Film Blog: Stan Brackage Pittsburgh Trilogy

Because of L.A. traffic, and faulty google maps, I arrived about fifteen minutes late to this event.  I was surprised to enter to a packed room (though I guess that shouldn't have been a surprise) but more the oppressive silence that literally hurt my ears.  In fact I had never stepped into a room, much less with a performance (film or live) where the audience was that quiet, it was somewhat daunting.  One comment made by guest speaker Werner Herzog: Brackages’ lack of sound was a way of distancing the events from real life, to give the audience another point of view, not wholly in reality (though Brackage never intended for the audience to be completely silent, this apparently confused him).  Even with my love of silent films, this is a new idea for me.  I love sound, and while I appreciate silence, I have never though of using silence as sound.

I had seen clips of some of Brackages work, but because of the noise of my daily life, I guess I never realized that not only did he shoot most of his movies in silence, according to Werner Herzog, Brackage never used recorded even in his sound films.

The first two films really set me up and grounded me for Brackages intent, and what is called in the description "cinematic documentary".  Even with the weight of the silence I was looking through the screen at life as I had not seen it before, first "eyes" in the back of a Pittsburgh police cruiser in 1970, and then in "Deus Ex", an operating room up close and personal.  While "eyes" was pretty straightforward in shooting style, "Deus Ex" re-caught my attention when Brackage began playing with zoom and rack focus, lighting and silhouette, using the life images to make abstract and back again, giving an additional perspective to oddly mundane events.

I had previously seen a clip of the last film, "The Act of Seeing with one's own eyes", and though I didn't continue, something macho inside me said that I could - after all I was raised on violent and gory movies.  But watching the whole film grew hard and tiring, I went through phases of not recognizing the bodies as human, wondering why on earth they were being cut up that way, and even spaced out at points I think because it was just too real.  Afterwards Herzog mentioned that although this was the only one of the three he had seen before tonight, he had somehow blocked out all of the imagery, guessing for his own mental self-preservation.  For me, the images aren't necessarily blocked, and one stands out quite clear as I just can't justify it with life that I know: one of the final images of a purple skinned woman, I have to guess either decomposed or with a layer of fat so when she is slit open there is yellow adipose underneath.

When I was a kid, my friends and I used too skin road-kill at our school.  We got quite good at it, and I recognized the technique the doctors used to separate the skin from the body.  Another way I distanced myself from the reality of these images was by thinking of the animals, not humans, the road-kill, not by our own hand, that we skinned in a similar way.