In a sentenceA blind man talks for 75 minutes about what he sees, and we came out blinking
Hugues de Montalembert, appearing as himself, lost his sight, and Black Sun is his account of what came after, told entirely in his own voice. There is no interviewer and no one else speaks. Over his words director Gary Tarn, who also wrote the music, lays footage of streets, crowds, water and light, often blurred or pushed until the shapes come loose from the things they belong to. De Montalembert describes the loss itself, the first weeks of not seeing, and the discovery that his mind went on making pictures without any help from his eyes. What he wants is to go on living as the man he was. What stands in the way is everyone around him, who assume he cannot.
Gary Tarn’s short, patient documentary hands the whole film to one voice, and Hugues de Montalembert’s is worth it. The pictures laid over his words are sometimes exactly right and sometimes merely pretty, but the man himself never wastes a sentence.
Hugues de Montalembert lost his sight, and Gary Tarn’s Black Sun is his account of what came after, told in his own voice and running 75 minutes, over images he will never see. How it happened, he tells us himself, early and plainly, and we will leave the telling to him. It is a small film and a good one, and it is better than that description makes it sound.
There is no interviewer and no one else speaks. De Montalembert’s voice, French, unhurried, slightly amused by itself, is the only line the film has to hold on to, and Tarn trusts it completely. Over it he lays footage of cities and water and faces that has been treated until it stops being record and becomes something closer to paint: a crowd gone soft at the edges, a neon sign that has slipped its outline, light on a river turned into bars of colour. Some of this is doing the obvious job of showing us what a damaged eye might see. More of it is doing something harder, which is to make a sighted audience notice that it is looking.
What moved us, more than we expected, was not his account of how he was blinded. De Montalembert gives that plainly, with no music and no raised voice, and the plainness is the point. It was a quieter passage soon after, in which he explains that in the first weeks his mind simply carried on producing images, and that he had to decide whether to call them memory or sight. He says it as a fact, not a comfort, and we found we had stopped taking notes. It is the stillness of the delivery that does it. He has clearly told this story before and has worn the self-pity off it.
Tarn also wrote the music, and it is spare and patient and mostly knows when to stop. For long stretches there is only the voice and a low held tone under it, and the film is at its best there. When the music does build, it builds slowly and pulls back before it tells us what to feel. That restraint matters in a film that could so easily have become a greetings card about courage.
It is not all that disciplined. The pictures and the words drift apart in places, and when they do the footage starts to look like something playing on a screen in a hotel lobby: handsome, slow, meaning nothing in particular. Once or twice Tarn illustrates too neatly, cutting to a pair of eyes just as his subject mentions eyes, and the film is poorer for the nudge. The later passages, which follow de Montalembert as he rebuilds a life, are the thinnest, because the voice is doing more and the images have less to answer with. At 75 minutes none of this lasts long. It is still there.
The film sits in the tradition of the essay documentary, where a single voice and a set of loosely connected images are asked to carry an argument between them, and the nearest comparison is Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), another film about losing sight that refused to show its audience very much. Jarman put a single colour on screen for the whole running time. Tarn gives us far more to look at, and the question his film keeps asking is whether that generosity is a kindness to us or a distraction from him. Mostly it is the first.
It is a short evening and a worthwhile one. Watch it with the lights off and the phone in another room, because it is a film about attention and it will not survive being half-watched. Seventy-five minutes, one voice, and no one in it asks to be admired.
Parkinson praises the documentary as a poetic, moving account of resilience. He singles out Tarn’s evocative use of light, colour and shape to challenge how we perceive reality.
Read the full review →Felperin finds the documentary compelling and says its concise running time is sustained by the story and imagery. She particularly praises de Montalembert’s account of rebuilding his life and Tarn’s painterly footage and soundtrack.
Read the full review →The available page identifies this as a review but does not reveal the critic’s verdict. It describes the film’s subject, Hugues de Montalembert’s experience of being blinded, without exposing what the critic singles out for praise or complaint.
Read the full review →
Blue · not on Fi1m yetDerek Jarman loses his sight on camera and refuses to show you anything but a colour.
Notes on Blindness · not on Fi1m yetA theologian’s audio diary of going blind, acted to his own recordings.
Sans SoleilChris Marker’s letters from nowhere, the essay film at its most wandering and alert.
The Gleaners and IAgnès Varda with a small camera, finding a whole philosophy in people picking up leftovers.
Baraka · not on Fi1m yetNo words at all, just the planet filmed slowly; the pictures carry everything.
