Is there some way to make your player blind (make the screen completely black) for a duration? My case is that I am in a room, after I drink a potion, the screen fades to black for several seconds and than fades back in, only to see everything around me destroyed. I suppose I could just move the player to a new cell (thereby creating a load screen, resembling something like this) but a black screen would be more fitting.

You could bypass the load screen by making a destroyed duplicate of the room in the same cell (just far away from the intact version) and moving the player to the destroyed version. I don't know of an easy way to make the screen fade in to black and then fade pack in, but I have an idea:

1. Set the default lighting for the cell as all black.
2. Place a series of lights in the center of both rooms, with one in the intact version active at first and the rest set as "Initially Disabled".
3. Using a script, disable/enable the lights in sequence so it seems to be getting darker.
4. Once it's totally black, move the Player to the destroyed version of the room and enable/disable the lights there in sequence so it seems to be gradually getting lighter.

I think http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=30054 can do the trick. I don't know how to invoke its functions (by script... I guess).

Maybe I'm being simplistic but why not just enable a very large mesh with a pure black non-reflective texture, and move it to the player constantly?

I heard the player moveto command makes the screen black out.

Only when moving from one cell to another, and that's because of load screens.