Projection and discussion
Stan Brakhage : The Pittsburgh Documents
18 Jan 2023
The event is over
In the early 1970s, Stan Brakhage, the American filmmaker, made a series of films on three institutions in the city of Pittsburgh that are partially connected as instruments that control bodies: the police, the hospital and the morgue. United under the collective title The Pittsburgh Documents (sometimes also entitled The Pittsburgh Trilogy), the three films mark an epistemological break in Brakhage's work.
Known for the subjective stamp of his films, seeking to make the visual space of his film correspond to the act of "vision", in the broad sense of the word, here he proceeds in an openly different manner. The filmmaker favours, not the techniques of postproduction (editing or manipulating the film roll) but the contact between shots and "the event" (in his own words), i.e. the encounter with the profilmic. He nevertheless consciously rejects the documentary mode, opposing another term to it, document, in an explicit attempt to reconnect the word with its Latin etymology – documentum, "example". The radicality of Brakhage's project is reminiscent of the contemporary project of filmmakers and anthropologists Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel who, in their latest full-length film, De humani corporis fabrica, present an investigation of Parisian hospitals and the bodies that pass through them.
Stan Brakhage, Eyes, 1971, 16 mm, colour, silent, 35 min 18 s
Stan Brakhage, Deus Ex, 1971, 16 mm, colour, silent, 32 min 24 s
Stan Brakhage, The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, 1971, 16 mm, colour, silent, 31 min 56 s
Caution: certain scenes in these films may be upsetting to the public. Deus Ex contains images of surgical operations; The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes presents scenes from an autopsy.
Session presented by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel. Filmmakers and anthropologists, they work in the Sensory Ethnography Lab, a Harvard University research centre. They co-made Leviathan (2012), Caniba (2017) and Somniloquies (2017), which have contributed to redefining, from a formal and technological point of view, the scope of the contemporary documentary. This session is organised on the occasion of the public release (11 January) of their latest full-length film, De humani corporis fabrica.
When
7pm - 9:30pm
Caution: certain scenes in these films may be upsetting to the public
Where
Stan Brakhage, Deux Ex, 1971, film 16 mm, couleur, silencieux, 32 min 24 s, Achat en 1975 (Photogrammes)
© droits réservés © photo : Centre Pompidou, Mnam-Cci/Hervé Véronèse/Dist. RMN-GP