Seeing With One's Own Eyes

The movie is credited to be one of the most direct confrontations with death ever filmed. It looks into three actual autopsies and documents the procedures preformed upon the bodies which enter into the morgue. The film is supposedly in direct juxtaposition to the fictional documentations of supernatural death which we have otherwise encountered in class.

Called the longest awkward silence ever filmed, Brakhage’s film has no sound. This could have been a choice made because sound typically tells a viewer how to feel about the images they are seeing. The reasoning behind making the film entirely silent may be to add an air of realism in that if the viewer were watching such processes take place in front of them, they would have to experience their own emotions in relation to the visuals rather than what a director decides they should feel when he alters the sound. However, in this removal of sound, Brakhage does seem to strip the autopsies of their realism.

The only faces seen in the film are those of the coroners, and even these are never seen as the autopsy practices are performed on each cadaver. The cadaver’s faces are not seen in full for legal reasons, however it is unclear as to why Brakhage felt it necessary to refrain from showing the faces of the coroners and morgue staff except when they are in situations which do not directly involve the cadavers. Perhaps this speaks to some desire to not connect conscious humans to the condition of death and the actions they are performing which would be horrifying if the bodies used were not already dead and it was in the name of science. That being said, the faces seen in the film are two instances of a coroner, once reporting on a cadaver’s clothes as a cadaver lies on the metal table behind him, half protected from the camera by his white lab coat, and another coroner in the end recording the autopsy process and findings vocally.

The other face which is seen is of a morgue staff member who wears orange gloves, as opposed to the white of the doctors. He is seen briefly before he begins to mop up the floor of the room in which the bodies were essentially emptied of anything which could be valuable. Interestingly, this individual is wearing headphones, implying that he, like the viewer, also does not have the full realism and sound of the situation. Perhaps this is a necessary thing for detachment in the situation.

At the time this film was made, it was revolutionary, hailed as perhaps the first true horror film. While it was an interesting look at death, I feel that the realism was stripped with the sound and it was no different from any of the other images this desensitized generation I hail from encounter. This stripping of realism, I feel, could have been prevented had Brakhage not insisted on using a variety of filters which tinted organs unbelievable colors, experimental angles which makes a freshly rinsed cadaver look like the Hostel edition of Barbie, and unnecessary close up shots that made a hollowed out human chest cavity look more like an artsy meat sculpture of the Grand Canyon.