The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A gloved hand lifts something out of an opened torso and the focus slips. For a second there is no organ in the frame, only a field of red and ochre, wet, unnamed. Then the hand turns, the image resolves, and it is a liver. The recoil arrives with the word.

That slide happens over and over across Brakhage's thirty-two silent minutes in the Allegheny County morgue, and it is the film's discovery. In Metaphors on Vision he had asked his reader to imagine an eye untutored by language, an eye that does not know the word “green” and meets a field of grass as an unnamed profusion of color. The Pittsburgh films put that idea under the heaviest load he could find.

Deleuze, following Bergson, imagines perception with no center in it: not a person looking at a world but matter registering matter, an eye belonging to nobody. His sign for it is the gramme, the photogramme, vision freed from any human anchor. His example is Vertov, whose kino-eye claimed to see what the naked eye cannot. Brakhage's title restates that claim exactly — autopsia, Greek, the act of seeing with one's own eyes — and then moves it somewhere Vertov never took it. Vertov's acentered eye was a machine's, wired into the montage of a whole city. Brakhage's is one man's, hand-wound, and the difference shows in every pan. The camera approaches and withdraws. It holds on an incision, then whips away. He kept those movements in the cut. What Vertov proposed as an ideal, Brakhage films as a nervous system: the untutored eye turns out not to be a clean instrument but a body that can barely stand there.

Deleuze splits the history of film along one joint. In the movement-image someone perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the editing serves that chain. In the time-image the chain breaks: what is perceived cannot be acted on, and the character becomes a voyant, a seer, who watches and endures. Most films sorted into that second category still have a person walking around inside them. This one has no protagonist, and the break comes out cleaner for it. Nothing in the room can be acted on. The pathologists are not transforming a situation, they are reading one, and their work issues in a report, not a change. You, in the seat, have even less available. Deleuze's term for an image that offers nothing but looking is a pure optical situation, an opsign. This is thirty-two minutes of them, with the sound stripped out so the ear has no job either. What you hear instead is the projector and the person beside you deciding whether to leave.

The lens earns its keep here because the film is almost always argued as an ethics problem and almost never as a formal one, and Deleuze supplies the ethics with its mechanism. The distress is not the content by itself; gorier footage circulates constantly without doing this to anyone. It is the removal of every motor exit. No narration to convert seeing into knowing, no cutaway, no climax, no music telling the eye how to feel. That last was Brakhage's stated principle and it is the strictest decision in the film. You are left holding an image with nowhere to discharge it.

He refuses the master shot as well. There is no establishing view, so you never get to build a map of the room and watch from a safe corner of it. What you get is proximity: gloved hands, the lip of a drain, a hanging scale, a face. Deleuze calls a space that has stopped serving as the container of an action an any-space-whatever, and its harshest form is the one cut into disconnected fragments, each carrying a charge instead of a position. The morgue is a real place with a floor plan. The film never gives it to you.

Then the faces. Brakhage keeps returning to them, which is the shot documentary convention suppresses. For Deleuze the close-up is the affection-image, a feeling registered on a face and not yet spent in action, and its purest form is the qualisign: an immobile reflecting face holding a single quality. A dead face is that taken to the end of the line. It will never discharge. Hollis Frampton, in the catalogue note that has traveled with the film ever since, called the autopsy room the last ditch of individuation, the place where a vague dread of mortality acquires the names and faces of others. From this follows the film's most audacious decision, which nothing on screen announces: the living are shown as functions, competent and barely individuated, while the dead are shown as persons. Deleuze would call that inversion a gest, a posture that lays bare a social arrangement. We appoint someone to look on our behalf. Brakhage films the appointment and rejects it, on the grounds that the delegation was never ours to make.

Bazin began his case for what photography is with embalmers, the image as a stay against time. Brakhage takes that argument into the one room where embalming is literal, and it comes back altered: the body on the table is already what Bazin's mummy was built to prevent.

Which returns us to the color. When focus goes and tissue becomes an abstract field, Deleuze's name for what is on screen is quality-power, an intensity presented for its own sake and cut loose from whatever it belongs to. This is not aestheticizing. It is a demonstration. By taking the name away and handing it back, the film shows how much of the horror was living in the noun.

Brakhage learned the moving camera from Marie Menken, whose untripodded Bolex, its pulse-driven pans and breath-length bursts on a wound spring, he credited with freeing his hand. The spring gives roughly twenty seconds per wind, so the film's basic unit is the length of a held breath. He had found the motor behavior already in Sirius Remembered, passing the camera over a decaying dog again and again, the speed of the pan standing in for his inability to hold still in front of it, and he had already dissolved flesh into color and back in Window Water Baby Moving. Deleuze's late category for work like this is a cinema of the body, where postures and attitudes carry the duration and no plot is being served. P. Adams Sitney called Brakhage's mode the lyrical film, the camera standing in for the filmmaker's own seeing. Same observation, reached from the other side.

Nothing builds. There is a procedural arc, because the autopsy has one and Brakhage mostly honors it, but no crisis and no resolution, and the film ends the way a shift ends. Dead time, temps mort, is normally a pause inside a story where the everyday is simply held. Here it is the entire running time. Bodies keep arriving, the room keeps working, and that is the form.

Deleuze's last claim for cinema is that it can stage an encounter with what thought cannot think. This film does not resolve its own ethical problem and has never pretended to. The dead did not consent. Their faces are shown. It has been screening for fifty years, and since the Criterion anthology it can be watched in a living room, which is a different act again. Brakhage's defense was always the necessity of seeing, never permission. The argument has not settled, and its refusal to settle is why the film survives.

What it did to filmmaking is checkable. Franju had shown in Le Sang des bêtes that in a film about killing it is the formal register, not the subject, that carries the ethical argument. Deren had established the one-person, co-op-distributed model that lets an uncommissioned camera into a county building at all. Brakhage took both and produced the proof that a camera's behavior is itself an ethical statement, legible in the movement alone, with nothing else in the film to state it. That is why Leviathan reads as descent and not resemblance, why the flat durational attention to death in Van Sant's Gerry and Elephant carries the mark, and why every argument since about mondo footage and circulating real death has this film standing on the other side of the line.

Watch it again for the operator. Not the tables, not the organs. Watch for the moment the camera decides to move, and ask what moved it.