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MARK RUFFALO and Julianne Moore are traipsing through a rubbish-strewn urban wasteland, scavenging for salvation. All around them, dozens of pitiful humans dressed in filthy, mismatched clothes grope their way past wrecked cars and graffiti-splattered highway ramps, like dancers in some grotesque ballet of the damned.

It is not a pretty sight, but it is impossible to avert your eyes - which is exactly the point. The director, Fernando Meirelles, and his camera crew are gearing up to shoot another take of Blindness, a feature film based on the harrowing 1995 parable about an unnamed city stricken with a plague of sightlessness, by the Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago. Like nearly everyone in the film, Ruffalo’s character, an ophthalmologist known simply as “the doctor”, is afflicted with a terrifying malady in which the eyes appear normal but are coated with a milky whiteness that blocks out vision.

The only person immune is Moore’s character, the doctor’s heroic, steadfast wife. As the story gathers speed, she must guide her husband and a small group of fellow sufferers (played by Danny Glover, Alice Braga and others) through a perilous obstacle course, in a society where order has collapsed and humans live like animals.

Critics heralded Saramago’s novel as a brutal but compelling allegory of the 20th century’s house of horrors: the Holocaust, the stigmatisation of AIDS patients, the ominous encroachment of Big Brother. First published amid the fin de siecle fixation on end-times scenarios, it anticipated pop culture’s obsession with apocalyptic story lines: I Am Legend, 28 Weeks Later, the Christian/sci-fi Left Behind books, Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road.

And if this film’s setting visually echoes post-Katrina New Orleans or a sub-Saharan refugee camp, that reflects the director’s view that the message of Blindness is more timely every day.

“Because now, especially with the environment, we’re really destroying the planet, but we keep going, keep selling, keep burning. It’s like we can’t see,” says Meirelles, whose 2002 international breakout hit City Of God, about Brazilian youth gangs, stamped him as a skilled action auteur with a social conscience.

Filming of the combined Japanese, Canadian and Brazilian co-production wrapped up last year in the chaotic Brazilian mega-city of Sao Paulo. The film will open this year’s Cannes Film Festival before its US release in August.

Originally published in Portuguese as Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (Essay About Blindness), Saramago’s international best seller might have been titled Eyes Wide Shut. In book and film, blindness is not only a physical condition but a metaphor for the darker side of human nature: prejudice, selfishness, violence and wilful indifference.

Blindness is about how we, as humans, look but do not always see. It is about how quickly our seemingly stable lives, even in so-called developed nations, can spiral into anarchy and barbarism.

“Sometimes we read about tribal wars in some countries in Africa and how terrible they are, and how aggressive, and how violent. And we’re exactly the same,” says Meirelles, who has made something of a specialty of translating Third World moral quandaries into gripping dramatic narratives with which First World audiences identify.

For the cast of roughly 700 extras, Blindness was frightening, draining and exhilarating. They were trained to act “blind” by Christian Duurvoort, an actor who coached his colleagues. Just as important as understanding the physical mechanics of being blind, Duurvoort says, was helping the actors deal with “the emotional state, the psychological state, being vulnerable”.

Meirelles wanted the extras to seem like traumatised people, not B-grade movie zombies. Practically everyone working on the film donned a blindfold at some point, even the producers and the director. In one exercise, the main actors were blindfolded and told to follow the sound of a bell. Ruffalo had particular trouble and kept wandering around getting lost. During shooting, he wore a thick make-up layer to make him appear older and special contact lenses that rendered him blind.

“At first it’s terrifying and then it’s frustrating and then it gets quiet,” says Ruffalo. “We’re tormented by our eyesight. A beautiful girl walks by; cars; clothes; terrible things on television. You don’t know this until you go blind … As an actor I suddenly felt free.”

For the characters trapped in the Hobbesian purgatory of Blindness, the seeing are as cursed as the sight-impaired.

Hundreds of people, including the doctor and his wife, are rounded up and placed in quarantine, where they are menaced by a gang of thugs led by a very unsavory Gael Garcia Bernal.

