10 5749@movingimage 12 1 0001

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE REAL Historicizing Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with one's
own eyes
Author(s): Juan Carlos Kase
Source: The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists,
Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 1-17
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/movingimage.12.1.0001
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ENCOUNTERS WITH
THE REAL
JUAN CARLOS KASE
Historicizing Stan Brakhages

The Act of Seeing with
ones own eyes
At first I kept telling people that I intended to interweave these Morgue

images with mountain-ranges, moons, suns, snow, clouds, etc.the mind
leaping to escape in every conceivable symbol.... One good look at the
footage (once that lab had processed these 3000-some feet) and I knew it was
impossible (for me now anyway) to interrupt THIS parade of the dead with
ANYthing whatsoever, any escape a blasphemy, even the escape of Art
as I had come to know itits lead/lied to inner self.
STAN BRAKHAGE DESCRIBING HIS EXPERIENCE OF EDITING THE MORGUE
F O OTA G E T H AT W O U L D B ECO M E T H E AC T O F S E E I N G W IT H O N E S O W N E Y E S
KASE 2
In the early 1970s, Stan Brakhage made a series of observational films that were intended,
at least initially, to survey three institutional cross sections of the city of Pittsburgh.1
These document films (as Brakhage labeled them) collectively represent a major
shift in his film practice as he turned his attention away from his own subjectivity and
toward the world outside. Well known as a filmmaker of expressive, painterly, abstract
films, Brakhage recalibrated his practice into that of an experimental documentarian.
For eyes (1971), the filmmaker shadowed police officers and presented a record of their
daily routines and sometimes unpredictable encounters with the criminals and citizens
of the city. In Deus Ex (1971), Brakhage entered a county hospital and created a visual
digest of an open-heart surgery and other invasive (and often bloody) medical proce-
dures. The third and final film in the series, The Act of Seeing with ones own eyes, was
shot in the Allegheny County morgue and features graphic imagery of human autopsies.
These landmark works of experimental nonfiction expand on the latent documentary
sensibility that manifested occasionally in earlier workssuch as Wonder Ring (1955)
and Thigh, Line, Lyre, Triangular (1961)and bring it to the foreground of his practice.
Shot over three or four days in late September 1971, The Act of Seeing documents the
activities of the county coroner, Dr. Cyril Wecht, and his staff as they perform the detailed
measurement, analysis, dissection, dismemberment, disemboweling, and cleaning of
a number of human bodies. As the apotheosis of the Pittsburgh trilogy, this enigmatic
and open work demands greater historical investigation, analysis, and understanding.2
With its overwhelmingly visceral content The Act of Seeing isas any uniniti-
ated viewer might expectan extremely difficult film to watch. For Brakhage, it was
also an exceptionally demanding film to make. Because of the historical singularity
and conceptual contradictions of The Act of Seeing, our contemporary understanding
of the film benefits significantly from new consideration of its production context and
its relation to a range of historical processes, material facts, and biographical details.
Such a pragmatic approach necessitates a consideration of the extratextual history of
the film, including its unique shooting conditions, anomalous material construction,
and sometimes misleading rhetorical framing. The historical resources that are now
available for the study of Brakhages workas is the case with numerous other experi-
mental filmmakersprovide new and exciting opportunities for a renewed understanding
of experimental film history that is informed more and more by archival research and
materialist historiography.
Undoubtedly, the most significant material resource for the study of Bra-
khages legacy is the Stan Brakhage Collection at the University of Colorado, Boulder,
which includes much of the filmmakers extensive, lifelong correspondence. After the
3 ENCOUNTERS WITH THE REAL
University of Colorado ob-

tained the collection through a
gift from the William H. Donner
Foundation, it was deposited
there in 20023. Since their
arrival in the Norlin Library,
the Brakhage Papers have
been diligently cataloged and
carefully maintained by the
meticulous archivist Bradley
Arnold. In addition to this ar-
chival collection, researchers
can also encounter significant
paper materials related to Bra-
khages work in selected other
locations. Both the library of
Anthology Film Archives in
New York City and the Jane Bra-
khage Wodening collection in
the Yale University Library offer
further opportunities to view
additional examples of the
Frames from The Act of Seeing
filmmakers voluminous letters. Many more of his letters with ones own eyes (1971).
can be found in the assorted collections and archives of

