The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes

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.

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.)

This 30 minute documentary on three human autopsies is one of the most disturbing yet intruiging things that I have ever seen on film. If you can imagine it, they show it. Everything but the corpses faces are shown. But I am willing to bet that if Brakhage was allowed to show the faces he would have. This movie delves into the idea of human curiosity and vision like never done before. A thinker.

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.

I know it is a violation of the terms and conditions to focus on other user-comments but 'The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes' demands an examination that acknowledges reception above all other interpretative modes. I find it fascinating that many of the respondents interpret this film as something more than simply the photographing of a number of autopsies. First, this demonstrates a desire to bestow meaning on anything, whether it is elicited or not. Secondly, it exhibits a desire to deify anything created by an acknowledged artist-in this case avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage-regardless of its true material worth. Ultimately, I think this is the wrong way to approach this film, which is simply the filming of a series of autopsies, nothing more, nothing less. Brakhage has stated that the metaphorical hermeneutic code is endemic in the material. This is true, but the notion that a dead body being stripped of its components says anything significant about the nature of life and humanity is highly contentious. Brakhage invests no artistic design in his film; he simply photographs the morgue workers in operation. Yes, we see imagery that is at turns repulsive and often saddening, but would we imagine anything else. It might be argued that, given the film's title, Brakhage is trying to demystify death. However, films like these are de rigueur in medical classes and therefore this 'scene' is not hidden from the world. People actually deal with it everyday. Those who have no exposure to the dead or the human anatomy will most likely have no interest in the material. So, once again, what is this film's worth? It is not artistic (despite other users trying to consign their own aesthetic design on the film), it is not useful, and it fails as a demystification of death or the human body. Ultimately, 'The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes' is a failure as a film and offers only limited interest as a curio.