When I first heard we were going to be watching a Stan Brakhage film, I was not really looking forward to it. My past film classes left me unimpressed and very cynical towards his work. We studied more of his post modern films such as Black Ice. These films were similar to the colored and textured framed shorts that were shown in class. My film teacher justified his ‘genius’ by saying,“ You may think you can do the same thing as this, and that it would not be difficult…but you didn’t and he did. “ I also recall my teacher saying Black Ice took him a year to make, and it was merely 10 seconds long. I had a hard time giving Brakhage any credit or respect for these shorts because my computer can generate much more diverse and fluid colors in motion than these films. People will say, but that’s a computer and he did it himself, but I say what a waste of time. Despite this, I was pleasantly surprised to see another side of Brakhage’s film portfolio, even though it is incredibly morbid, in The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes.

The Act of Seeing with One’s own Eyes had a huge initial shock for me. Once the premise and material set in I really had no aversion to watching what was being shown. I think the only thing that made me a little uncomfortable was the fact that these were actual people being examined and taken apart. Testa touched on this in the reading, “even when stilled in Death they suggest a person, a subject” (Testa 279) As far as I know I am not the squeamish type (at least through the screen), so the gore and brutality against the human body was not really an issue for me. Just knowing that we were witnessing an actual person being cut open made the experience a little more visceral than fictional Hollywood or television violence and special effects. Once I attached reality to the autopsy and saw the lifeless human beings, I found my that my mind was toying with the actual repercussions of the loss of these lives ; ie:The Family members and friends that are all mourning the loss of this person, this person who I will never know.

If the bodies were anyone who I knew, I cannot even imagine what it would be like to see them on that mortician’s table. Seeing someone you know having these things done to them would come across as one of the greatest of insults (in my opinion). One of the most the most memorable scenes was when the mortician hollowed out the peoples’ chest cavities. The removal of all the organs left both a physical and metaphorical empty shell. This organ evacuation felt very dehumanizing (this could be the justification I’ve been seeking to rationalize not wanting to be an organ donor). I think this is because as humans we think we are more than just a biological organism made up of flesh, blood and bone. We like to imagine a soul or something intangible which can explain our consciousness; we have a misconception that we have control over our bodies. Testa mentions this as one of the movies main effects:
“The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes is that this is a special space of transformation: universal, for we all die, but also a space with a decided threshold. The film has transformed that space by seeing it—in the most literal, documentary fashion—from a secret, forbidden zone into a space where the body at once ceases to be human in our usual sense.” (Testa 283)The autopsy, similar to the film itself, shakes this conception we have of ourselves and reaffirms we are still mortal with or without modern medicine. The title of the film quite explicitly hints at this concept.

Through the absence of any sound, and Brakhage’s careful cinematography, I found this film to be extremely reflexive. The purely visual experience made this film impartial and un-biased. The viewers’ reactions were directly linked to whatever emotions were evoked through the film. In more conventional films, Filmmakers distort and shape anything they shoot by adding or emphasizing certain sounds, or create a certain narrative through editing. Testa confirms this, citing that, “No overall narrative evolves” (Testa 269). In fact the only input that Brakhage really gives to this film is the wording of the title itself. The strongest way that Brakhage achieved this reflexivity was how he initially withheld any solid shot of any one body’s face. The camera was mainly focused on a certain part of the body, or an action of the mortician (whose face was also not captured until the end). It seemed Brakhage intentionally did not want us to identify the body as an ‘other’. It is as if he wanted us to personalize us more with the unknown bodies, potentially making viewers imprint personal losses onto them or, for myself (who fortunately, have not lost anyone close to me), feel the fragility of life in general, including my own.