the set silent because it was so strong. We cut it."

One of his final posts was about screening some edited scenes for his wife, Ciça, Moore and Ruffalo in a hotel room. Moore seemed generally pleased, Meirelles wrote, but the ultra-self-critical Ruffalo, "as expected, praised what he saw, praised Julianne, but was devastated by his own performance."

"I've seen a lot of guilty people in my life, but Mark breaks all records," Meirelles concluded with evident affection for the actor. "He's worse than I am."

[MacGuffin]

Blindness' Moore Has Only POV

Julianne Moore, who stars as the only sighted person in Fernando Meirelles' SF movie Blindness, told SCI FI Wire that she was daunted by the role, which tells the story from her character's point of view. Literally.

"It's told through her eyes in the book--it's all from her point of view--so there were times when it reads like 'She thought she would do this' or 'She decided not to do that,' and I wondered how to play that," the Oscar-nominated actress said in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, following the film's premiere.

The story, based on the book by Portuguese author José Saramagoa, deals with a mysterious infection that sweeps the population of an unidentified city, leaving all but a few without sight, including Moore's character, a doctor's wife. When victims are first placed in an abandoned asylum, they become victims of other inmates and guards.

"What's amazing about Fernando is that he tells this big stories in great sweeping detail and huge cinematic gestures, where you see this swath of humanity, but he does it small brush," Moore said.

The oddly futuristic story gives no hint as to the film's setting or time, and Moore said that's on purpose. "I always say movies don't predict the future; they merely reflect the culture," she said. "In the last decade, there's been so much happening politically and socially in terms of natural disasters and man-made disasters that it's kind of overwhelming for us. There's this huge sense of anxiety in our global culture. This film definitely reflects that."

Blindness also stars Danny Glover, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal and Alice Braga and is scheduled for U.S. release on Sept. 26.

[MacGuffin]

Descending Into Blindness to See the Light 
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY; New York Times

"USUALLY when I make a film, I can get started by going to Google, doing research," Fernando Meirelles said a little nervously, a few hours before a screening in Montreal of his ambitious new movie "Blindness," opening Oct. 3. "But this is a film based on nothing," he said. "It's all invented — a generic city with characters who have no names and no past, who get a disease that doesn't exist. After I got involved in the film, I realized, wow, this is like a trap." That's one possible metaphor. Here's another: To make this movie in a spirit faithful to its source, a 1995 novel (of the same name) by the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, Mr. Meirelles had to resign himself to flying blind.

Will Smith in "I Am Legend" epitomizes the man of action in most end-of-the-world dramas, a template "Blindness" avoids.
In the movie, as in the book, every character but one — an ophthalmologist's wife played by Julianne Moore — comes down with the title affliction, which is, bafflingly, contagious. (And which, just as mysteriously, manifests itself not as darkness but as total, blank-page whiteness.) "In most films everything is based on the eyes," Mr. Meirelles said. "You cut to show where the character is looking, that's how you tell stories. It's all about point of view, and I wasn't going to do this film showing only Julianne's character's point of view. So how do you get people involved with the characters when you can't put them in the same position visually?"

His solution, he said, was to "put the audience in this blind world, to try to deconstruct the image, if I can say that." (Just this once, but don't let it happen again.) "Sometimes the image is washed out, sometimes it's out of focus, sometimes the framing is totally wrong, deliberately," he continued, "and toward the end of the film I even tried separating the sound from the image — showing a character with his mouth shut, but you're hearing his voice."

"It was all very experimental," he said. "Very scary."

"Blindness" is not, however, scary in a horror-movie way, or even in the manner of the apocalyptic science fiction that has been turning up regularly on multiplex screens in the first few years of the millennium: pictures like "28 Days Later," "Cloverfield," "Children of Men," "I Am Legend" and "The Invasion" (the fourth film based on Jack Finney's 1955 novel "The Body Snatchers"). Despite the speculative nature of the plot and the pervasive aura of doom, "this isn't science fiction, really," Mr. Meirelles insisted. "It's a metaphor."

Of course horror and science fiction have been known to traffic in metaphor too, but Mr. Meirelles clearly approached this difficult story without a lot of genre preconceptions. The longest and most harrowing section of "Blindness" takes place in a locked-down, heavily guarded holding facility in which the government has quarantined the first victims of the epidemic, and these scenes, despite their sporadic gestures toward visual "deconstruction," are filmed with the sort of immersive, hyperkinetic realism that Mr. Meirelles brought to his earlier films "City of God" (2002) and "The Constant Gardener" (2005). It's only in the final half-hour or so, when the main characters, sprung from confinement, wander through the devastated, chaotic city in search of food and shelter, that the movie begins to resemble the end-of-the-world narratives we've all become so used to. Rubble, looted shops, hungry dogs, fear, bad behavior: we've all been there. (At least at the movies.)

Every story of this kind, from Daniel Defoe's "Journal of the Plague Year" to Albert Camus's "Plague" to Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's comic book series "Y: The Last Man," is essentially an experiment, a laboratory trial of behavior, like what Will Smith, the last man (and last virologist) on earth, does in his basement in "I Am Legend." But, Mr. Meirelles said, his film is "not a story like that, about a disease and somebody looking for a cure." He added, "The plague here is just an excuse to explore human behavior — how this blindness affected people, how they'd react if nobody could see them and they could do anything, knowing that they won't be judged."

And how do they react? Not well. "I agree with Saramago," Mr. Meirelles said. "After all these years of civilization we're still very primitive. In a crisis, we always seem to go back to our basic instincts, everything becomes about eating and sex. I want the film to remind us that we're part of nature, not so special — we're really animals."