other friends, poets, artists, critics, and filmmakers. Of course, another major opportunity
for the study of Brakhages career is the living archive of experts and researchers who
have spent years immersed in diverse aspects of his life as a filmmaker. Collectively,
these resources present remarkable opportunities to reconsider, and perhaps chal-
lenge, the established critical orthodoxies that circumscribe Brakhages artistic legacy.
BRAKHAGES ARTISTIC IDENTITY
Throughout Brakhages roughly fifty-year career, most critics argued that his essential
contribution to cinema was his singular focus on the expressive power of the artists
imagination. Brakhages films demonstrate a virtuosic use of visual abstraction, fully
utilizing the plasticity of cinema and the artists creative vision to transform conventional
KASE 4
motion picture photography into something more sumptuous and less immediately
legible. In one of the first major appraisals of his work outside of small film journals,
art critic and professor Annette Michelson famously described this defining aspect of
Brakhages art as celebrating the imperial sovereignty of the Imagination.3 More
recently, scholar David James has written, along similar lines, that it was Brakhages
philosophical goal to use film to chart the depths of his own psyche.4 Critic P. Adams
Sitney has also argued forcefully for Brakhage as the visionary demiurge.5 Of course,
this interpretation of Brakhages aesthetic sensibility would not be so common if it
were not largely accurate.
In much of his work, including his most well known and critically acclaimed
filmssuch as Mothlight (1963), Dog Star Man (196164), and Scenes from Under Child-
hood (196770)Brakhage used celluloid as a purely visual tool (the vast majority of
his films are silent) to produce an imagined approximation of the experiences of first-
person perception, what he called moving visual thinking, a fundamentally subjective,
ahistorical, egocentric artistic undertaking. In its incredible richness of poetic abstrac-
tion, the majority of his work before the Pittsburgh trilogy perfectly epitomized these
expressive values. Most of his films are defined by a formal reflexivity that continuously
calls attention to the artists direct intervention in every frame, through gestural camera
movement, painting and scratching on the film emulsion, rapid-fire editing, and complex
laboratory effects (such as superimposition, matting, and cross-fades). In his Pittsburgh
films, Brakhage shifted his approach to film construction away from densely layered,
highly montage-based work, such as Scenes from Under Childhood, which featured up
to four distinct layers of interwoven footage (A-B-C-D rolls), and toward a more imme-
diate recording of a photographic encounter with real-world phenomena. This shift is
particularly noteworthy when one considers that these strikingly different films were
completed roughly a year apart.6
In his Pittsburgh films, Brakhage reconstituted the ontological disposition of
his film practice by representing the world and the artists temporal perception of it as
whole, integral, and historically contingent. Formally, Brakhage achieved this goal by
modifying his working methods and radically limiting his use of postexposure modi-
fications. The edited camera original that was used for printing the Pittsburgh films
only exists in A-roll and thus incorporates no postproduction effects whatsoever. In
The Act of Seeing with ones own eyes, Brakhage directed his artistic energies toward
the external, phenomenal universe and thus devised an artistic experiment in which he
could more effectively bridge the experiential space between the material world and the
perceiving self of the artist. In his voluminous correspondence from the period in which
he made the Pittsburgh films, Brakhage excitedly explained how his document films
represented a conscious and intentional transformation in both his working methods
and his ideas about cinema.7
In a November 10, 1971, letter to his friend and mentor, the elder filmmaker
James Broughton, Brakhage explained how his goals and artistic strategies were
changing: Ive been divesting myself of all elements in my work which would make a
visible container of the art of them. He then cataloged the filmmaking resources that
he had jettisoned: Sounds (as I never managed anything but an effective use of it, of-
ten arty), Paint and other chemicals (all use of them having been to express the inner,
ego-centered, vision of myself), multiple exposures and other specific lab effects (used
mostly in my work to show that mix of inner and outer seeing), Eisensteinian Editing
(used by everyone to re-arrange The Event according, at best, to the laws of memory,
the tyranny of re-membering, etc.).8 Brakhages new efforts to limit the influence of
his expressive ego were remarkable and surprising because an egocentric notion of
filmmaking as personal expression most effectively characterized his most well known
work up to this point.
With these films, Brakhage privileged The Event (as he describes it)the
encounter with the profilmic realabove and beyond the typically complex postproduc-
tion techniques that he had previously used. In his gathering and editing of the footage
from the autopsy experience, Brakhage consciously avoided the symbolic and poetic
tendencies of his earlier methods to create a film in which the images would have a
different kind of referential function. As he explained in a letter to filmmaker Hollis
Frampton in 1971, these new films would be evacuated of associative or philosophical
reference. Instead, he intended to make all reference terminate in the film and thus
discourage flights of intellectual or poetic extrapolation from the core visual facts of the
work.9 These observational films collectively represent Brakhages efforts to devise a
fresh breed of nonfiction film that is divorced from the ideological framing structures of
the documentary as he had come to understand it. Instead of tying his Pittsburgh films
to the didacticism of the rhetorical, persuasive tradition of the documentary, which is
generally traced to the symbolic father of that trajectory, John Grierson, Brakhage con-
nected his new filmmaking project to the earlier observational practice of the Lumire
brothers, in which the camera presented historical datum without any overarching
argument. To Brakhage, the works of the Lumire brothers, sometimes described in
early film literature as views, were, like his Pittsburgh trilogy, document films and
not documentaries.
In a letter to Frampton, Brakhage assessed the disparity between different
KASE 6
modes of nonfiction cinema: I am most concerned in my work at the moment with