The movie does not shy from depicting the degrading conditions, although it will spare audiences some of the novel’s more excruciating details, such as people slipping on excrement.

Rape and revenge killing come into play. But so do valour, courage and small, redemptive acts of kindness. Through their blindness, the principal characters discover (or rediscover) their ability to empathise with others. “It’s at times the very best we can be, and also the ugliest and basest and worst that mankind has toward one another,” Ruffalo says.

Los Angeles Times

The 61st Cannes Film Festival opens on May 14.

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Meirelles’s latest offering was among a handful of notable absentees when the bulk of the competition and out-of-competition lineup was unveiled earlier this week. Blindness and Agnes Varda’s autobiographical documentary Les Plages d’Agnes are both ready and had been widely expected to secure berths in the festival.

Now it seems that Meirelles’ tale of a bizarre blindness pandemic may figure more prominently than had originally been predicted. Sources in the industry believe the film will open proceedings on the Croisette and take its place alongside Steven Soderbergh’s Che double feature, Clint Eastwood’s The Changeling and Wim Wenders’ The Palermo Shooting.

Meirelles’ sprawling Rio crime drama City of God screened at Cannes in 2002 and he followed that up three years later with his first English-language film The Constant Gardener.

Blindness stars Julianne Moore as the only person who is not affected by a blindness pandemic that afflicts an entire town. Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal, Danny Glover and Sandra Oh also star.

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But members of the under-30 set, if they know anything at all about the convention and the subsequent trial of Abbie Hoffman and his fellow protesters in the so-called Chicago Seven, probably write it all off as another grainy slice of boomer nostalgia. The hybrid animated documentary Chicago 10, which opens Friday in select cities, reheats the controversial subject to serve it up to a younger audience.

Writer-director Brett Morgen, the Oscar-nominated creator of On the Ropes and The Kid Stays in the Picture, translates the events in Chicago into a style he hopes today’s college students will grok.

Chicago 10 mashes together rotoscope animation, vivid and sometimes shocking archival footage, transcripts from the legendary trial of culture jammer Hoffman and his Youth International Party, or Yippie, pals, and music by the Beastie Boys and Eminem. Morgen calls his style “mythomentary,” and Chicago 10 is an inventive, entertaining and stirring portrait of the ’60s protest movement at its peak.

In a phone interview, Morgen disses documentarian Ken Burns, relays the challenges of reaching the YouTube generation and explains why the phrase “animated documentary” is no longer an oxymoron. Chicago 10 features voice work by Hank Azaria, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo, Roy Scheider (who passed away this month), Liev Schreiber and Jeffrey Wright.

Wired: To a 22-year-old, the events in Chicago probably seem like ancient history. But with the punk soundtrack and the animation, you obviously wanted to get this story to a new generation.

Brett Morgen: That’s the challenge. How do you present a fresh take on one of the most mythologized and written-about periods in American history? My approach was to try and smash all of the conventions of historical documentary filmmaking. Replace the music of the time with a more contemporary soundtrack. Do away with talking-head interviews with aging boomers and present a film that would be perceived as radical as the culture that I was trying to document.

Wired: But why?

Morgen: This is a movie about the rebellious spirit that’s inherent in youth culture. I took the iconography of the ’60s and transplanted it into a language that’s relevant today. I think if Abbie and the others were around today they’d be punks. Would they be listening to Buffalo Springfield or Rage Against the Machine? They’d be listening to Rage Against the Machine.

At the time I began thinking about the film, we were embarking on a war, and there was very few protests, at least few that were covered by the media. By the time we started developing the film, there was a vacuum in terms of inspiring leadership, of people who knew how to mobilize the anti-war movement. So it was like, “Let’s bring Abbie back. But we’ll bring him back as a punk-type character.”

Wired: What do you want audiences to take away from the film?

