This scene from the film Daredevil (2003) demonstrates how a blind protagonist's perspective might be conveyed through the use of camera work. Films portraying blindness often rely on camera work to help the audience sympathize with the protagonist's impairment and better understand his/her heightened reliance on other senses. Through the use of camera work, the director of the film Blind Fear (1989) also employs a very distinctive style to convey the experience of a blind protagonist. Tom Berry helps his audience understand both the physical and emotional ramifications of Erika's disability, encouraging us to sympathize with her as a victim of circumstances beyond her control. A number of movies focus on either the likely emotional ramifications of blindness or its effect on mobility and socialization, but very few manage to accomplish both. Blind Fear is one.

The Village (2004), by contrast, privileges the emotional experience of its blind protagonist, Ivy. The camera tends to capture Ivy from a distance or when she is with other people, focusing less on her experience with her disability and more on her relationships with others. To Noah, Lucius, and her sister, she embodies a best friend, lover, or comforter. Across a number of personal scenes, the camera focuses on the faces of the characters, capturing the emotions they feel. The emotions span the range of human emotion--anger, fright, and love--drawing the audience into the lives of the characters. The true origin of the film's suspense is not its fantastic subplot, but its compelling representation of various sympathetic characters. The audience is so drawn into the emotions that they do not want anything to harm the characters. The audience observes only the emotional aspects of Ivy from an outsider's point of view within the span of her daily routine and her relationships; they never view her world through her own eyes.

Camera work in the film The Eye (2002), by contrast, puts the audience physically in the place of the main female character, Mun. The audience follows Mun's journey with her new eyes throughout the movie, from blurred vision to seeing the ghosts of those who have died. Many sequences begin with an objective outsider's view at what Mun is looking at, the "normal" view. The camera angle then changes and the audience observes the same subject from Mun's perspective, as when she speaks to a ghost that only she can see. The frames switch quickly back and forth between Mun talking to the open air and Mun's point of view as she gazes on the face of the ghost. The camera work convinces the audience that she is not hallucinating, but merely reacting realistically to the horrific things she sees. Sometimes, the camera's focus blurs or moves around and sways, creating a sense of confused movement. The director relies on camera angles shot from an eye-level point of view, allowing the audience to feel as if they are looking directly from Mun's eyes into her world. These shots allow the audience to see exactly what Mun sees, causing them to sympathize with Mun physically.

In Blind Fear, the camerawork captures the interplay of emotions among all the characters. Extreme experiences turn a hide-and-seek game into an intense struggle, with the villains seeking to kill the female protagonist. The director portrays these acute emotions through close-up and medium shots that bring us close to the characters' faces and eyes, allowing the audience to understand the inner motivations of both sides in the conflict. The camera slowly and stealthily follows Ed and Bo throughout the house, matching their steps, like a predator tracking its prey. When the camera turns to Erika, the prey, it pauses on her, waiting to pounce. This creates fear in the audience--they can sense Erika's intense will to live by reading the map of her facial expressions and body language.

The audience sympathizes emotionally with Erika due to the camera angles the director chooses. The camera portrays the villains from the ground level, shifting upward to suggest their power relative to Erika. This low camera angle gives the villains a menacing quality, subtly creating a sense of helplessness in those audience members sympathetic to Erika, whose is constantly moving about crouched against the floor. We identify with Erika and her frightening situation the more fully because the camera often captures her at eye-level. Tom Berry effectively instills a sense of fear in the audience, making us feel victimized ourselves.

Erika relies heavily on her sense of sound to navigate her surroundings, a facility Berry ably conveys with camerawork. Camera shots quickly zero in on sounds that help Erika determine her location and that of her adversaries. In action scenes, Erika sometimes makes mistakes and runs into objects, such as a typewriter or books, that fall down and make loud noises. In such moments, the camera accentuates and focuses on the source of the sound, de-emphasizing Erika's movement, and the audience watches the object fall to the ground. The camera also focuses upon the feet and shoes of characters as they stalk around the house in the dark. The sound characters make as they step tells Erika their exact location in the house and where she must go in order to avoid them. Each shoe also has a different step, from Erika's soft Keds to Ed's heavy boots that make a clunking noise when he moves. The camera focuses specifically on the different shoes, so that by the movie's end the audience can distinguish the different characters based on the sound of their footwear. This puts us physically in Erika's shoes because Erika too can identify the different characters by the shoes they wear.

Susan Wendell once said, "Any deep understanding of a disability must include thinking about the ethical, psychological and epistemic issues of living with [that] disability" (Disability 261). Tom Berry recognized this need and allowed his audience not only to understand Erika's blindness, but to experience it themselves. Unlike many other contemporary movies, Blind Fear shows the audience what it might be like--both emotionally and physically--to deal with a profound vision impairment. Instead of allowing us to watch Erika from a distance, Berry encourages us to see life through her own blind eyes . . .


Works Referenced

Daredevil. Dir. Mark Steven Johnson. Perf. Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Colin Farrell, Michael Clark Duncan. DVD. 20th Century Fox, 2003.

The Village. Dir. M. Night Shyamalan. Perf. Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien
Brody, Sigourney Weaver. DVD. Touchstone Pictures, 2004.

The Eye. Dir. Oxide Pang, Danny Pang. Perf. Angelica Lee, Lawrence Chou, Chutcha
Rujinanon, Yut Lai So. DVD. Applause Pictures/Raintree Pictures, 2003.

Blind Fear. Dir. Tom Berry. Perf. Shelley Hack, Kim Coates, Jack Langedijk, Heidi von
Palleske. DVD. Lance Entertainment/Allegro Film, 1989.

Wendell, Susan. "Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability." The Disability Studies. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. United States of America: Routledge, 1997. 261.