Context and "The Act of Seeing..."

My physical reactions to The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes were visceral and easy to identify, but it took me a long time to identify and understand my emotional reactions. Like my classmates’, they were mixed. I want to start by responding to John's blog post, in which he briefly mentioned Brakhage’s suggestion that the Pittsburgh Trilogy was intended as a means of redeeming undervalued but important professions such as autopsists. It’s true that as a society we don’t really think too much about the stuff that happens behind the scenes when people die; doctors are revered, but coroners, morgue technicians, undertakers, embalmers… these invisible professions belong to the part of our society where we see certain work as necessary but prefer not to think about how it gets done (we have a similar attitude to sewage workers or trash collectors). Watching The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, I found myself constantly wondering about the people who were performing the autopsies, wanting to know who they were, how they lived, how they came to the profession, and, most importantly, how they felt about the whole thing.

But Brakhage never gives us any of this information, which I think is rather the point. I felt as though the film was more of a broad reflection on mortality than a documentary about a specific time and place. Bringing back Sontag, I’m not sure how I feel about this. The Act of Seeing has no captions, no voiceover, and no soundtrack. It offers no insight into the people conducting the autopsy. Instead, the film reads like a representation of the audience’s subjectivity: the objects are the corpses, and the subjects are not the medical examiners but the viewers, who express their subjectivity through their reactions. The lack of overt emotional guidance allows for a wider range of reactions, recalling Sontag’s point that “No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain” (7).

In his introduction, Brakhage describes his film as more akin to poetry than documentary, saying that the film is easier to watch because it is aestheticized, which creates a certain distance between the viewer and what is being shown. I wonder whether this is true. Art is matter out of place, but so is dirt. Are these autopsies easier or harder to watch out of context? And, more importantly, by taking them out of context is Brakhage making them more or less “true”? The lack of background information allows the audience to form their own opinions in the absence of a “voice of god”—a kind of postmodern “death of the author”. However, this absence also implies a universality, suggesting that the images on screen stand for themselves and do not need to be explained. By removing the images from their context, it seems as though Brakhage is objectifying the bodies and ignoring the autopsists in order to make some larger point about death and the human body. I appreciate the subjectivity, but at the same time I’m not sure if I think it's fair.