Metaphors On Vision Summary

There is an eye looks out from an inch-wide hole stamped out of a piece of unusually corrugated cardboard on the cover of a book. The book is the special issue of the journal Film Culture published in 1963. It is we are looking at, and is looking at us. In Metaphors on Vision, Brakhage (1963) claims that there is an original perspective of an eye. From Brakhage’s perspective, it is his eye that peers through the hole. It is his eye we are invited to see through. For many of his audiences in the years since the issue was produced that disembodied eye sums up all that is uncomfortable about Brakhage’s position. It signifies his passionate advocacy of the sovereignty of the eye and in turn his ambivalence to the particularity of the body of which it is a part.
Brakhage mentions that a single eye looking through a hole has an unusual vantage point. On the one hand, it is immobile, its vision is restricted to a limited field, yet without the confusions of binocular vision, the view can be understood as clearer, more commanding, than
They in essence blame their status in life on their parents. ‘It is because of my parents why I am like this’ or ‘the reason I am such and such is because my parents forced me into it- I did not have a choice’. However, what the film is actually saying is that we, the subjects of the film, actually have a choice. Physically, a birth is when sperm meets with the ovary. Out of millions of sperms only one actually gets to fertilise with the egg. Spiritually this is a condition of fate. It is as if the sperm and ovary are able to communicate and thus choose each other. In the pre-natal stage, we were the ones who actually chose our parents and at the same time, our parents select us. Through that decision, we came into being. Hence birth is a mutual selection between the child and the parents. We are born as a child so what we should do is to live the life that was given to