It took me a long time to watch Julien Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a beautiful, extraordinary movie about a quadriplegic who can only move one eye.The imagery and narration went hauntingly, suffocatingly well together that I felt like I couldn't breathe, I felt like I was trapped in a beautiful but horrible dream. It took me a long time to watch because I would feel engulfed after about fifteen minutes and would have to stop, sometimes not coming back to it for a few days (!).
It is based on the man's memoirs, which were dictated by blinking his eyes as his... helper?... translator?... read the alphabet.
I'm not sure what to say about it now, just that it was perfect.
1 comment:
I loved "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", but the movie I'd rather see is "My Stroke of Insight", which is the amazing bestselling book by Dr Jill Bolte Taylor. It is an incredible story and there's a happy ending. She was a 37 year old Harvard brain scientist who had a stroke in the left half of her brain. The story is about how she fully recovered, what she learned and experienced, and it teaches a lot about how to live a better life. Her TEDTalk at TED dot com is fantastic too. It's been spread online millions of times and you'll see why!
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