Letter on the Blind – on the 48th Edition of Cinema du Reel
From Lucrecia Martel to Sebastian Brameshuber, from Luke Fowler to the snippets from Les Yeux de l’Ouée: a particularly exciting 48th edition of Cinema du Reel, where sound takes precedence over image and where the Palestinian question emerges as a critical method.
In 1749, Denis Diderot published the Letter on the Blind for the Benefit of Those Who See. A few years later, he published the Letter on the Deaf and Dumb for the Benefit of Those Who Hear and Speak. All the irony of the Enlightenment is contained in these titles: thinking of sight and the experience of the world from the perspective of the blind; thinking of language from the perspective of the deaf and dumb. That is, thinking from what is counterintuitive to understand what lies behind the illusions; a philosophical gesture par excellence, a gesture that naturally comes as an exercise in rhetoric, a gesture that may also liberate.
A necessary gesture for a festival that seriously considers its own concept of the Real: starting with amateur collectives to create the most refined works of art; starting with sound to move towards image; initially being in fiction to make the purest documentary. Or the entire journey of the festival’s opening film, Nuestra Tierra by Lucrecia Martel, as discussed in these pages a few days ago and released in theaters on April 1st: a fiction filmmaker who, long absent from cinema, returns with a rethought device, unusual uses (drones, trial footage), a submission to contingency, and achieves her greatest film.
In this particularly rich and exciting edition, a particular film made us reconsider Diderot’s text: A Blind Song, directed by Stefano Canapa and Natacha Muslera. If the blind person in Diderot’s letter manages to grasp and feel while being absolutely deprived—not only of sight, but of the organ—the blind woman who speaks in the opening minutes of A Blind Song tells instead of her ability to glimpse light around her in fragments.
A magnificent first scene, which gently breaks free from the “handicap-disabled” relationship to build equality in dialogue, a sharing of
By Pierre Jendrysiak
Critique