This clinical result has been replicated many, many times in fiction and film, and it is, to put it baldly, sort of a depressing outcome. Most movies dealing with apocalyptic events, especially plagues, get around the inherent bleakness of the human prospect by positing some way out the end-of-the-world impasse, like that cure Mr. Smith finds in the last minutes of "I Am Legend," or the boat that turns up at the end of "Children of Men" to rescue the first child born in the world for 18 years and thus save the human race from extinction. Without hope, what you get is something more like Bergman's "Seventh Seal" (1957): plague everywhere, agonizing and incurable, the last faint hope of mankind a chess game with Death (who doesn't play fair).

It's risky for Mr. Meirelles to make an apocalyptic movie that doesn't externalize our fears in the form of zombies, vampires or giant monsters of indeterminate origin like the one that lays waste to New York in "Cloverfield." The blindness epidemic has the effect of turning people inward, where the demons are hardest to fight. In the final paragraph of Mary Shelley's great plague narrative "The Last Man" (1826), the lonely survivor writes: "Neither hope nor joy are my pilots — restless despair and fierce desire of change lead me on. I long to grapple with danger, to be excited by fear, to have some task, however slight or voluntary, for each day's fulfillment." This sounds suspiciously like the prevailing philosophy of the traditional, generic end-of-the-world movie, in which action and danger and the excitement of fear are strangely comforting. In the movies adrenaline's the prescription for every ill.

Mr. Saramago, in his novel, and Mr. Meirelles, in his film, try to do without the usual heart-starting jolts of genre action movies, and in their absence the world really does look unfamiliar: bleak, arbitrary, experimental — a world making itself up as it goes along, a page waiting, anxiously, to be written upon. What action "Blindness" has consists mostly of the heedless operations of pure chance, nothing like the directed, purposeful tasks that Shelley's last man longs for and that the protagonists of horror and science fiction movies perform with such unseemly gusto. It takes a fair amount of faith to try to imagine the world this way, just closing your eyes and charging into the void. Mr. Meirelles, though, is convinced that the risk is worth it. "This movie," he said, "is about how we lose our humanity and how we get it back, how we learn to see again." In other words, the whiteness that this film's characters see isn't, or doesn't have to be, merely blindness: it's also the light at the end of the tunnel.

[MacGuffin]

Blind Activists Plan Protest Of Julianne Moore Movie
Source: Huffington Post

BALTIMORE — Blind people quarantined in a mental asylum, attacking each other, soiling themselves, trading sex for food. For Marc Maurer, who's blind, such a scenario _ as shown in the movie "Blindness" _ is not a clever allegory for a breakdown in society.

Instead, it's an offensive and chilling depiction that Maurer fears could undermine efforts to integrate blind people into the mainstream.

"The movie portrays blind people as monsters, and I believe it to be a lie," said Maurer, president of the Baltimore-based National Federation of the Blind. "Blindness doesn't turn decent people into monsters."

The organization plans to protest the movie, released by Miramax Films, at 75 theaters around the country when it's released Friday. Blind people and their allies will hand out fliers and carry signs. Among the slogans: "I'm not an actor. But I play a blind person in real life."

The movie reinforces inaccurate stereotypes, including that the blind cannot care for themselves and are perpetually disoriented, according to the NFB.

"We face a 70 percent unemployment rate and other social problems because people don't think we can do anything, and this movie is not going to help _ at all," said Christopher Danielsen, a spokesman for the organization.

"Blindness" director Fernando Meirelles, an Academy Award nominee for "City of God," was shooting on location Thursday and unavailable for comment, according to Miramax. The studio released a statement that read, in part, "We are saddened to learn that the National Federation of the Blind plans to protest the film `Blindness.'"

The NFB began planning the protests after seven staffers, including Danielsen, attended a screening of the movie in Baltimore last week. The group included three sighted employees.

"Everybody was offended," Danielsen said.

Based on the 1995 novel by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, "Blindness" imagines a mysterious epidemic that causes people to see nothing but fuzzy white light _ resulting in a collapse of the social order in an unnamed city. Julianne Moore stars as the wife of an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who loses his sight; she feigns blindness to stay with her husband and eventually leads a revolt of the quarantined patients.

The book was praised for its use of blindness as a metaphor for the lack of clear communication and respect for human dignity in modern society.

Miramax said in its statement that Meirelles had "worked diligently to preserve the intent and resonance of the acclaimed book," which it described as "a courageous parable about the triumph of the human spirit when civilization breaks down."

Maurer will have none of it.

"I think that failing to understand each other is a significant problem," he said. "I think that portraying it as associated with blindness is just incorrect."

The protest will include pickets at theaters in at least 21 states, some with dozens of participants, timed to coincide with evening showtimes. Maurer said it would be the largest protest in the 68-year history of the NFB, which has 50,000 members and works to improve blind people's lives through advocacy, education and other ways.

The film was the opening-night entry at the Cannes Film Festival, where many critics were unimpressed.

After Cannes, Meirelles retooled the film, removing a voice-over that some critics felt spelled out its themes too explicitly.

Meirelles told The Associated Press at Cannes that the film draws parallels to such disasters as Hurricane Katrina, the global food shortage and the cyclone in Myanmar.

"There are different kinds of blindness. There's 2 billion people that are starving in the world," Meirelles said. "This is happening. It doesn't need a catastrophe. It's happening, and because there isn't an event like Katrina, we don't see."