BLIND LIGHT a film by Pola Rapaport 1 hour, color BACKGROUND

BLIND LIGHT was inspired by a visit to the haunting Villa San Michele on Capri. My idea for the film began as a fascination with its architect, the Swedish doctor Axel Munthe, a remote personality so obsessed by the power and beauty of the sun that he drove himself to blindness. This overlapped with my interest in pursuing on film the idea of the transcendent moment; that rarely-felt experience in which everything but the present here-and-now falls away, leaving a pure and crystalline experience of the self. I myself had such an experience at Munthe's Villa San Michele on the island of Capri a few years ago. I was on a trip to Italy with my mother, celebrating her birthday, when I first visited Capri for one day. I was inspired by that and a few similar events in my past, and by texts on the subject from some of my favorite authors, particularly the essays of Albert Camus.

The idea  for the film first solidified when  I went to Sweden with my husband, cinematographer Wolfgang Held, to present BROKEN MEAT at the Uppsala Film Festival. The powerful difference between the light and atmosphere of Sweden and that of southern Italy left in me a strong sympathy with Munthe's melancholy and yearning for the Mediterranean. A meeting at the San Michele Foundation in Stockholm led me to re-visit Munthe's villa two weeks later, after traveling the same route from Stockholm to Naples which Munthe described in his book "The Story of San Michele".