Document (as distinct, as I can make it, from Documentaryknocking that airy off the
end giving me the sense Im escaping that rhetoric and outright propaganda associ-
ated with Old Doc school of film-making . . . that I would rescue ment for some end
in absolutehoping to get the Latins documentum sense of example in the first place
... where documentarys lesson now sits).10 Thus Brakhage defined documentary
cinema in generic terms as depending on certain rhetorical patterns and modes of
spectatorial manipulation. Yet document cinema is something altogether different.11 For
him, the essence of this nonfiction mode, both in practice and theory, is the indexical
directness that results from a historical encounter between a camera, a filmmaker, and
the world. In 1972, at a screening of Deus Ex and The Act of Seeing, he explained the
transformation of his filmmaking goals: I wanted to rely, in other words, on the pres-
ent moment in which I was photographing, and not depend that I should come back to
my work table, and become the great editor with the green nightshade who rearranges
the news for all of us.12
FILMMAKING AS PERSONAL ENCOUNTER
It was largely due to happenstance that Brakhage filmed his trilogy of document films
in Pittsburgh. During at least one dinner conversation with Sally Dixon, the film curator
at the Carnegie Museum of Art, and Michael Chikiris, a Pittsburgh photographer, Bra-
khage explained that for his entire life, he had harbored significant fears of the police,
hospitals, and morgues.13 Yet he felt a tangible need to confront these institutions to
overcome his anxiety. He thought that perhaps if he used a camera as an intermediary,
he could soften the impact of the encounter with these forces and thus diffuse his ap-
prehension. However, the opportunity to shoot such films had never presented itself,
Brakhage shoots in the Allegheny

and he felt that permission to film in these sorts County Morgue. Photographs by
Michael Chikiris. Stan Brakhage
of locales would likely be difficult to obtain. Dixon Collection, University of Colorado
Boulder.
and Chikiris offered their assistance in providing
access to such institutions. As a working photojournalist, Chikiris had an established
relationship with the Pittsburgh police and was certain that he would be able to lever-
age it into a filming opportunity for Brakhage. Similarly, Dixon was close with a head
surgeon at a local hospital who could likely authorize such a project. As a result of their
contacts as well as their enthusiasm for Brakhages cinema, Dixon and Chikiris were
able to aid the filmmaker in initiating this new chapter in his work. As a result, he made
a number of return trips to Pittsburgh to shoot these new projects, while also showing
some of his films locally, a factor that helped to finance his travel.14
On a personal level, Brakhages filmmaking experiences in Pittsburgh were
traumatic and immensely challenging. In a psychoanalytic sense, these encounters with
law enforcement, medicine, and death represented a coming to terms with, in Brakhages
language, the bogeymen that had haunted him for his entire life. By all accounts, the
most challenging of Brakhages filmmaking experiences in Pittsburgh was his direct
encounter with a number of dead bodies in the local morgue. On many counts, The Act
of Seeing simultaneously embodied a personal crisis and a concomitant transformation
of Brakhages aesthetic identity.
As he finished shooting in Pittsburgh, Brakhage wrote a letter to his wife in
which he summarized the anxious predicament that he faced in his visits to the morgue:
I tried very hard to write you several days ago, after my first experience at the
morgue; but I simply couldnt put more than 3 or 4 words together articulately.
After the 2nd, Sundays, experience there I was all but speechless. (Can you
imagine Brakhage speechless?)
KASE 8
It has been something terrible to face.

