Outside Event: 'Eyes of Me'

Eyes of Me (2009), dir. Keith Maitland

Eyes of Me is an interesting counterpoint to Chicago 10. In Chicago 10, the animation (like the over the top stylistic techniques) feels like cool for coolness sake. It is not inherent to the material; it is there to spice things up. In Eyes of Me, the animation is thematically justified and the result is very effective.

It is apropos that Eyes of Me screened when it did, because it serves as a nice example of some of the POV issues discussed in Directing the Documentary. The animation is an important technique for giving insight into the characters’ POV. The characters in the film have not always been blind. Three of the four lost their sight after years of vision, and one had had incredibly poor eyesight their whole life. They have a sense of what the world is like, but cannot visualize the actual thing. The animation helps illustrate that. At one point, Chas talks about how he does not know how things look, but he has memories of how things were. The animation then comes in, leaving the world crudely and strangely rendered. A girl describes how it is like she is viewing things through a fog. Suddenly, her character is in a gray landscape populated by abstract shapes. If the characters simply described their perception, there would be distance and the audience would merely sympathize with their condition. The stylistic choices employed throughout, such as the animation and the ever-shifting focus, puts the audience in the characters’ position, thereby creating empathy.

I asked the director about how the animation decision had come about, and he said it was one of the first decisions he had made, even before shooting had started. Interestingly, the thematic logic had changed. Before, when he had not known any blind people, he felt it could be used to create a dreamlike state – which is how he imagined blindness to be. As he talked to the characters, he realized that this was not the case and so it was employed to a different end.

The Q & A was interesting as a whole. The filmmakers described how radically the film had changed during production. The original focus was going to be on kids playing a sport for blind people, with little character asides throughout. It sounded very much like Murderball. However, they felt the mechanics would take too long to explain, and the team did not do very well, so they shifted the focus to the day-to-day lives of the characters. The fact that they abandoned their main framing device helps explain why the film feels rather amorphous. They try to use the school year at the Texas School for the Blind as a new framing device, but it does not give the film a strong trajectory. Still, the characters and their tribulations were interesting and relatable enough to keep me engaged, and the film proves to be a very humanistic and sensitive portrait of several disabled youth.

This does a good job of pulling out some nice moments from the film, but the title card: “How do you see yourself, when you can’t see at all?” is HORRIBLE.

Seriously, whose idea was that?