In the Flesh: Balázs, Brakhage, and the Anatomy of Filmic Gesture Stephan Boman (bio) In recent years, scholars have noted the timeliness of avant-garde works that foreground and dramatize the material qualities of photographic media.1 Materialist strategies are by no means new in avant-garde practice, but they seem newly significant for how they register deeper uncertainties about media transitions in the twenty-first century. This is especially vivid in a cycle of films that retrieve and rework old film footage, degraded celluloid whose “florid decay” indexes its susceptibility to random accidents, unstable environments, and the erosive work of time itself.2 These found-footage films enact layered forms of mourning—the vanishing (or departed) bodily figures etched in celluloid but also the tangible film elements themselves, in their physical disintegration and impending obsolescence—while eliciting complex lines of bodily response and psychic identification with the cinematic image.3 This entanglement of materialist practice and affective arousal points to unsettled questions about the status of physical media as well as the meaning of bodies in a culture increasingly defined by digital technologies, virtual spaces, and immaterial labor.4 We are by now used to asking how cinema is implicated in these rapid technological reformations, but to what extent can film still speak back to these cultural realities and anxieties? How does evoking film’s unstable, [End Page 305] imperiled physical basis (as celluloid) help us reflect on the body’s manifold production of meaning? Several major theoretical discourses have taken up these questions of filmic materiality and its ligature to human carnality, whether through layered structures of embodiment or viewer affect, or, as in the three essays cited above, by invoking analog film’s disputed indexicality. In thinking through these messy, suggestive alliances between film stock and bodily minutiae, the proceeding turns to Stan Brakhage’s 1971 film The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes. To be sure, Brakhage’s film belongs to a different historical moment, largely removed from the singular anxieties of the digital age. But as critics such as Ara Osterweil and Marie Nesthus have shown, the film was framed by a crisis that, for Brakhage, was at once artistic and existential—a period of alienation from his chosen medium that coincided with the death of a mentor and with the experience of filming human autopsies.5 Bearing out this seed of radical doubt, the film’s presentation of the postmortem body raises fundamental questions about the nature of filmic expression, especially the dialectic between the tactility of the cinema and its aesthetic meaning. The camera silently beholds pathologists as they reduce human bodies to blood, bone, and amorphous pulp, and yet nestled within this work of rending and rendering, we become attuned to a range of oddly humane gestures. In fact, Brakhage’s style not only helps us appreciate the rich ambiguities in these corporeal gestures but also seems to emulate them. The camera moves, reframes, and modulates itself in ways that seek analogy with the dexterity of the pathologists, with the repose of the deceased, and with whatever sort of understanding passes between them. In this way, the film asserts an essential bond between cinematic artistry and somatic communication, suggesting that cinema’s materiality stems from its roots in physical, tactile gestures—gestures it is intuitively able to capture and amplify and whose communicative logic it ultimately shares. “Gesture” can be broadly understood as covering the range of ways in which bodies make meaning, especially as visible body movements and poses. Drawing on its etymology—from the Latin gerere (“to carry, act, or do”), Carrie Noland defines gesture as “a corporeal practice engaging the fleshly human being,” stressing the contradictions and conflicts that attend both colloquial and academic understandings of gesture: they may be narrowly instrumental or explicitly communicative, full of personal feeling yet colonized by social conventions, an outlet of individual agency as well as an index of cultural determination.6 For these reasons, gesture demands a cross-disciplinary conversation, and of the scholarship [End Page 306] addressing the connections between cinematic expression and bodily gesture, two particular theorists loom large: Giorgio Agamben and Vilém Flusser. Agamben posits...
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Jan 15, 2024
Simon Rowberry 
Open Access
