TFPF 2008 RECIPIENT
$4,500 for distribution
Edited by Keith Maitland
Produced by Keith Maitland and Patrick Floyd
Animation by Jason Archer and Paul Becka
USA,
2009, a Co-Production of Illegal Films and Independent Television
Service (ITVS), with funding by the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting, 72 min.
Keith Maitland’s uplifting documentary THE EYES OF ME accomplishes what
the best films do – take us into another world and help us see/feel
what it is like to be other people with different situations,
experiences, and options. In this case, we follow the lives of four
young students, who, like so many teenagers, talk about school, home,
family, jobs, romance, and friends. In addition, these four teens talk
about what it is like to be blind and/or visually impaired. In the
course of 72 minutes (compressed from a year of filming over 250 hours
of material) we come to see the world through their sightless eyes and
bright, eager young minds. The world of Chas, Meagan, Denise, and Isaac
is rich and challenging in experiences, thoughts, hopes, obstacles, and
feelings.
These four teens are students at the Texas School
for the Blind and Visually Impaired, a residential school founded by
the Texas Legislature in 1856 and located in Austin since its
inception. As seniors, Chas and Meagan are poised to graduate and go on
to higher education and employment. In fact, Chas has already
made a leap into the “real world” by moving off-campus at age 17 with
JP, a fellow TSBVI student, and getting a job making belts and
fasteners for the US military at the Travis Association for the Blind.
After living in the school dorm for six years, Chas wanted to make it
on his own out in the world. When he’s not at work, in school, or with
his girlfriend Ashley, he spends much of his time honing his emcee
skills, as “1 2 Cee” [One To See], through composing raps for an album,
which he types out in Braille and practices and records with strong
beats. The documentary appropriately takes its title from the song Chas
keeps tightening up – “Through the Eyes of Me,” the young man’s first
rap about his experiences being blind, a subject he had avoided in his
musical life.
At the age of ten Chas was sent into the
operating room to try to save his sight, but he woke up blind. He raps,
“The only time I cried about being blind was the first night.” Having
some form of sightedness during his first ten years has left him with
visual memories. Present sounds and textures connect with those
memories to give him an idea of how things might look. As he listens to
the sounds of birds and rustling leaves, the documentary slips into an
unexpected realm of beautiful, simple animation of birds and leaves,
all pared down with minimal detail but perhaps close to what is being
seen in the young man’s mind’s eye. This is a fortuitous stylistic
choice by Keith Maitland with the help of Jason Archer and Paul Beck,
who worked with the innovative rotoscoping techniques on Richard
Linklater’s WAKING LIFE and SCANNER DARKLY. Such animation provides a
perfect alternative to recreations as the creative images flow smoothly
in and out of the real scenes.
Birds and leaves with their
consistent, generic sounds and image memories are one thing, but the
people in Chas’s life are growing up or aging, He can only remember how
they were nearly half his life ago. He is sad about not being able to
see his baby sister, who just turned 13. Her voice is no longer that of
a 5-year-old and even the memories of how she looked as a child are
fading. His visits home are very poignant as he is surrounded by family
members, and he gets frustrated when his hopes of other visits to Fort
Worth are put on hold. Family is so important to him that one of his
dreams is to move his mom and sisters down to Austin to live with him.
Those close family ties seem to sustain him as much as his music.
Living
on his own would work just fine if his roommate would be more
conscientious about paying his half-share of the bills. When the
electricity is disconnected for non-payment, Chas adjusts by using
extremely long extension cords to keep his computer running. Lights
don’t matter, of course, except
for visitors, but Chas is definitely upset about not being able to tune
into “Family Guy.” Unfortunately the electric bill is only the first of
several problems. Things get far more difficult when JP doesn’t leave
Chas his half of the rent payment. The apartment landlords ultimately
move toward an eviction suit. And Chas begins slacking off with his
academic classes at McCallum HS. After having to attend Saturday
classes to try to make up, he finally decides to drop out and get his
G.E.D. even though he fully intends to go to community college. Toward
the end of the film he definitely has second thoughts about that rash
decision.
