In a career loaded with visionary works, Stan Brakhage’s The Pittsburgh Documents (aka The Pittsburgh Trilogy) is a trio of masterworks, representing a radical approach to the cinematic document rooted in subjective observation. By training his eyes and the film medium on three subjects he felt were elusive, inscrutable, even fearful in their universality, Brakhage sought to gain some empathic foothold in these realms of authority (police), illness (hospital), and death (morgue). Introduced by Alison Taylor, author of Troubled Everyday: The Aesthetics of Violence and the Everyday in European Art Cinema. 16mm prints courtesy of the NFSA.

Eyes (1971, 35min)
An extended silent film poem about the Pittsburgh police. Brakhage follows the events of one night in a patrol car.

Deus Ex (1971, 33min)
Brakhage drew on the experience of the time he spent ill in hospital to create this film. It is inspired by Charles Olsen’s poem ‘Cob’s Island’ which begins, ‘I met Death/He didn’t bother me or say anything’. Brakhage describes heart surgery as, ‘equivalent to Aztec ritual sacrifice … the lengths men go to avoid so simple and straightforward a relationship with Death as Charles Olsen managed on/in “Cob’s Island”.’

The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971, 32min)
An extended silent film poem about an autopsy performed in a Pittsburgh coroner’s office. ‘Brakhage enters with his camera, one of the forbidden terrific locations of our culture, the autopsy room’—Hollis Frampton.