Blindness

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This charming tale of an elephant given by the 16th-century Portuguese king João III to the Archduke of Austria has much to recommend it, despite its being a minor work from the late Nobel laureate.

He is immediately taken home and then to the doctor's office, where he infects all of the other patients and the doctor. Because he has been blind since birth, the Accountant is much more used to relying on his other senses, which gives him a major advantage over the other prisoners; he assumes control over Ward 3 and the food supplies for the community after the King is murdered. This ward extorts valuables from the other internees in exchange for food and, when the "goods" (such as bracelets and watches run out) they begin to rape the women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing.

Weaving together memories of his Portuguese childhood, Nobel Prize–winner Saramago (1922–2010) presents a lyrical portrait of the artist as a young man. The group spends the night there, but the next afternoon they move to the doctor and his wife’s apartment, which is exactly as they left it.

Once inside, she attempts to help the compound organize, but she is increasingly unable to hold back the animality of the compound. Proust may have seen death, or thought he did, at the foot of his bed, in the guise of a fat woman dressed in black, but death has no substance unless we push against the limits of the possible to gain access to a different level of seeing, to the inner scenario of the imagined where everything makes sense. In 1998, Saramago received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Blindness was one of his works noted by the committee when announcing the award. Meirelles ensures that the obviousness of the symbolism (in the global village the blind need guidance!To complicate things further, an armed clique acquires control and power, forcing the subjugated to pay for food in any way they can. The piece is claustrophobic by nature, but when wearing the required mask on a swelteringly hot day, breathing suddenly feels much harder. But he is also mocking the apparent authority of his own narrator, whom he emphasizes only provides a single and incomplete picture of events.

It's a beautiful moment, democracy in action, when millions were mobilised - including people who had never voted before - for a new candidate, and a black candidate at that. Despite being on a number of critics top 10 lists for 2008, the film received "mixed or average" reviews on Metacritic, which sampled 31 critic reviews and calculated a weighted average score of 45 out of 100. Tokyo International Film Festival | "BLINDNESS" Press Conference with Director Fernando Meirelles, Actresses Julian Moore, Yoshino Kimura and more!Ultimately, in the alternative model of narrative that Saramago both defends and exemplifies, people accept the limits of their knowledge and the ambiguity of their understanding so that they can narrate their experiences without having to completely define themselves.