Blindness - First 5 Minutes
There’s a lot of buzz about this movie these days. We just wrote about the “Blindness” movie problems.
But now take a look at first five minutes of “Blindness” directed by Fernando Meirelles and starring Julianne Moore, Gael Garcia Bernal and Mark Ruffalo.
“Blindness” Is Outrageous And Offensive / Fernando Meirelles About His Movie
“Usually when I make a film, I can get started by going to Google, doing research,” Fernando Meirelles said about his new movie “Blindness,” opening October 3, 2008.
“But this is a film based on nothing. 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.”
“In most films everything is based on the eyes. 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?”
So, his solution, he said, was: “I put the audience in this blind world, to try to deconstruct the image, if I can say that. Sometimes the image is washed out, sometimes it’s out of focus, sometimes the framing is totally wrong, deliberately 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. Very scary. But “Blindness” is not scary in a horror-movie way, this isn’t science fiction, really. It’s a metaphor.”
His movie is “not a story like that, about a disease and somebody looking for a cure. 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.”
Blindness International Trailer
New international trailer for the upcoming “Blindness,” - apocalyptic nightmare adapted from the 1995 novel by Nobel laureate José Saramago and directed by Fernando Meirelles - has been released, showing some never-before-seen scenes from the movie.
Julianne Moore in "Blindness"
In an unnamed city of the near future, a terrifying epidemic of “white blindness” - the sufferers seeing only milky white light - spreads like wildfire. The infection’s ground zero is a Japanese businessman (Yusuke Iseya) who staggers sightlessly from his luxury automobile which is promptly stolen by an opportunist thief who also goes blind.
The man finds himself in the offices of an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who is also treating a high-class prostitute (Alice Braga) in the business of servicing clients in a hotel, with the help of a discreet barman (Gael García Bernal). All go blind and from this nexus, the disease spreads.
”Blindness” New Trailer and Character Posters
‘‘Blindness”, adapted from the 1995 novel by Nobel laureate José Saramago, is Fernando Meirelles‘ third film, after his heralded 2002 thriller “City of God” and 2005’s “The Constant Gardener“.”Blindness” movie, an apocalyptic nightmare, urban collapse, opened Cannes Film Festival 2008 and also was in Competition.
Although Saramago’s book was published more then 10 years ago, he declined to sell rights to the book for years. He resisted because it’s a violent book about social degradation and rape. Saramago 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.
In an unnamed city of the near future, a terrifying epidemic of “white blindness”, the sufferers seeing only milky white light, spreads like wildfire.
As the shuffling inmates become used to their blindness, they experience a crisis, being and being perceived: they see no one and no one sees them. Do they exist? Did they exist before? Other inmates, however, see a new equality or democracy in blindness: young and old, ugly and beautiful, all are levelled.
And all the time Julianne Moore, exiled from the community of suffering, must endure a vision of horror from which everyone else is spared. She has characteristically strong performance as a lone figure who retains her eyesight, bearing sad but heroic witness to the horrors around her.
Director: Fernando Meirelles
Writer: Don McKellar
Starring: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal, Danny Glover, Alice Braga, Yusuke Iseya and Yoshino Kimura.
Release: September 19, 2008
watch the trailer after the jump
‘Blindness’ - Mixed Reviews
”Blindness may well be the bleakest curtain raiser in the history of the festival, a nightmarish parable of the apocalypse, directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles and just as impressive in its way as his career-making City of God.”
“Blindness is a drum-tight drama, with superb, hallucinatory images of urban collapse. It has a real coil of horror at its centre, yet lightened with finely judged touches of gentleness and even humour. It reminded me of George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids and Peter Shaffer’s absurdist stage-play Black Comedy, showing humanity groping in the darkness. This is bold and masterly filmmaking from Meirelles: popular entertainment with challenging ideas.” - The Guardian
“Blindness feels like a curious mix of highbrow literary aspirations and lowbrow genre fiction,” “It’d be easy to dismiss Blindness as Dawn of the Dead for NPR listeners or Outbreak for grad students…. But while Blindness can be faulted for many things, it also has to be respected for its ambition, craft, and effort; Blindness shows us a world of wide-eyed sightlessness, and it does so through a fierce vision that only occasionally loses focus.” - Cinematical
Variety finds it “an intermittently harrowing but diluted take on José Saramago’s shattering novel. Despite a characteristically strong performance by Julianne Moore as a lone figure who retains her eyesight, bearing sad but heroic witness to the horrors around her, Fernando Meirelles’ slickly crafted drama rarely achieves the visceral force, tragic scope and human resonance of Saramago’s prose.”
‘Blindness’ Premiere - Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes film festival opens tonight with ‘Blindness‘, an apocalyptic nightmare adapted from the 1995 novel by Nobel laureate José Saramago and directed by Fernando Meirelles. The film is superbly photographed by Cesar Charlone.
In an unnamed city of the near future, a terrifying epidemic of “white blindness” - the sufferers seeing only milky white light - spreads like wildfire. The infection’s ground zero is a Japanese businessman (Yusuke Iseya) who staggers sightlessly from his luxury automobile which is promptly stolen by an opportunist thief who also goes blind.
The man finds himself in the offices of an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who is also treating a high-class prostitute (Alice Braga) in the business of servicing clients in a hotel, with the help of a discreet barman (Gael García Bernal). All go blind and from this nexus, the disease spreads.
The city of the blind opens its inhabitants’ eyes to their former civilisation’s brutality and indifference. What is fascinating to see is how the blind prisoners are admitted to the quarantine camp in the order in which they made fleeting contact in the preceding narrative: a pharmacy clerk, a cop, a hotel maid, all connected via the fleeting and heedless contact of the modern, uncaring city, and now joined in a chain of terrible significance.
As the shuffling inmates become used to their blindness, they experience a crisis, being and being perceived: they see no one and no one sees them. Do they exist? Did they exist before? Other inmates, however, see a new equality or democracy in blindness: young and old, ugly and beautiful, all are levelled.
And all the time Julianne Moore, exiled from the community of suffering, must endure a vision of horror from which everyone else is spared.
‘Blindness’ starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, Gael Garcia Bernal, Yusuke Iseya, Yoshino Kimura and Alice Braga.
More photos at FF Cannes Film Festival gallery HERE
Watch the third clip from ‘Blindness’ after jump Read the rest of this entry
‘Blindness’ - New Clip
‘Blindness’ is 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 Cannes Film Festival starting Wednesday.
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.
