The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes
Stan Brakhage, 1971, 32 min, 16mm

Introduced by Molly Miles and Lucy Peters

Preceded by
Obverse and Reverse
Barbara Rupik, 2020, 8 min

In conversation with Tyler Thier’s Little White Lies article ‘In Praise of Stan Brakhage’s Most Disturbing Film Document’, Electric Blue presents a corpus of cinematic bodies, surgically unpicking cinema's complex histories of seeing and unseeing the flesh we all possess. The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes is the final film in Brakhage’s Pittsburgh Trilogy, a silent meditation on death depicting real bodies lying in a morgue. Described by Thier as “one of the starkest works of body horror” in which Brakhage “makes the monster our very own perception”, this work derives its title from the word ‘autopsy’ to consider how we see, and what we see on the cinema screen.

With thanks to Little White Lies, Tyler Thier, LUX archives, Lodz Film School and Marilyn Brakhage. 

More info:
https://www.instagram.com/electricbluecinema/?hl=en
https://www.instagram.com/categoryhfilms/?hl=en
https://www.instagram.com/taxidermybreakfast/?hl=en