Oh Jane, it is ... I just dont know how to write about it. The dead, cut open
in autopsy, look like two incongruities: dress dummies and meat. The scalp
is cut, pulled down over the face. The face, like a mask, retains its features
even when loosened from the bones. The body gapes. It is a chasm attached
to model limbs.15
He continued his letter by describing the horrific nightmares that he experienced dur-
ing this period, in which he envisioned himself in anguished exchanges with the dead
bodies that fill the morgue and the doctors who dissect them. He concluded his letter by
reiterating his experience as an encounter with something dark and unbearable: Ive
faced something terrible here.16 As this correspondence indicates, The Act of Seeing
was the product of one the most overwhelming aesthetic and emotional challenges of
Brakhages life.
Produced on a personal and artistic precipice, this unprepared, unrehearsed
film was, quite literally, an experiment. Brakhage described the indeterminate nature of
his voyage toward an unexplored aesthetic frontier: But I know less about this filming,
have much less sense of what Ive photographed, than ANY film previously.17 Both dur-
ing the shooting and editing of the film, Brakhage was unsure what kind of work would
result from this traumatic encounter with the bare material facts of life and death. It is
clear that he was working far outside his comfort zone, both in content and style; he
was also testing the limits of his own aesthetic system. By choosing the most difficult,
almost unbearable visual spectacle of the dead as his subject, he was interrogating
the mediums capacity to register subjectivity and affect without the imposition of a
guiding rhetorical directive.
THE MATERIAL OF THE FILM
In his three or four trips to the county morgue, Brakhage shot roughly an hour and a halfs
worth of footage, over three thousand feet of 16mm reversal film stock. The final work
that he produced from that material is thirty-one minutes long, about one-third the length
of the total footage. In a number of letters from this period, he made it clear, through
the tone of his writing, that he was surprised and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of
film that he exposedas if it were a compulsive and perhaps defensive response to an
emotionally overwhelming situation. The shooting ratio of this film (of exposed camera
original to final cut) is substantially larger than that of most of Brakhages work. For the
Letter to Jane Wodening

majority of his films, he carefully controlled the volume (then Brakhage), 2nd
Tues in Pittsburgh 1971.
of exposed film stock through diligent and rigorously Stan Brakhage Collection,
economical shooting methods.18 As the basic arithmetic University of Colorado
Boulder.
here suggests, the final film was significantly edited
down from the camera originals and thus presents fascinating revelations about Bra-
khages working methods. For example, despite the extensive excisions that he made,
Brakhage left substantial sections of his shooting chronology intact and unmodified.
This was something that was entirely atypical for a filmmaker who carefully modified
almost every single frame of the camera originals in his previous work by transforming
them through editing and a wide range of laboratory processes into complex collages
of discontinuous temporalities and heterogeneous visual textures.
Insofar as The Act of Seeing contradicts the dominant expressive tendency
in Brakhages filmography, it represents a massive modification of the filmmakers
artistic disposition and a fresh negotiation with the profilmic real of the world in front
of the camera. Nevertheless, it becomes clear on viewing the edited camera original,
which became the printing master, that Brakhages claims about his editing process
and the purity of its methods were overstated. Though he suggested on numerous oc-
casions that he simply cut away the footage that felt extraneous, he in fact restructured
significant portions of the exposed film in his editing process. Thus, though The Act of
Seeing forges a renewed, transformed relationship between Brakhages films and the
K A S E 10
external world, it also demonstrates that he was unable to completely let go of some
core sense of artistic agency and control.
There are clues regarding this inconsistency in some of Brakhages early com-
ments about the film. At the public debut of the work at the Millennium Film Workshop in
New York in February 1972, the filmmaker made the following contradictory statements
within a few minutes of each other: In The Act of Seeing with ones own eyes you see
everything exactly in the order in which it was shot. There is very little cutting.19 (This
is a strange statement, considering that he edited about ninety minutes of footage into
a half-hour film.) Shortly after explaining this temporal detail of the works construction,
Brakhage contradicted his earlier statement: And all of the rearranging that occurs in
the film, and there is in fact quite a lot of it, is purely to use this full [color] palette. I
will shift footage around so that I can shift from one color tone to another.20 It is clear
from this description that Brakhage felt some ambivalence about exposing his working
methods, like a magician concerned that the aura of the miraculous would evaporate
from his work once its details were revealed. This impression of the filmmakers reti-
cence to reveal his techniques is supported by a letter to Ed Dorn, in which he writes,
Im just hoping that I dont find myself in the absurd position of lecturing on the Art of
these recent films in specific detail when its managed to conceal itself as beautifully
as it has.21 However, there is no reason that a consideration of Brakhages working
methods in The Act of Seeing should detract in any way from an appreciation of its artistic
and philosophical significance.
As mentioned earlier, significant portions of the final work were made from long
strips of unedited camera original that Brakhage kept largely intact without modification
in postproduction, either through editing or optically printed effects. The edits that one
sees in these sections of the filmas well as a lengthy uncut section of forty feet (over a
minute) in the first third of the filmwere completed entirely in-camera. These exposed
sections thus retain traces of their contingency as parts of a chronological filmmaking
event, as evidenced through the films flash frames, which are produced by the partial
exposures that accompany in-camera edits on a Bolex. When analyzing Brakhages
edited camera originals, it becomes clear that the major sections of the film, which
correspond roughly to the autopsies of four different people, are kept loosely intact.22
For this film, the textual integrity of Brakhages editing process seems, for the most
part, to have respected the bodily integrity of its subjects.
Still, Brakhages claims about his editing process and its straightness have
proven to be significantly overstated when considered in relation to the final edited
film. By studying the edge numbers on the camera originals, we learn on one hand that
11 E N C O U N T E R S W I T H T H E R E A L
Frame from The Act of Seeing

