Kissing One's Own Eyes

As a huge fan of the long take and difficult material, Andy Warhol's The Kiss as well as Stan Brakhage's The Act Of Seeing With One's Own Eyes fits right to my palette, and provides some important perceptual modes that prior to his work had only been explored in the obscure.



The Kiss follows or even comments on the form of staging an act for the camera (instead of documenting life) first cultivated by Edison's work in the Black Maria studio, where the films shot were highly theatrical and artificial. Warhol repeats the same process here, only the artifice he has worked creates not a distant and theatrical space, but an intimate and borderline uncomfortable gaze. The viewer is forced to stand in place of the filmmaker behind the camera, which for me brings out a very uneasy, almost predatory twitch in poaching the images of these young lovers and their long snogs.

Similarly, Brakhage's piece forces you into a space that is not agreeable to most people. What is different about Act is that the visual confrontation does have cuts, and thus, we are pushed even closer to the subject by the filmmaker. One can discuss the thematic separation between to the two pieces, but what I find more interesting is the way both filmmaker's really strap you to the back of the camera and wrangle you in close to what you may not want to see.