Title: Janela da Alma
Genre: Documentary
Duration: 73 minutes
Year: 2001
Country: Brazil
Directors: João Jardim and Walter Carvalho
Scripts: João Jardim and Walter Carvalho
Allocation: Evgen Bavcar, Raimunda da Conceiçao Filha, Felipe, Gabriel, Arnaldo Godoy, Walter Lima Jr., Hermeto Paschoal, João Ubaldo Ribeiro, Oliver Sacks, Veronica de Jesus Santos, José Saramago, Hanna Schygulla, Marieta Severo, Agnes Varda, Wim Wenders
Music: José Miguel Wisnik
Photography: Walter Carvalho
Production: Claudia Braga, Bia Castro, João Jardim, Flavio R. Tambellini, Mayanna von Ledebur
Assembly: Karen Harley and João Jardim
Sound: Heron Alencar, Tom Paul y Waldir Xavier
Here was the chicken before the egg ... The Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles surprised just a year ago by adapted to the big screen Essay about blindness by Jose Saramago. It was a raw and uncompromising recreation of Plato's cave, transferred to our society, showing that what we are is not determined by what we see; but rather the reverse.What would everything be like if we could not see anything? Saramago set a pattern in his novel; but two co-workers of Meirelles, João Jardim (Fitter) and Walter Carvalho (Photographer), asked themselves this same question seven years before filming Blindness and with the precise intention of giving an answer, or at least, rate a reflection.
Both filmmakers were released as directors with this documentary which is nothing more than a lesson about the art of seeing. Jardín and Carvalho, both suffering from myopia, sought the help of totally blind characters, like the photographer (oddly enough) Evgen Bavcar and poet and musician Hermeto Paschoal, with myopic illustrious like the English neurologist Oliver Sacks, the German filmmaker Wim Wenders and the same Nobel Prize for Literature José Saramago.
Janela da Alma (the window of the soul) refers to the eyes, and the documentary crumbles with fantastic details how the blind see ... Just as it sounds. Like a little light or total darkness, dancing in the eyes of people who everybody would consider ill adaptive, recreating a space in which peace and joy are frequent visitors.
As difficult as it sounds, the blind look and see aspects that our perfect eyes never pay attention to. In their minds there is colour, pictures recalled like a collection of photos or movies, there are dreams, emotions, and intuition of presences.
Some eyes are windows
The look is always a limit, the protagonists reflect; the words with which we communicate are blind ... With a very clever use of black and white, the sounds applied to darkness and the blur of the camera, Jardim Carvalho puts us in the skin of those who are blind and can barely see, possessed of special wisdom. Not only intellectuals, but also artists, people from the street, they explain that shame is a form of fear that has nothing to do with seeing, but to be seen. We all see different but we think that we see equally, hence we live confronted with an ongoing dispute on viewpoints. It's like Babel, but in light and colour.
Wenders reflects on the framework that we all make in own particular movie of what we see, leaving aside elements present in the field of view to focus only on what interests us.
Bavcar, the blind photographer, photographs naked women he does not see, but he imagines. "It's the emotion," he explains, "that reveals my images; even more than light”.
In a poetic way, the documentary begins with a small fire sparkling in the darkness of the night and ends with a newborn that begins to open his eyes without "seeing" or understand anything that his retina captures... We are born and die blind; what we see in between could well be a dream. Sacks, Wenders, Saramago make it abundantly clear that there is no truth or reality that can be translated into an image. "We look at what others make us see; we do not discover anything”, acknowledges the German filmmaker. The neurologist individualises all action of seeing, "only you see what you see", and the Noble reclaims Plato's cave, where everything we take for reality is really just a shadow of the real thing.
Some eyes are windows, others are mirrors; they all have life.