with ones own eyes.
the filmmaker left significant sections of the camera original uncut (sometimes up to
one minute in length), while on the other hand, there was also a noticeable reshuffling
of shots within each section. It thus becomes clear that though Brakhage severely
constrained his montagist tendencies in this film, there is nevertheless a significant
amount of historical rearrangement of footage within the temporal flow of the final work.
To further dull the force of the editing, and to limit the collision of montage
in this film, Brakhage often began and ended his shots with quick in-camera fades to
and from black. Similarly, he carefully controlled each exposure through the nuanced
modification of his cameras aperture over the course of a shot rather than in postpro-
duction, which is much more flexible in its allowance for the controlled recalibration of
light. In this sense, much of this film functions as an index of Brakhages own meeting
with the bodies in the Pittsburgh morgue, as documented by the apparatus of his mo-
tion picture camera. Like Andy Warhols use of entire unedited camera reels throughout
his major sound films of the 1960s, such as Kitchen (1965) or The Chelsea Girls (1966),
K A S E 12
Brakhages use of in-camera edits and real-time image modification partially conserved
the historical conditions of encounter between the artist and the phenomenal world.
Nevertheless, Brakhage was not a naive believer in filmic illusionism. In his
conscious and careful use of diverse film stocks, Brakhage acknowledged the cameras
role in mediation. In The Act of Seeing, he intentionally chose to use seven different
film stocks, each of which featured a particular speed, color temperature, and granular
texture. Such choices were rarely, if ever, casual for Brakhage. Therefore, though the
filmmaker limited his authorial modifications to the photographic image, he neverthe-
less created a film that foregrounds its own process of mediation through its willful use
of markedly different representational materials. He explained this connection between
his shooting experience and his film materials: The rhythm reflects directly my feelings,
my movements, my heartbeat, my aversion at times. In this case, I use seven kinds of
film, EF daylight, EF tungsten, [Ektachrome] MS, Kodachrome tungsten, Kodachrome
daylight, commercial Ektachrome ... plus two filters, plus three light sources.23 As
Brakhages description suggests, in this work, he rearticulated the site of his autho-
rial inscription more forcefully within the shooting stage of the filmmaking process.
As such, this work showcases the color qualities of the myriad lights, filters, and film
stocks that Brakhage chose at the time of the films exposure rather than in postpro-
duction modification, which he sometimes described pejoratively as aftering. As a
result, The Act of Seeing is a Brakhage film that demonstrates his control of light and
color like few others.
ARCHIVAL RESEARCH IN THE SERVICE OF HISTORIOGRAPHY
Brakhage generally explained and contextualized The Act of Seeing in terms of his experi-
ence of making it, as a record of his own experimental process, or in his words, a track of
my disturbances.24 This film and its coextensive registers of biography, aesthetics, and
ethics encapsulate a subtle and complex weave of detached observation and committed
intimacy. This landmark work of nonfiction is underpinned by the basic philosophical
assertion that filmmaking can intervene into the flux of life and death by taking a cross
section of history. Yet it also suggests a cautious self-awareness about the rhetorical
and philosophical significance of such a documentary practice. The Act of Seeing is
a delicate, nuanced work about transcription and observation that, in profound ways,
implicitly suggests a number of methodological strategies for the practice of its own
historicization. In other words, as a work about history, observation, and affect, The Act
of Seeing foregrounds the active nature of historicization itself. As such, it suggests to
the historian who attempts to contextualize it that it be assessed and studied with the
sensitivity of the coroners in the Allegheny County morgue.
In The Act of Seeing, Brakhage produced a filmic experiment that provoked and
transcribed extreme encounters of somatic tension and ontological crisis to reveal the
fault lines between human bodies and the technologies that circumscribe them in art.
To understand the anxious network of aesthetic problems and issues that surround this
challenging work, there are benefits to be found in pursuing a range of historical detail
