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John Leonard from New York Magazine:
"remarkable...Imagine a Bad Girl Huck Finn, or a country-and-western Philoctetes, insouciant on the verge of shameless."
Daniel M. Kimmel from Variety:
"David Sutherland has spent the past decade trying to redefine the stylistic limits of the documentary.
With Out of Sight he goes further, creating what...is closer to soap opera than the traditional
talking heads documentary."
Review from The Boston Globe
By Matthew Gilbert
December 19, 1993
You know a film on blindness works when you forget the hero can't see.
This is the path taken by local filmmaker David Sutherland in his
intimate documentary, Out of Sight. As Diane Starin brushes out
horses, two-steps at dance bars and suffers the last gasps of an 11-year
relationship, her blindness becomes increasingly unimportant. She may
have lost her eyes to cancer when she was 18 months old, but that's the
least dramatic fact of her daily life.
"This movie will teach people to stop thinking it's amazing that a blind
person can shop for herself or keep a house," Starin says in an
interview at Sutherland's Newton home. Her investment in Out of Sight
includes two months of intensive
filming reminiscent of PBS' landmark 1970s documentary "An American
Family," with film crews all over Starin's bedroom and cordless
microphones for her horseback rides.
Filming began in summer 1991, when Sutherland and his crew--including
his wife and collaborator, Nancy Sutherland--moved a mountain of
cameras and tripods into Starin's Northern California life. There they
found themselves in the middle of a country melodrama, complete with
cheating hearts, fatal illness and an abusive stepfather.
Sutherland couldn't have asked for a more upfront subject than Starin.
Initially, he was approached to make a more general film on the history
of blindness. He reshaped the idea into a group portrait of five blind
people, something like his Halftime,
in which Yale classmates consider
their lives 25 years after graduation. Finally, he chose to zero in on a
single subject, to "penetrate a personality," as he puts it. After
interviewing a number of candidates, he was drawn to the complexity of
Starin's life: "I knew she was leading a double life, and that she
wasn't a goody two-shoes." Once he set up in her home, he allowed the
relentless presence of his cameras to wear down the defenses of Starin
and the people around her. "People get guarded, until you're there long
enough," he says. He would often ask his subjects to do four or five
takes in a given scenario: "By the fourth time, they're bored and they
start really talking."
...while editing the footage for Out of Sight, Sutherland
decided to return to Starin's home to film reenactments of her life
prior to 1991. Herb, sober in 1991, had been an active drinker who'd
tormented Starin during a 2-year road trip. Sutherland wanted to be able
to show some of these painful moments: "Diane can say Herb was drinking
and driving, but it's better if you see it." Punctuating the film, then,
are re-creations of the past starring the principals themselves. "I
could have put actors in there," Sutherland says, "but aren't the real
people better?" For Starin, it was a week of hard retrospect: "Filming
the reenactments brought back really awful memories," she says.
- Blue Ribbon, American Film Festival- 1987
- Gold Plaque, Chicago International Film Festival for Documentary Features- 1986
- CINE Golden Eagle- 1986
- Selected by the Academy of Motion Pictures Foundation for its series featuring the outstanding documentary films of 1986
- Chosen by The Boston Herald as one of the ten best movies of 1986
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