[ Pour la version française, veuillez cliquer ici ]
“A BLIND MAN’S VISION OF THE DARK SIDE: THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF JACQUES SEMELIN”
26 August 2019 (Serifos, Greece) – This video project has been the most challenging of my career, and far beyond my usual digital technology and cyber security toil. The following is a preview (feedback is always welcome; just click REPLY; and please feel free to distribute). Below the video is a short text to give you more detail on the subject matter of the documentary.
Jacques Semelin is French, a professor at the Institute of Political Studies of Paris at SciencesPo, a selective research university of international standing. It was here that Jacques created a pioneering course on genocide and mass violence, as well as programs on the civil resistance processes in dictatorships.
His research is unequaled. His work is based on a multidisciplinary approach using history, political science, and social psychology. He was the first genocide expert to take this approach. And it is not just the study of the Holocaust. He has done a deep dive into the Rwandan genocide, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia Herzegovina, as well as the atrocities in Syria, respecting the specificities of each of these appalling phenomena. In the full documentary, I am going to introduce you to his work, his approach.
But the central purpose of this video is to talk about his most recent book, “I want to believe in the sun”, a book far more personal which follows his book “I’m going where I’m a stranger” which was in 2007.
In that 2007 book Jacques tells how he brutally learns at sixteen that he will become blind. For years, he keeps this secret to himself by confronting the anxiety and progression of blindness alone. He then fights to become a researcher, to obtain his PhD and to continue his passion: a deep investigation of genocide, massacres and the themes of resistance.
And so for years he traveled, he investigated, he taught — and having “tamed the fog”, he felt ready to testify to his life coping as a blind man. He had made a solo trip to Quebec, Canada a few years ago for a series of lectures on genocide (a trip he then repeated) and that was the inspiration for him to write this new book – what I will call a new kind of travel story.
I began a series of long talks with Jacques about two years ago, and we began filming about 1 year ago. As I noted in the preview, I came full circle. I knew of his importance because of my involvement in war crimes investigations, a topic I have addressed from time-to-time such as here. My team immersed itself in Jacques writings and a host of other sources on genocide and mass violence.
But I also wanted to learn the everyday reality of a blind person. What is his relationship to the world? To the city and nature, to the need to move, to technology, to cross the street, to recognize people?
Jacques told me each of his other senses (hearing, smell, touch) were heightened and I learned he has an enormous toolkit of technology he uses to work and get through his day. And he accepts the fact that his degree of autonomy is, often, almost zero. Such as in an airport. He told me:
I know I have to be driven, directed, labeled, controlled, dropped as a package here, and then there.
In his second book, “I want to believe in the sun” he says:
It’s been years since I lost my sight and, in response to this earthquake, I gradually changed my way of being in the world. Today, in Paris, I redraw the world around me, I have my little habits. But when I travel to another city, what will happen in a universe I barely know? How will I apprehend it? How, in this unfamiliar environment, will my senses wake up? What sounds, what materials, what smells will allow me to decipher them?
I somehow find myself immersed in a sensory and aesthetic experience, to use the words with which the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges evoked for his own blindness.
He thought: if it is true that deprivation of sight requires us to develop another sensibility to the world, why not try to describe it, to pin it down, keep track of it? To recount his experience from the point of view of “no-view” is an opportunity to respond to the curiosity of the seer who questions how the blind “see” the world”.
And despite the physical darkness of his world, and the brutal darkness of his professional work, he has an unabiding positive attitude:
It helps me if I forget the small vexations of everyday life due to my dependence. Refocusing on the essential, on what you think is important in your life, provides goodness, welfare. In my case, it allows me to ignore those moments of profound melancholy where you regret the world of yesterday, or you want to return to that earlier world that has gradually collapsed, engulfed before your eyes, because of your eyes, a world from which you have been expelled. So I say “Let’s forget all this”, or at least I pretend we can forget it. But I do feel love. Of that there is no doubt. It sustains me.
We’ll have the full documentary out this winter.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
“A BLIND MAN’S VISION OF THE DARK SIDE:
THE EXTRAORDIANRY LIFE OF JACQUES SEMELIN”
This has been a production of
PROJECT COUNSEL MEDIA
Associate Producer
Gregory Lanzenberg
In association with
LES ARÈNES, ÉDITEURS
In cooperation with
MÉMORIAL DE LA SHOAH
PARIS, FRANCE
MÉMORIAL DES MARTYRS DE LA DÉPORTATION
PARIS, FRANCE
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
WASHINGTON, DC
THE AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU MEMORIAL AND MUSEUM
OŚWIĘCIM, POLAND
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Directed by
GREGORY P BUFITHIS
Written by
GREGORY P BUFITHIS
GREGORY LANZENBERG
Cinematographer
MARCO VALLINI
Research Team
CATARINA CONTI
LAURA MOREAU
ANNABELLE VANBEVER