WHEN ARTISTS’ VISION BECOMES CINEMA
In my last post, I wrote about artists whose eyesight shaped their work—Monet, Degas, O’Keeffe, Chuck Close, and others. Their paintings bear the trace of cataracts, macular degeneration, blindness, or simply a different way of seeing. But sometimes words and canvases aren’t enough—we want to see these struggles brought to life. Luckily, filmmakers have been fascinated with the same question: what happens when an artist’s vision changes?
Here are some films and documentaries that take us there:
Goya in Bordeaux (1999)
Carlos Saura’s lush, dreamlike portrait of Francisco de Goya in his final years. Nearly deaf and nearly blind, he paints the Black Paintings directly onto his walls—hallucinations that blur perception, politics, and nightmare.
Goya’s Ghosts (2006)
Milos Forman’s drama isn’t strictly about vision loss, but it captures the turmoil of Goya’s later years and the fevered imagination that came with age and illness.
At Eternity’s Gate (2018)
Julian Schnabel’s take on Van Gogh, with Willem Dafoe embodying the painter’s restless perception. The film leans into speculation about how Van Gogh saw—those vibrating yellows and pulsing halos—and asks us to inhabit his world.
The Inner Eye (1972)
Satyajit Ray’s moving short about Indian painter Benode Behari Mukherjee, who became blind after cataract surgery but never stopped creating. He describes blindness not as loss, but as “a new state of being.”
Vision Portraits (2019)
A recent documentary by Rodney Evans, following four creatives—a photographer, a dancer, a writer, and the filmmaker himself—as they navigate vision loss. It’s not about historical figures, but it’s one of the most honest films I’ve seen about adapting, redefining, and continuing to make art when the eyes no longer cooperate.
Notes on Blindness (2016)
Not about a painter, but unforgettable. Using the diaries of theologian John Hull, who went blind in middle age, the film reconstructs his perceptual world through sound, light, and memory. It’s less about art objects and more about perception itself.
For me, these films offer another kind of comfort. They remind me that blindness and vision loss don’t end the story—they change the way the story is told. Watching them, I’m struck by how perception itself can become the subject of art, whether on canvas or on screen.
Written with the help of AI