Stan Brakhage's Autopsy: The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes

The apparatus does as the photographer desires, but the photographer can only desire what the apparatus can do.

—Vilém Flusser

let us begin with an experiment. I want you to close your eyes, just for a moment, and gently use your fingers to push on your lidded eyeballs. Try applying pressure in different places for varying lengths of time. What do you see? Do you "see" anything, or do you just intuit the faint outline of shapes and brief flashes of light? Do you see little splotches of color or ghostly geometric shapes? It is quite likely you do, but then again, you may not. One question this experiment raises would be: what exactly are we seeing, and what does it mean to "see" if our eyes are closed?

In 1926, Heinrich Klüver, a University of Chicago psychologist and future participant in the Macy Conferences, determined that these visions, or entoptic phenomena—also known as phosphenes—"cannot be influenced by 'thinking' and 'will'" (503). For experimental filmmaker and writer Stan Brakhage, these insights into "the perpetual play of shapes and colors on the closed eyelid," the realization that "[these] abstractions which move so dynamically when closed eyelids are pressed are actually perceived" (Brakhage 13), would become fundamental to his theory of vision and aesthetic practice.

The extent to which Brakhage's writings and films describe or posit phosphenes and other internally or autopoietically produced visions as main artistic influences poses a problem of aesthetic origin, and in the case of Brakhage's film The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1971), it becomes a problem not only of genre but also of artistic practice and its relation to the apparatus of film. What Brakhage is at pains to describe in Metaphors on Vision and represent in his films is not only the prerepresentational or unmediated content of the artist's very personal imagination (and indeed for Brakhage, the artist's personal vision always comes first). Instead, what Brakhage describes in his writings originates from and emerges out of the co-constitutive relationship that obtains between filmmaker and machine so that the entire machinic apparatus of the camera can be considered to structure and determine the form and content of Brakhage's artistic output. As suggested by this article's epigraph, Brakhage's camera yields to the filmmaker's desire only insofar as the filmmaker's desire is constrained by the camera's technical affordances: poiesis constrained by techne.

However, as soon as we attempt to describe Brakhage's often fantastical, psychedelic films, we often hit a discursive wall. Why are Brakhage's films so difficult to talk about? How are Brakhage's films able to render linguistic description so impotent? The standard literarycritical toolkit does not seem to apply to the films because most of them are non-narrative and do not contain plots or characters, thereby making it almost impossible to discuss a Brakhage film in relation to narrative analysis. An approach indebted to art criticism might yield up certain insights into the films that would be beneficial. And of course, film theory offers us a rich descriptive vocabulary from which we could begin an analysis. Considering film theory and philosophy alongside media theory is, I think, the most useful discourse available to us for describing Brakhage's oftentimes perplexing, though mesmerizing, films. By drawing from film theory and philosophy and from the insights of apparatus theory in particular, we are able to unpack the ways in which Brakhage's personal aesthetic ideal—"closed-eye visions" and so on—cannot be separated from the material/technological aspect of filmmaking.

It is precisely in this sense, then, that Brakhage's claims to artistic autonomy—or his "personalist" approach to filmmaking—collapse under the weight of their own romantic baggage. In what follows, I argue that Brakhage's unique visual aesthetic, coupled with his theory of filmmaking, be reconsidered as "autopoetic" phenomena,¹ a portmanteau that combines "autopoiesis" with "poetics" (McGurl 112). The difference between the term "autopoetics" (self-generated aesthetics) and "autopoiesis" (self-making) is a...