The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971)
Directed by Stan Brakhage
Brakhage’s silent, impressionistic document of several autopsies conducted at the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office is the final installment of his informal “Pittsburgh trilogy” of shorts observing the apparatus of the state in the administration of life and death. The film records the basest material reality of life with grim conviction, while insisting with equal firmness on the wonderment of subjectivity and the invisible bonds linking all humanity. Rendering the philosophical visceral, and vice-versa, it is as indelibly affecting, and as difficult to watch, as any other half-hour in the history of cinema, a pure and awful glimpse of the sublime. Eli Goldfarb (Apr 21, 7:30pm at Light Industry, at “Overdue,” presented by the critics Nicolas Rapold and Nick Pinkerton, preceding Thierry Zéno’s Des morts)