beyond that which is contained within the limits of the film text itself. Just as Brakhage
yearned to know more about the lives of the people who lay on the dissection table of
the coroners office by dutifully collecting their obituaries, the history of experimental
cinema continues to encourage a degree of historical detail that extends beyond the
blunt textual borders of the work.25 In the current scholarship on experimental cinema,
increasing numbers of researchers are utilizing archives and concrete film materials to
revisit and reassess the historical record written by earlier generations. Historians of
experimental film are following the examples set by scholars of silent cinema, who have
long worked with paper and celluloid collections of film archives, as well as art histo-
rians, who have an established tradition of archival research. Recent and forthcoming
work on Hollis Frampton, Stan VanDerBeek, Len Lye, Bruce Conner, Andy Warhol, and
Tony Conrad attests to this shift toward a history of experimental film that is enhanced
by hands-on archival research and materialist historiography.
To the historian of cinema, Hollis Frampton may offer some parameters for
reflection. In a typically poetic turn of phrase, he crafted a sympathetic response to the
web of anxieties and ideas that Brakhage presented to him in his document corre-
spondence, even though the two filmmakers had still not met in person. Of Brakhages
experience in converting his morgue footage into a finished film, Frampton wrote,
What was to be done in that room, Stan? And then, later, with the footage?
I think it must have been mostly to stand aside; to clear out, as much as
possible, with the baggage of your own expectations, even, as to what a work
of art must look like; and to see, with your own eyes, what coherence might
arise within a universe for which you could only decree the boundaries.26
Framptons statement speaks to the philosophical challenges that face nonfiction film-
makers and film historians alike, people who are required by the definition of their crafts
to intervene in the flux of history by situating subjects and objects within some kind
of artistic or conceptual framework. Implicitly, Frampton suggests that any meaningful
K A S E 14
artistic encounter with the material world demands that the integrity of its subject be
respected such that it is allowed to manifest its own coherence from within. As Brakhage
directly faced the real material conditions of death in the Allegheny County morgue,
his filmmaking allegorized the ways in which his practice might be studied and histo-
ricized. In his attempt to strip away the core expressive techniques of his filmmaking
style, Brakhage aspired to a more direct kind of access to the visual and experiential
facts surrounding his subject. In a parallel sense, film historians may continue to learn
from Brakhages examplethe fretful yet disciplined encounter with the real that is
represented by The Act of Seeingto humbly and cautiously approach the real of film
history by respecting its integrity and recognizing the very details of its contingency as
facts that will always, in some fundamental way, exceed our capacity to contain them
in any rhetorical form.
Brakhage was a filmmaker of massive scope. He produced over four hundred
films that collectively embody the conceptual paradox of an extreme heterogeneity
and total conceptual unity. Similarly, his gift for rhetorical and poetic inspiration was
defined simultaneously by its hyperbolic excess and its overwhelming persuasiveness.
In this sense, there was no one Stan Brakhage; there were many. He was a filmmaker of
extreme philosophical complexity and rhetorical contradiction, and for that reason, his
Pittsburgh films have often been understood as strange anomalies rather than landmark
transitional works. In the brief assessment presented here, I have attempted to outline
the aesthetic and historical territories that circumscribed The Act of Seeing as both a
concrete material object and a conceptual construction of Brakhages own lifelong pro-
cess of self-mythologization. Recent trends in avant-garde film historiography promise
a continued integration of its material histories, as encountered within film archives
and paper collections, into a wider range of cultural reference and interaction. Within
such historical studies, a coherence may arise from within the works and their overlap-
ping personal, social, and material landscapes, as we onlookers from the present look
toward an unruly past of experimentation and aesthetic exploration for which we can
only decree the boundaries.
Juan Carlos Kase is assistant professor of film studies at the University of