Morgen: I was talking to some college kids today and what I don’t want them to take away is a sense of how passionate the Yippies were and how complacent college kids are today. Not everything the Yippies did would resonate today, but there are certain lessons we can extract from that period. One is the sense of fun, the sense of comedy and the kind of theater they brought to the anti-war movement. What they did feels fresh and contemporary. So where did that energy go?

This is an incredibly important moment in American history. For whatever reasons, (Chicago 10’s slice of history is) a story that most Americans under the age of 45 are unfamiliar with. So there’s a need to reintroduce that story into our culture. That alone is enough for me to tell that story.

Wired: Isn’t that the kind of thing Ken Burns does, tell the essential American stories? I think of you as more of an innovator.

Morgen: Fuck that! I’d rather drown myself than see the (Ken Burns) version of this story. I mean, that kind of filmmaking serves its purpose, but I have no interest in it. Actually, a lot of what I’m trying to do is inspired by a lecture Ken Burns gave in 1987 or ‘88. He said, “History, going back to the dawn of man, has always been in the oral tradition, passed on from one generation to the next. Each generation puts its own spin on it, and so it becomes mythology or folklore.”

I wanted to return to that, to make history more animate. Somewhere along the line, Burns’ films have become stodgy and formulaic. But I take what he said as the root and inspiration for all of my documentary films right now. History presented as mythology…. The style is a reflection of the subject. So when the subject is (legendary movie producer and subject of The Kid Stays in the Picture) Bob Evans, the film stylistically becomes a reflection of who Bob is: glamorous, a bit kitschy, seductive. In Chicago 10, the style becomes revolutionary, it becomes anarchistic, in your face, a personification of Yippie, a celebration of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

Wired: What would the Yippies be doing right now? Probably more than sending out e-blasts, which is what a lot of the action from the left looks like these days.

Morgen: I think they would be operating virally. They’d be using film and video to get the message out. Abbie was on the cusp of that at the time. He clearly understood the power of the media, the whole movement understood the power of imagery, and the modes of communication, and the underground film circuit. I think Michael Moore has inherited the mantle from Abbie. He’s certainly not as sexy or charismatic, but he uses films as an entertainment vehicle to illustrate political ideals.

Wired: Honestly, what’s the chance you’ll get college kids to watch this?

Morgen: That’s a brutal question. We had overwhelmingly positive response from the distributors at Sundance, but they all had the same response, which was, “We think this film would play great with a young audience but don’t think we can reach them without spending millions and millions of dollars. Even then we don’t know if they’d show.” It was a reality check…. People have a lot of choices. The day my movie opens, they can see Semi-Pro. They probably are going to see Semi-Pro.

Wired: You started filmmaking in the vérité style — the fly-on-the-wall, purist method of making nonfiction films. Now you are making animated documentaries — the other end of the spectrum. What changed?

Morgen: I’ll tell you what changed. Technology changed. In 1991, you could count on one hand the ways you could tell a historical story. You could use archival footage and interviews and that was about it…. For Kid Stays in the Picture, we used photo animation to bring the past to life. Four years later, we used motion capture.

Anyone can do photo animation and After Effects on a laptop. From the time Robert Zemeckis did motion capture on Polar Express to the time we used it on Chicago 10, it became totally affordable. All of these new technologies first created through Hollywood eventually trickle down to us documentary filmmakers. Now, we can do Flash animation at a fraction of the cost of cel animation, and that opens up the doors to different ways of telling stories. It is an absolute aesthetic revolution that’s completely married to the technology.

Wired: After all of your success, you could probably direct fiction films. Why aren’t you?

Morgen: Documentary filmmaking, even at the scope I do it, is really DIY filmmaking. You don’t have to wait around for financing. I’ve been involved in fiction films and spent months writing, casting, [story]boarding, only to have the rug pulled out from underneath us. I like the fact that in documentary, there are stories I can tell that I can go out and do.

They require money but I can still research while we are securing the financing. I love that there are no rules. This is the Wild West. You can do a film with live action and animation and motion cap and archival footage. It’s as exciting now as I imagine the French New Wave was at its time.

Source: Wired10

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