However, he still has his music which is like a
life-raft for his spirit. “When I’m in the recording studio, I’m
completely in the zone.” Rap is the perfect musical genre for Chas
because it’s so overwhelmingly full of emotions – anger, defiance,
strength, determination, and, for Chas and others, hope. He describes
the autobiographical “Through the Eyes of Me” as “all about pushing
yourself.” Just “when everything seems to be crumbling down,” he is
determined to “never ever let a single boulder touch” him. Jobs,
family, education aside, the young man states, “All I really need is my
music. I don’t need nothing else. That is the only thing that has
helped me through this rocky-ass year.” But he is also certain that
“All I need is to know I can make a way for myself.” The documentary
certainly makes us feel as confident as Chas that he will make a way
for himself.
The other TSBVI senior in the film is Meagan, who
is just as driven as Chas but in different ways. She is president of
the student council at TSBVI and runs a very tight meeting concerning
an upcoming barbecue at the school. Watching her in action, one feels
certain that she will achieve her dream of getting
a Master’s in social work and become a licensed professional counselor
at a school or hospital. Her determination can sound a bit callous or
even cruel at times – “I feel that a lot of blind people don’t try –
but that belief is what drives the young woman to “prove people wrong.”
There is no danger of her letting her blindness stop her from what she
wants to do in life. “I can overcome it and be what I want to be” is
her guiding mantra.
Meagan was evidently not always this
driven and self-assured. Her mother candidly reveals that Meagan’s loss
of vision was devastating – “she had no social life, no self-esteem.”
Meagan adds that after losing even her limited vision at age 16, she
continued wearing her very thick glasses to pretend nothing had
happened. She had cancer of the retinas at the age of 17 months, which
was treatable by radiation, but it is also the radiation treatments
which are suspected of finally removing the last vestige of vision.
Unable to remember the very last thing she saw, she does confess to
missing colors, especially those of sunsets – “That’s cheesy, I know,
but it’s true.”
Meagan has blossomed at TSBVI. As her mother
says, “She came here and got her self-esteem back.” But the young woman
was initially in some form of denial as she found it hard to ask for
help. Even learning to use a cane or get across intersections was
initially difficult psychologically, but in the film we see her being
taught how to achieve what too many of us take for granted – safely
crossing “at the light.” The scene of Meagan with her boyfriend Garrett
at a café is delightful and shows a much more light-hearted, playful
teenage girl at ease within a relationship. As valedictorian of her
2006 class at TSBVI she gives
the graduation speech, in which she thanks her parents for their
encouragement, but one gets the feeling that she is more than
sufficiently self-motivated to pursue all her dreams with or without
encouragement.
The two freshmen of THE EYES OF ME, Denise and
Isaac, are extremely sweet teenagers finding their way in a new school
situation far from family and their respective hometowns of Dallas and
Paris, Texas. Denise was afraid of not being liked by others at the
school and felt awfully homesick at the beginning, but in the course of
a year at the school we see the young girl blossom
– literally – into Cinderella. Acting was always something she wanted
to do, so she tried out for the role of the mistreated future princess
in Sondheim’s Into the Woods. Throughout the documentary we see and
hear Denise practicing and anguishing over remembering her lyrics, but
the opening night on the TSBVI stage appears to be a success as the
cast plays to a full house.
Born with shortened nerves of the
eye, Denise is proud that she has learned to convince herself that she
can do things and feels that she hadn’t been giving herself enough
credit. Her mom credits TSBVI a lot for the changes she sees in her
older daughter: “Her social skills are better. Her attitudes are
better. She’s more outgoing than ever.” Part of those social skills
certainly have to do with learning more about boys, even if her mother
says she is too young to date. One boy that Denise likes in particular
is a classmate named Johnny. When getting ready for the prom, Denise
has her hair done and talks as any 16-year-old would about her mom’s
precautious advice and her own ability to tell the “touchy” boys to
back off. She picks out a pretty, fluffy, gauzy
kind of dress for the big event and looks very much the way she says
she feels – like a queen. Your heart can almost break when Johnny walks
into the prom with his date and, in response to Denise’s “Hi,” just
walks on by. Saving face, Denise spends the rest of the night dancing
freely and gracefully by herself. Cinderella doesn’t yet have her
prince, but she has been to the ball.