North Carolina Wilmington. His ongoing research concerns the overlapping
aesthetic, historical, and political registers of experimental cinema, documen-
tary, art history, performance, and popular music within American culture.
NOTES
1. The epigraph with which this essay begins is from Brakhages letter to
Robert Creeley, November 22, 1971, Stan Brakhage Collection, University of
Colorado Boulder. For all the letters quoted in this essay, I have maintained
Brakhages original, and often eccentric, punctuation, capitalization, and
spelling. Though it has not always been printed as such, Brakhages title for
the film was intended to feature the eccentric orthography I use throughout
this essay and in my own title, in which the first four words are capitalized
and the last four are not. This is also how the scratched titles appear in the
finished film. As he explained to Hollis Frampton, The large case letters de-
liberately setting this context in opposition to The Art of Vision. Brakhage
letter to Frampton, November 22, 1971, Stan Brakhage Collection, Univer-
sity of Colorado Boulder. The Art of Vision (1965) is a very different kind of
Brakhage film, featuring an incredibly dense layering of multiple strands of
superimpositions. A hyperbolically plastic work, it represents the opposite
tendency of Brakhages aesthetic methodology.
2. The earlier scholarship on The Act of Seeing focuses primarily on textual
analysis. The published criticism includes a number of astute readings of the
film, including an early essay by Daniel H. Levoff (who was then a graduate
student of professor and critic Annette Michelson) and a more recent con-
sideration by scholar Bart Testa. See Levoff, Brakhages The Act of Seeing
with Ones Own Eyes, Film Culture 567 (1973): 7381; Testa, Seeing with
Experimental Eyes: Stan Brakhages The Act of Seeing with ones own eyes,
in Documenting the Documentary, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Slo-
niowski, 26985 (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1998).
3. Annette Michelson, Camera Lucida, Camera Obscura, 1973, repr. in
Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker, ed. David E. James, 3656 (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2005).
4. David E. James, Allegories of Cinema (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1989), 35.
5. See P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde,
19432000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Because of his interest
in defining Brakhage as a romantic visionary whose work was founded on
the celebration of the imagination, Sitney was less sympathetic, in a critical
sense, to the bluntly observational Pittsburgh films. Brakhage complained
that Sitney and other critics wanted him to continue working in the same
expressive mode as his earlier films, producing Son of Dog Star Man, Dog
Star Man Returns, Dog Star Man Meets the Wolf Man. Brakhage, Stan and
Jane Brakhage (and Hollis Frampton) Talking, in Brakhage Scrapbook (New
York: Documentext, 1982), 200.
6. This is a technical detail pointed out by archivist Mark Toscano.
7. Throughout the large corpus of letters from this periodwhich Marie
Nesthus has described as The Document CorrespondenceBrakhage
exchanged conceptual missives about his recent work with critic Annette
Michelson; filmmakers Hollis Frampton, James Broughton, and Jonas Mekas;
K A S E 16
and poets Ed Dorn and Robert Creeley. See Nesthus, The Document Corre-
spondence of Stan Brakhage, Chicago Review 478, no. 1 (20012): 13356.
8. Brakhage letter to James Broughton, November 10, 1971, Stan Brakhage
Papers, University of Colorado Boulder. In a letter to Robert Creeley, he
described this choice in slightly different terms: Some of the obvious mani-
festations of that direction [of the Pittsburgh document films] are my selling
all sound equipment, giving away paints and chemicals, eschewing lab effects
which would be obvious as such and giving up those forms of editing which
operate as absolute control over the immediate means of photography.
Brakhage letter to Robert Creeley, November 22, 1971, Stan Brakhage Collec-
tion, University of Colorado Boulder.
9. Brakhage letter to Hollis Frampton, November 22, 1971, Stan Brakhage
Collection, University of Colorado Boulder.
10. Ibid.
11. For a more thorough and detailed consideration of Brakhages attitude
toward conventional documentary, as well as its articulation in his personal
correspondence, see Nesthus, Document Correspondence of Stan Bra-
khage.
12. Stan Brakhage at Millennium, Millennium Film Journal 479 (20078):
7.
13. A film about football was also planned but never finished.
14. Robert Haller, who is currently the director of library collections at An-
thology Film Archives, provided this anecdote. Telephone conversation with
the author, September 13, 2011. For more on experimental film culture in
Pittsburgh in this period, see Haller, Crossroads: Avant-Garde Film in Pitts-
burgh in the 1970s (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 2005).
Regarding the dinner conversations that contributed to this decision,
Haller mentioned one with Dixon and Chikiris in Pittsburgh, and Brakhage
mentioned one with them at his home in Colorado. Stan Brakhage at Mil-
lennium, 1415. Dixon confirms that this conversation, which catalyzed the
Pittsburgh Trilogy, took place at her home. Sally Dixon, telephone conversa-
tion with the author, March 30, 2012.
15. Brakhage letter to Jane Wodening (then Brakhage), 2nd Tues in Pitts-
burgh Sept 1971, Stan Brakhage Collection, University of Colorado Boulder.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid. These letters to his wife provide detailed insight into the private life
of the filmmaker as well, including vivid descriptions of his dreams and curi-
ous anecdotes, such as the offhand mention that he appeared on television
during his visit to Pittsburgh.
18. Brakhage in fact repurposed a small amount of the unused footage from
The Act of Seeing for Murder Psalm (1980), a work that reflects on violence
and death and includes a fair amount of found footage and industrial imagery.
This conservation of film stock was typical of the filmmaker; he often used
outtakes from one film in other works such that his overall shooting ratio
might be closer to a one-to-one ideal than the ratios of most other experimen-
tal filmmakers.
19. Stan Brakhage at Millennium, 15.
20. Ibid., 16.

