Blindness (Vintage classics)

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Claraboya, novela inédita de Saramago, verá la luz". El País. 3 October 2011 . Retrieved 14 October 2011. Note: This essay is based on the podcast, PICT Voices #22: Burghard Baltrusch, “ From Blindness to Seeing with José Saramago,” hosted by Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte, 25 January 2021 [6 October 2022]. The English has been revised by David Selim Sayers. a b c Evans, Julian (28 December 2002). "The militant magician". The Guardian . Retrieved 28 December 2002. Saramago was born in 1922 into a peasant family in Azinhaga, a village in Ribatejo, northeast of Lisbon. When he was two, they moved to the capital, where his father José, an artilleryman in the first world war, found a job as a traffic policeman and his mother worked as a domestic cleaner. After the 1926 coup d'etat overthrew the republic, António de Salazar rose to power with his fascist militias and PIDE secret police. Small Memories, Saramago's memoir which is published in Britain next year, describes his family's sordid living conditions in Lisbon and hints at a coercive submission within the household to the fascist slogan of "God, Fatherland, Family". Chang, Justin (2008-05-14). "Blindness". Variety. Reed Business Information . Retrieved 2008-05-20.

This, on the face of it, is an odd description of Blindness, for in that book it is powerless people who insult human dignity - ordinary people, terrified at finding themselves and everyone else blind, everything out of control. Some behave with stupid, selfish brutality, sauve qui peut. The group of men who seize power in an asylum and use and abuse the weaker inmates have indeed abandoned self-respect and human decency: they are a microcosm of the corruption of power. But the truly powerful of our world don't even appear in Blindness. Seeing is all about them: the perverters of reason, the universal liars. It is about government gone wrong.

There is, of course, a lot of scepticism and dystopian pessimism in Saramago’s work. In part, this has to do with a certain melancholy aspect of the Portuguese mentality. But it is also related to the fact that Saramago became a writer in a very difficult, even hostile, context: he began writing under a fascist regime; had no academic education; didn’t belong to the cultural, bourgeois elite; and found it difficult at times to make a living. All this surely contributed to his increasingly pessimistic character. Saramago's English language translator, Margaret Jull Costa, paid tribute to his "wonderful imagination," calling him "the greatest contemporary Portuguese writer". [23] Saramago continued his writing until his death. His most recent publication, Claraboia, was published posthumously in 2011. Saramago had suffered from pneumonia a year before his death. Having been thought to have made a full recovery, he had been scheduled to attend the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August 2010. [23] a b Eberstadt, Fernanda (18 June 2010). "José Saramago, Nobel Prize-Winning Writer, Dies". The New York Times . Retrieved 18 June 2010. In 1986 Saramago met a Spanish intellectual and journalist, Pilar del Río, 27 years his junior, and he promptly ended his relationship with Isabel Nóbrega, his partner since 1968. [16] They married in 1988 and remained together until his death in June 2010. Del Río is the official translator of Saramago's books into Spanish. In 1998 Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature with the prize motivation: "who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality." [21]

