Loss of vision without insight – the globalized city in Ensaio sobre a Cegueira/Blindness (2008) by Fernando Meirelles

Abstract

Blindness (2008) by Fernando Meirelles used its mode of production as a motive to situate its story in urban spaces that results in fact from an assembled city. Filming Blindness took place in Toronto, São Paulo, Osaka and Montevideo. The resulting assembled globalized city blurs the insight in Saramago into the limits of individuality by offering a homogeneous worldview that levels socio-economic differences, especially between the north and the south. Losing (clear) sight is in the original text in fact a metaphor for the inability of coping with society’s inhumanity in these particular sites. The aim of this article is to study the film by using the concepts of e-motion and indisciplinarity to reveal that Blindness is nothing more than a conventional approach towards a more complex idea on the loss of sight. By marketing it for a globalized audience, the mimics blindness and thus elimenates Saramago’s lucidity regarding the loss of sight of an entire civilization.