Autopsy Report is certainly composed of visual images and language; it even starts with an image (“chests of drowned men, bound with ropes”) and not an action or character description. There was also something more visual and immediate by using so many hyphenated words: “diesel-slicked,” “sludge-filled” and “mud-smeared.” Instead of being slicked with diesel or smeared with mud, the mud and sludge were instantly acting in the image. The images of the dead bodies and the jars of organs stuck in my mind because of the many modifiers, but what made me queasy was when every day objects were described alongside the innards of human bodies. The human fat was yellow “as a carton sun, or sweet cream butter” and the abundance of organs lining a table was the numerous fruits at a grocery store.
These comparisons reminded me a lot of “Dust Off” not only because of the morbid discussions, but because my brain tied as many connections as I could between the images and the words, and these beautiful natural images which were calming became sad and uneasy. My brain tried to reconcile the beautiful images showing moments of life and movement and the sad awful descriptions of death. The snow blowing in the wind was suffocating the air and making it hard to breath, the tree branches were the frozen bronchioles of the lungs, the time-lapse of the sky was moving so fast like the speeding car (yet also so slowly), and the translucent jellyfish was naked, electric and so fragile. The swings in the playground reminded us that they were young boys, people’s children. The images straddled this line of being unlike, but also tied to the words, which for some reason made me feel uncomfortable.
Autopsy Report was also about this idea of being a present observer and looking on things. It introduces the idea of looking and being “so terribly here” and that “here could be at once a gesture of mourning and a gesture of ease.” That phrase captures how I feel about the “Dust Off” video, and the strange combination of something calm and something heavy.
Also, just a quick note on “Wolfvision.” I enjoyed Nick Twemlow’s description and reasoning for using found footage. He describes using various images from different sources as a “cinematic grammar” like using building blocks of words in writing. I like thinking of footage in this way because it focuses more on how you put different pieces together and how you use footage to create whole sentences or ideas. Also, framing the footage around the wolfvision projectors that enlarge and cast ghostly images of objects on a wall is pretty fascinating. What we see and how we see things can depend strongly on the context that what we see it in.