Daniel Zettel as an onlooker. Zettel has previously acted in many Meirelles films, including the 2002 film City of God. When critics talk of “allegory” in Saramago’s writing, this is often a simplification, and, in my opinion, indicates an extended misuse of the term. Saramago didn’t create allegories in the sense of rhetorical tropes or of allegoresis in the theological sense. We can, of course, use the word in the restrictive context of literary studies, where allegoresis is simply a hermeneutical technique. But in the case of Saramago, I prefer to think of the term along the lines proposed by Walter Benjamin. a b c "Portuguese Nobel laureate Saramago's funeral held". Xinhua News Agency. 21 June 2010. Archived from the original on 23 June 2010 . Retrieved 21 June 2010. Kilday, Gregg (2006-11-01). " 'Blindness' gains Focus for int'l sales". The Hollywood Reporter. The Nielsen Company. Archived from the original on 2007-09-30 . Retrieved 2007-06-18.An easier way to establish context for Blindness would be to analyze Saramago’s life as well as the historical events surrounding it. On November 16, 1992, José Saramago was born in Azinhaga, Portugal in the Ribatejo province to a poor farming family. His father had served in the French military during World War I, and he decided to pursue a career in law enforcement in Lisbon, Portugal’s capital. Their way of living had greatly improved because of his new job, but they remained poor regardless of a new home. Saramago’s parents sent him to grammar school, though, they could not afford the tuition long enough for him to finish his studies. As a result, Saramago attended a technical school to become a mechanic while studying literature during his free time. Before marrying his first wife Ilda Reis in 1944, he began working as an administrative civil servant for the Social Welfare Service. Three years later he published his first book, The Land of Sin, though his initial literary endeavors were not very successful. He wrote more novels, but he failed to publish his projects. Saramago describes his early attempts at writing in his autobiography, “The matter was settled when I abandoned the project[s]: it was becoming quite clear to me that I had nothing worthwhile to say… For 19 years, I was absent from the Portuguese literary scene, where few people can have noticed my absence” (Saramago, “Autobiography”). Following acclaimed novels such as The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis and The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Saramago was hailed by literary critics for his complex yet elegant style, his broad range of references and his wit. [14] A man with a handgun appoints himself "king" of his ward, and takes control of the food deliveries, first demanding the other wards' valuables, and then for the women to have sex with their men. In an effort to obtain necessities, several women reluctantly submit to being raped. One of the women is killed by her assailant, and the doctor's wife retaliates, killing the "king" with a pair of scissors. Independently, other raped women sneak to the dead king's ward and set it on fire, which rapidly engulfs the building, with many inmates dying in the ensuing chaos. The survivors who escape the building discover that the guards have abandoned their posts, and they venture out into the city. Saramago joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969 and remained a member until the end of his life. [17] He was a self-confessed pessimist. [18] His views aroused considerable controversy in Portugal, especially after the publication of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. [19] Members of the country's Catholic community were outraged by Saramago's representation of Jesus and particularly God as fallible, even cruel human beings. Portugal's conservative government, led by then-prime minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva, did not allow Saramago's work to compete for the Aristeion Prize, [9] arguing that it offended the Catholic community. As a result, Saramago and his wife moved to Lanzarote, an island in the Canaries. [20]

Saramago was a member of the Communist Party of Portugal, [10] and in his late years defined himself as a proponent of libertarian communism. [7] He ran in the 1989 Lisbon local election as part of the "Coalition For Lisbon," and was elected alderman presiding officer of the Municipal Assembly of Lisbon. [30] Saramago was also a candidate of the Democratic Unity Coalition in all elections of the European Parliament from 1989 to 2009, though he ran for positions of which it was thought he had no possibility of winning. [30] He was a critic of European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies. [9]

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During the 2006 Lebanon War, Saramago joined Tariq Ali, John Berger, Noam Chomsky, and others in condemning what they characterized as "a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation". [36]

The cast and crew included 700 extras who had to be trained to simulate blindness. Actor Christian Duurvoort from Meirelles' City of God led a series of workshops to coach the cast members. Duurvoort had researched the mannerisms of blind people to understand how they perceive the world and how they make their way through space. Duurvoort not only taught the extras mannerisms, but also to convey the emotional and psychological states of blind people. [9] One technique was reacting to others as a blind person, whose reactions are usually different from those of a sighted person. Meirelles described, "When you're talking to someone, you see a reaction. When you're blind, the response is much flatter. What's the point [in reacting]?" [23] Filmmaking style [ edit ] Director Fernando Meirelles alludes to Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1568 painting The Parable of the Blind in the film Blindness. Located in an unspecified city and country, the novel tells the story of a strange mass epidemic of blindness and the social breakdown that follows in its wake. Saramago focuses on the misfortunes of a small group of unnamed characters who are the first to go blind, including an ophthalmologist, some of his patients, and others thrown together by chance. Only the doctor’s wife is inexplicably immune.Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter described Blindness as "provocative but predictable cinema", startling but failing to surprise. Honeycutt criticized the film's two viewpoints: Julianne Moore's character, the only one who can see, is slow to act against atrocities, and the behavior of Danny Glover's character comes off as "slightly pompous". Honeycutt explained, "This philosophical coolness is what most undermines the emotional response to Meirelles' film. His fictional calculations are all so precise and a tone of deadly seriousness swamps the grim action." [38] Justin Chang of Variety described the film: " Blindness emerges onscreen both overdressed and undermotivated, scrupulously hitting the novel's beats yet barely approximating, so to speak, its vision." Chang thought that Julianne Moore gave a strong performance but did not feel that the film captured the impact of Saramago's novel. [39] Roger Ebert called Blindness "one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I've ever seen." [40] A. O. Scott of The New York Times stated that, although it "is not a great film, ... it is, nonetheless, full of examples of what good filmmaking looks like." [41] Tokyo International Film Festival | "BLINDNESS" Press Conference with Director Fernando Meirelles, Actresses Julian Moore, Yoshino Kimura and more!!". A sequel titled Seeing was published in 2004. Blindness was adapted into a film of the same name in 2008.