Six blind youths gain insight on a mountaintop.
There are some blind people whose blindness is a result not of damage***image2*** to their eyes, but of damage wrought to their visual cortexes-the part of their brains primarily responsible for processing visual stimulus. Cognitive scientists have discovered a fascinating phenomenon with such patients: They deny being aware of what they are directed to gaze at-take a pile of marbles, for example. "I'm blind, you bastard," the patient might reply to the doctor who asks, "Do you see the marbles?" But when forced to perform a task that depends on the sight they deny having-guessing how many marbles are in the pile-the patients do remarkably well. Cognitive scientists call this phenomenon "blindsight."
The kids in the new documentary
Blindsight
are not blind in this way-they all have the more common forms of blindness that results from conditions of the eye. But the title is a brilliantly selected metaphor. For these blind Tibetan youth-who were told all their lives that they were ***image1***useless- have, at the film's outset, a great dissociation between what they believe they can accomplish and what they actually can. Just like in the cognitive scientist's experiment, the only way for the kids to find what they are capable of is for them to try something that seems impossible.
The seemingly insurmountable task in
Blindsight
is to summit the Lhakpa-Ri peak of Mount Everest. The six kids who attempt the summit are students at blind humanitarian Sabriye Tenberken's Center for the Blind in Lhasa, Tibet. Led by Tenberken, Erik Weihenmayer-the first blind climber to summit Everest-and several other experienced climbers, the kids trek steadily up into the "death zone."
This sounds like the typical inspirational documentary about the "triumph of the human spirit" and in many ways it is. But
Blindsight
, which is directed by Lucy Walker (
The Devil's Playground
), affords a more nuanced exploration of what constitutes success. (Admittedly, other "triumph of the human spirit" docs-take last year's King of Kong for instance-have done that too.) It also provides some lucid insights into the blind experience, incredible mountain vistas and ethnographic glimpses of Tibetan culture.
There is one grating aspect of Tibetan culture found in
Blindsight
-cultural relativism be damned-that is difficult to ignore: the superstitious claim (much like the idiotic teachings of
The Secret
) that a person's misfortune is deserved because something like blindness is written into one's karma from evil deeds done in a past life. The kids in
Blindsight
don't deserve to carry guilt about their blindness; they do deserve to show what they can do. And this they do.
