The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes

Now obviously, this film may sound silly. The film itself is basically a 40 minute film without narrative or opinion. It is simply a film depicting autopsy on dead bodies. At first this sounds gross and disgusting, but in reality, the skin of dead bodies are really nothing much other than dirt, or at least soon to be. The idea of this being gross can be pulled out of the fact that these bodies were once alive. Yes, we see images of the insides of their bodies. We see their brains and skull. We see the cuts being placed on their skin and then being opened to reveal a massive doorway to intestines, bone, blood,liver, veins, and other things. We do not know what kinds of things that these bodies did when they were alive and moving. We are not even shown what their facial features are like really. We just see their bodies being opened and examined. Stan Brakhage, an experimental filmmaker, doesn't consider that his audience may want to know these things. Or maybe he does but is not interested enough to show us. This way, we can leave our concerns behind and hope to get something out of these gruesome things. We may or may not, but the idea of this sort of meaning is enough to watch it more than once, if not to see if we react or see something differently.

(I watched this film as part of the DVD short film collection of Stan Brakhage entitled, BY BRAKHAGE: AN ANTHOLOGY.)

The titles comes from the literal translation for the Greek word 'Autopsy". And that's exactly what this film is . 32 minutes of intense, hand-held photographing of several autopsies in extremely explicit detail.

While the film is, by nature, shocking, and sometimes hard to watch, it's far from exploitational or sensationalistic. It invites us to meditate on life, death, the body, what miracles we all are, how fragile we all are, how alone we all are in the end, and yet how alike we all are. What is a human? What were these people like in life? Are all we are really just the blobby masses of brain we see being removed, leaving only empty skull cavities? Why is the film stomach turning? Why is it so hard to look at what is inside us all? Brakhage raises all these questions, and they are valuable and unsettling to consider.

That said, for me, the film could have been shorter. It started to feel repetitive, which I'm sure was part of the intent (watching ourselves become inured to images that only minutes earlier seemed deeply disturbing), but there was a point near the end where I started to feel I had gotten what I was going to already, including that last idea.

Most of the time I'm not really all that much a fan of Brakhage's "live action"-films. Generally, I feel they lack the evocative and creative elements of his hand-painted or more abstract films. This film though, was very engaging and interesting for several reasons. While many of Brakhage's films deal with the concept of vision and perception, very few of them incorporate standard first-person perspectives. They tend to take a more irregular and perhaps chaotic approach to the very activity of seeing and how Brakhage shows things in his "live action"-films are rarely how one would normally perceive it in the real world. His films do give different perspectives though, I think, to show the nature of things and aspects of life in a new way. And this one is a very good example of just that.

"The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes." A genius title that is so multifaceted in this context. Firstly, it's the direct translation of the world "autopsy" which this film, on the surface level, is about. Secondly, it seems to be an important guiding sentence, not only for this film, but for much of Brakhage's work. Regardless of what Brakhage had in mind when making his films, I think anyone who watch them put their own meaning to it. They see with their own eyes and thus gives it meaning. This film is so much more than just an experimental take on documenting the work of pathologists though. Watching it, one is placed face to face with death. One is placed face to face with people working with the dead, all the time. Their working days are surrounded by death. I think this picture can get one to know death better, look it in the eye and accept its inevitable presence. Driven by curiosity, the camera shows in great detail every part of the human body being weighted, dissected, seemingly being totally shred to pieces. At times it's unsettling to watch. But then you take a step back and think about the purpose of it all. This is a serious practice, advanced and perfected through centuries of development. We see craftsmen, doing the work that probably very few of us would ever want to do or even think about. And in the end, what they do is a benefit for the humankind as much as whatever anyone do.

It's all very natural. The things shown that we may find repulsive and disgusting, is what we all are made of. And Brakhage's quick, unusually explorative style highlights this in a very admirable way. The lack of sound of course just keeps the focus entirely on the dead human body, torn apart with deep respect.

Shot by Mr. B in a busy metropoliton morgue. The recently deceased are prepared for embalming by technicians we barely see. Hands wearing rubber gloves open torsos with scalpels. Heads are opened and brains are removed. Real people are pulled apart and thrown away. Who were they? Who are we? Grainy 16mm color stock. Available light. Moderately long lenses. No sound. No music. Silence.

I was somewhat disappointed by this film because I expected to see a full autopsy being performed from start to finish. In his interview, Brakhage said that he chose not to use any weird effects with the material he shot because one doesn't need metaphor for something so primal. Yet his way of shooting and editing his footage made me feel like there was a great deal of manipulation involved. This was not an objective look at the human body. What we got was a mishmash of body parts being filmed so close up, and shot and edited with so much motion, one can barely tell what one is looking at. Although I'd seen somewhat similar stuff in "The Re-Animator", I did find the shots of brain autopsies fascinating, especially the way that one's scalp skin is peeled back so much that it covers the entire face, making us look truly alien (one imagines that H.R. Giger saw a few autopsies before creating his aliens). Still, very few shots of the brain, and we see no shots of them being dissected. I consider the human brain to be the most fascinating thing in the universe so I was disappointed. I also resented the shots early in the film of victims who obviously died by violent means. I suppose some viewers like the exterior shots of the autopsies because it makes them try to guess who these people were and how they came to such grisly deaths. But that to me is kind of like the junk one can see in those Mondo Cane type movies. It's sensationalist and exploitive and completely ruins one's sense of objectivity. I preferred the actual shots of the autopsies that simply allowed one to see the glorious pulp that meticulously keeps us functioning every hour of every day. The film excels brilliantly at that level though as I said, there was not any cognitive approach to displaying the organs. One can interpret Brakhage's films in any way they see fit, but I'm guessing that either he wanted to create an impressionist view of life through its ultimate mortality, or he is just another hack who prefers exploitation and sensationalism over reality. I appreciated the film for what it did show, but in my opinion, the inside of us human beings is fascinating enough without dancing lenses and choppy editing obscuring it. Someone should have told Brakhage he can't top God.