Filmmaking style

Meirelles acknowledged the challenge of making a film that would simulate the experience of blindness to the audience. He explained, "When you do a film, everything is related to point-of-view, to vision. When you have two characters in a dialogue, emotion is expressed by the way people look at each other, through the eyes. Especially in the cut, the edit. You usually cut when someone looks over. Film is all about point-of-view and in this film there is none."[20] Similar to the book, blindness in the film serves as a metaphor for human nature's dark side: "prejudice, selfishness, violence and willful indifference".[5]

With only one character's point-of-view available, Meirelles sought to switch the point-of-views throughout the film, seeing three distinct stylistic sections. The director began with an omniscient vantage point, transited to the intact viewpoint of the Doctor's Wife, and changed again to the Man with the Black Eye Patch, who connects the quarantined to the outside world with stories. The director concluded the switching with the combination of the perspective of the Doctor's Wife and the narrative of the Man with the Black Eye Patch.[4]

The film also contains visual cues, such as the 1568 painting The Parable of the Blind by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Allusions to other famous artworks are also made. Meirelles described the intent: "It's about image, the film, and vision, so I thought it makes sense to create, not a history of painting, because it's not, but having different ways of seeing things, from Rembrandt to these very contemporary artists. But it's a very subtle thing."[5]