Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing With Ones Own Eyes (1971) focuses the relations between documentary and phantasy into a limit experience. The series of autopsies in a Pittsburgh morgue is nearly unmatchable, even for audiences accustomed a contemporary audio-visual context saturated with violence. The Act of Seeing With Ones Own Eyes is a difficult film to bear because it depicts cadavers without promoting the formation of a phantasy with which to screen them. The formal structure of Brakhage's film actually inhibits the production of phantasy.
Paratextually, The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes presents itself as a documentary. It is one of three documentaries Brakhage made about Pittsburgh in the early 1970s. Its amphibological title can be understood as referring to either sight as a authenticity's privileged sense, or to the experience of sight as authenticity itself. In either case the truth of the films images is invoked. Brakhage's film embodies the primordial documentary impulse to show its audience something actual. It does not go beyond that impulse. The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes depicts corpses without explaining them or containing them within a narrative. The film does not invoke scientific discourses about the dead bodies. The image is left raw.
My paper reads Brakhage's film along with Jacques Lacan's lectures on "The Gaze as a" to show how it counteracts phantasy. Unlike most documentaries The Act Of Seeing With One's Own Eyes is framed and cut in such a way as to constantly return audiences to an awareness of looking at the film's images. By constantly throwing the spectator back on to the experience of spectating the film does not give its audience the time of phantasy.
Like The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes André Bazin's essay "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" works the themes of death and plastic representation. In light of Bazin's demonstration that photography is the realization of the drive to defeat death through the endurance of the image, the above analysis of Brakhage's film suggests that the film is an example of pure cinema. In depicting the corpse the camera is enacting its essence. This reminder of the essence of cinema presented as the trace of an encounter with the real itself blocks the production of phantasy.
The themes of the corpse and the image are also developed in Maurice Blanchot's "Two Versions of the Imaginary." Blanchot's essay argues that "The cadaver is its own image" because both the cadaver and the image continue to "affrim things in their disappearance." By making a film which depict the cadaver Brakhage creates a sort of mise-en-abyme, an image of an image.
The mise-en-abyme of Brakhage's film divides the image in such a way that it has no unitary trait and cannot serve as an imaginary mirror in which a spectatorial subject finds the mirage of its unity reflected. In the so called classical documentary the unitary trait is granted by the film's narration. In the absence of that or any other structure capable of suturing subject, the the vision that the film throw us back onto is fragmentary. Without the a the film cannot serve as the locus of fantasy.