Everything Near Becomes Distant

My friend Xiaoxin contracted eye disease. He gradually lost his eyesight from that point on. By 2015, he had gone completely blind. He told me that complete black scared him. I felt my friend was on his way to somewhere.

The story of a journey, from one twilight to another. Children are playing in a yard. From the way they move, we finally realise that they are bereft of sight. The words of the blind describe perceptions that are heightened (the volume of things) or totally absent (“no black: a bottomless crater”). A voice answers them, the voice of Yunyi Zhu, who experienced in the isolation imposed by Covid a world lacking certain dimensions: a visible and audible exterior but barred to touch; tactile fruits, but with no taste or smell. This experience changes the course of the film, from an inquiry into poetry, from testimony to scansion – the through-line being the story of another twilight: the blindness creeping up on a friend. The filmmaker assembles images where some of the information they normally contain has been amputated: a blurred globe on which words are illegible, a drum without its sound, trees filmed against the light without their colours. He accumulates paradoxes, such as a friendship that survives despite the distance separating France and China. Words, spoken, written, printed in Latin script or in braille, serve as passages between the dimensions. Their capacity to transmute creates a shared space. While the opening twilight showed an unstable, gradually disintegrating form, the film closes on the brutal disappearance of the sun. In the blink of a cut, the reddish glow gives way to the plenitude of blueness, but this still resonates with the vibration of a silent instrument.

Olivia Cooper-Hadjian