I'm just watching the movie now, and I have a question--do we ever find out why Anne wears those glasses?
The Olive Garden--It's like eating in the private kitchen of a delightful Italian stereotype!
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I'm assuming you mean the tinted glasses/shades...
She gotten like 9 operations on her eyes, and the light hurts them. Hence the glasses.
"Hated by fools and fools to hate. Be that my motto and my fate."
Funny thing about those glasses -- Anne Sullivan did have a pair, but in real life, she didn't get them until *after* the time portrayed in the film. Anne's house-mother from the Perkins Institute sent them to Annie after Helen's breakthrough at the water pump. I've never seen a photo of the real Anne wearing them -- not even at the end of her life, when she was virtually blind.
I believe the disease that cost Anne her sight was conjunctivitis. Ridges formed on the underside of her eyelids, which scraped and damaged her corneas.
Wow...learn something new everyday. Honestly, it hurt my eyes to even read about that (conjunctivitis)...blaaah...
And to think, all I can complain about is my myopia.
"Hated by fools and fools to hate. Be that my motto and my fate."
No, Annie's eye problem was trachoma, a common disease among the poor in the late 1800's/early 1900's. Trachoma is much more serious than conjunctivitis. It formed granules and ridges under the eyelids and scratched the eyeball, causing inflammation and blindness. Annie's parents had been very poor Irish immigrants and Annie developed trachoma when she was two. Immigrants coming in from Ellis Island at that time were routinely checked for trachoma.
shareDamn Coryraisa, like it literally hurt to read about that.
"Hated by fools and fools to hate. Be that my motto and my fate."
When I first saw this movie I was only about eleven and it affected me greatly. I guess since the two main leads were in the original Broadway play, it was a chance to see two exceptionally good performances.I don't know whether it was the age I was when I saw this or not but I don't think I've ever seen anything quite as touching as this.I think that the film being made in black and white was a fine idea because it let the story shine and did not distract from the events on screen with a lot of fancy effects. Also,the memory/flashback/dream sequences were in my opinion much more effective in black and white than they would have been in colour-it gave them a much more dreamy imaginary quality.
shareShe was blind as a child. If you want to really understand the movie, you should read the play.
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I've seen the play in Stratford in Ontario as a class field trip. Seems to me that this Broadway had been appearing almost all of North America. Trust me, I had to save up at least $145.00 CND for a ticket to be with my class to see it. Though we had seen the movie (This one that all of us are talking about) and read the play. Bare with me,I had to do a 30 page summary of the play and movie. And I was only in grade 7 and my class was into this play and movie for half our class year. I'm surprised that a lot of people still remember this movie. I think the play was about 4 to 5 hours long. But I dunno. It just seemed long. I wish I could've worn my jeans, but I had to act 'presentable' and wore my flare cotton pants. Seeing the movie and then the play was just unbelievable. When I saw the play, I wasn't surprised in some scenes, because the movie basically spoiled everything to me and classmates in grade 7. To tell you the truth, I kinda liked this presentation. Even though it may have seem stupid and a waste of money to see it, I quite enjoyed it. I just wished that it was the play I saw first, and then it would be the movie secondly. Despite that I liked the presentations, my classmates gotten really bored out of their minds and were cussing and booing at it. Oh well, not all can like something so... Powerful and outgoing. But Anne's glasses were definitely shades and yes she did have a diagnose with being blind as I can remember. I'll tell you a scene... SPOILERS!!! (If you'd like to read it, scroll down)
In one scene that I saw in the movie, Anne's character was just a little teenager. And she was wearing those shades and had to walk with two canes (Or crutches?) and what was happening was that Anne's character was walking saying something. This scene was basically a flashback for Anne's character.
It always comes down to this!
Anne's brother had the crutches, not her. She was partially blind, he had a bad hip.
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Oh, you can't do that with a ping pong ball!!
Anne Sullivan had progressive blindness. By the time she was 12, she was totally blind, but an operation when she nearly twenty restored most of her sight and removed the cataracts that caused her blindness. That was just about the time ether started becoming available because she mentioned it. All her previous operations on her eyes were done while she was awake.
Her brother had tubercliosis in his hip. She and her brother were both living in a poor house until her brother died. She was sent from the poor house to the Perkins Institute for the Blind. She learned to function as a blind person there and met the first deaf-blind person ever taught. Helen was the second. Laura Bridgman (The Silent Night) was the first. When the Kellers asked for a teacher, she was sent. Her sight had recently been restored and she had graduated from student to teacher at the Institute.
Not bad for doing it all from memory!
It wasn't cataracts that caused Annie's blindness; it was trachoma. There seems to be a lot of confusion here regarding Annie's eyes, so here's some links that will provide more info on trachoma:
http://www.spedex.com/resource/documents/veb/trachoma.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trachoma
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001486.htm
http://www.trachoma.org/trachoma.php
Hope this helps clear up the confusion; these sites are very informative.
The poorhouse was called Tewksbury and it still exists although I think it is a hospital now. Some other deaf-blind kids had been given a basic education before Laura but she was the most highly publicized. Gallaudet had a hand in some of this.
shareI teach this play every year in my ninth-grade class. The glasses are one of the two gifts given to Anne by the children and Mr. Anagnos before she leaves the school for Ivy Green (the other one is a doll for Helen).
share"The glasses are one of the two gifts given to Anne by the children and Mr. Anagnos before she leaves the school for Ivy Green (the other one is a doll for Helen)."
Yes, in the movie, that's true. The doll was in reality a gift from the children at Perkins, but the glasses came much later...
Anne was blind, and after the operations that partially restored her sight, her eyes were still very sensitive to light, which is why she wears the smoked glasses.
sharehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Sullivan
Anne Sullivan was three she began having trouble with her eyesight; at age five, she contracted the eye disease trachoma, a bacterial infection that often causes blindness by scarring. Sullivan underwent a long string of surgeries. Doctors in Tewksbury had made a few vain attempts to clean her eyelids. Later, Father Barbara, the chaplain of the nearest hospital, took it upon himself to arrange a procedure. This operation failed to correct her vision. Still more attempts were made. Father Barbara took her to the Boston City Infirmary (today Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary [2] [3]) this time, where she had two more operations. Even after this attempt her vision remained blurry. Sullivan returned to Tewksbury, against her will. After four years there, in 1880, she entered the Perkins School for the Blind where she underwent surgery in 1881 and regained some of her sight. After the improvement of her eyesight, and graduating as class valedictorian in 1886,, a founder of the Perkins Institute for the Blind, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, encouraged her to teach Helen Keller.[4] In 1887, Sullivan had an additional surgery which restored more of her vision.
Sullivan stayed with Keller at her home and joined her on tours. In 1935, she became completely blind. She died in Forest Hills, New York, on October 20, 1936.
I think Annie went completely blind at least a few years before her death. And I think during her life, despite all her operations, her vision still remained very weak and she was still nearly blind. I think her vision was very blurred and she couldn't see much color at all in her entire life. Annie was much blinder than history or any of the films let on.
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