21. Brakhage letter to Ed Dorn, November 24, 1971, Stan Brakhage Collec-
tion, University of Colorado Boulder.
22. For example, by studying the edge numbers and edge labeling of the film
stocks of the different sections, we were able to ascertain that much of the
first section of the film was shot on Ektachrome EF Tungsten (7242), the sec-
ond on Ektachrome EF Daylight (7241), the third on Kodachrome II, and the
fourth on Ektachrome Commercial (7255). In addition, the dating of the first
section of the film indicates that it was processed September 1971, whereas
the last section was processed October 1971. I thank Mark Toscano for this
opportunity to study Brakhages camera originals and for his detailed techni-
cal guidance.
23. Stan Brakhage at Millennium, 15. He continues, So there are two
kinds of neon, one tungsten lamp, and daylight. For two hours a day there
was daylight coming into these subterranean rooms. I have enough experi-
ence now to have a pretty clear idea when Im shooting what qualities of
color these will produce. Ibid., 16.
24. Ibid., 21.
25. As Brakhage was shooting the film, he was also researching the lives and
identities of the dead that he had filmed by saving clippings from the local
newspapers obituary columns. At one point, he even thought of using these
texts in his film, though his agreement with the coroners office required that
he not show any identifying details of the dead, including their faces. Bra-
khage letter to Jane Wodening (then Brakhage), 2nd Tues in Pittsburgh Sept
1971, Stan Brakhage Collection, University of Colorado Boulder.
26. Frampton letter to Brakhage, January 26, 1972, printed in Millennium
Film Journal, 1618 (198687): 213.

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ENCOUNTERS WITH THE REAL Historicizing Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with one's

Historicizing Stan Brakhages

At first I kept telling people that I intended to interweave these Morgue

leaping to escape in every conceivable symbol.... One good look at the

ANYthing whatsoever, any escape a blasphemy, even the escape of Art

as I had come to know itits lead/lied to inner self.

STAN BRAKHAGE DESCRIBING HIS EXPERIENCE OF EDITING THE MORGUE

University of Colorado ob-

can be found in the assorted collections and archives of

BRAKHAGES ARTISTIC IDENTITY

modes of nonfiction cinema: I am most concerned in my work at the moment with

FILMMAKING AS PERSONAL ENCOUNTER

Brakhage shoots in the Allegheny

It has been something terrible to face.

THE MATERIAL OF THE FILM

Letter to Jane Wodening

Frame from The Act of Seeing

ARCHIVAL RESEARCH IN THE SERVICE OF HISTORIOGRAPHY

Juan Carlos Kase is assistant professor of film studies at the University of

20. Ibid., 16.

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