Blinding (2011)

• 80%
• 2011
• Steve Sanguedolce

"Vision, in all of its manifestations, permeates the disclosures of the three characters that journey us through the film: Jackie, a lesbian police officer grappling with corroding forces of perception both within and outside her profession; Jamie, for whom the horrors of the Rwandan genocide are tempered by the distance offered by technologies of the military industrial complex; and Ryan, who has progressively lost his sight, retaining just one per cent of vision in one eye. In attending to vision and its primacy in Western society, Sanguedolce materializes the traumas it inflicts, whether through the imperceptibility of truth and its subjective red herrings, obfuscations and blind-spots, or the moment where recognition changes you forever—often for the worse. Blinding couples the confessional intimacy of a documentary with a hypnotic panoply of hand dyed images, luring its audience into a compromise between visual skepticism and optical sumptuousness.