The Cinematheque

“A deeply moving experience—one containing more joy than heartbreak.”

Terry Atkinson, Los Angeles Times

This first of four films Frederick Wiseman made at the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind opens with a sequence unlike any other in his films: a young student walks, for the first time, from one classroom to another unattended, every step a momentous journey into the unknown. In this school, where teachers do not share the disability experience of their students, privileged moments of understanding are rare. Educational concepts often rely upon metaphors of vision, which brings out a stark divide of subjectivity, between what teachers, students, and filmmaker perceive, and therefore consider important. Wiseman, whose films never assume an ability for the camera to transcendently represent a subject, sensitively connects the two extremes of the film—blind experience and visual images—showing without overcompensation the school’s rigidity and real achievements: the space to approach the potential joys of reading, playing, dancing, and discovering the physical world.

“Blind is worth the real time it takes: fascinating and surprisingly unoppressive, it is a forceful exploration of both systematic education and the nature of the documentary form.”

Katherine Dieckmann, Village Voice

“The students’ persistent determination to find their way—mixed with varying degrees of anguish, humor and sweetness—yields a film as much about blindness as it is about the darkness faced in childhood and adolescence.”

Brittany Gravely, Harvard Film Archive