There are other moments
in the film which are much happier for Denise. So that the students can
enjoy the freedom and accomplishment of running, TSBVI has set up a
special running track with handrails. Denise complains somewhat about
the physical strain but also seems to enjoy the exhilaration of
running. Her “sweet 16” birthday party is very emotional but joyful.
She cries a bit while thanking people for coming and admitting that at
previous birthday parties back home she had had only a couple of
guests. Here at TSBVI she is surrounded by friends who love her. As she
says, “I think it’s heaven here, I really do.” It’s not hard to see
what she means, so much so that I found myself sometimes wishing the
youngsters could stay on for as long as they wanted, especially in the
case of Isaac, the other freshman.
Unlike the other three
protagonists of the documentary, Isaac is only recently blind. In an
accident at the age of 14, a collision with concrete detached his
retinas. Without insurance, his guardian-grandparents prayed, cried,
threatened to rob a bank but never came up with the money to pay for
the operation
that might have saved the young boy’s sight. Instead, Isaac woke up
completely blind one morning. TSBVI seemed like the perfect place for
him to continue his education and, as he says, learn how to be blind –
to read Braille and to discover how to get around with a cane and
through more focused use of his hearing. His sight memories are still
quite acute since the experience of being blind is so new to him.
Isaac’s self-confidence doesn’t seem diminished by this new situation
and he expresses his intention of becoming the first blind President of
the US. His girlfriend Chastity is a cheerleader at the school and they
seem to be playfully in love – even with all the putdowns mid-teens can
heap on each other. But ever the player, Isaac takes up with some other
girl and loses Chastity. Their versions of the reason for the break-up
differ remarkably. But Isaac seems genuinely emotional about losing his
girlfriend. In a purposefully funny editing choice, we next see him
doing extreme pushups.
But it seems that something else
happened during that period, possibly with the other girl, because the
next thing we know about Isaac is that he has been suspended from TSBVI
“for inappropriate physical contact with another student.”
Understandably the rules about such physical contact must be strict,
but I can’t help but feel this is a tragedy for Isaac. He seemed to be
doing quite well at the school and was getting through the initial
trauma of suddenly going blind. He was learning life-skills that would
serve him so well. Instead, the film follows him back to Paris, where
he is the only blind student in the high school and feels like an
“oddball.” Without the resources, encouragement, guidance, and
friendships he had at TSBVI, his future looks dimmer than it might have
been. The shot of Isaac eating alone in the Paris HS cafeteria is
heartbreaking. But he has at least learned something. He admits that he
“shouldn’t have made the mistakes he did.” While playing with the
dogs, listening to the animals on the farm, and enjoying the fresh air,
he thinks about life and concludes, “Every act has a consequence – a
lesson everybody should learn. That kind of lesson pops up and hits you
square in the chest.” Without knowing the details of the infraction
committed at TSBVI, I just can’t help but feel that the young boy has
been hit too hard.
Unlike the rather easy four-person
structure this review takes, the documentary THE EYES OF ME is
beautifully structured through intertwining scenes from these four
young lives in such a way that obstacles, difficulties, sidetracks,
successes, and realizations of one can insightfully comment on the
lives of the other three. Making that flow even smoother is the
inclusion of the animated sequences that give a lyrical quality to the
film. Keith Maitland has truly opened up the world of blindness to us,
the viewers, and we can see the beauty and strength of human beings who
can actually thrive in a world that we might have chosen to look away
from. It’s a supremely eye-opening film that helps put problems and
obstacles into perspective. And I have purposely chosen sight-driven
words and images to remind us of how much we unthinkingly take for
granted.
-- Chale Nafus, Director of Programming, Austin Film Society