About the Film

Nascentes Morimur developed from an earlier version first presented at Martos Gallery in 2008 as part of the exhibition Like a Shipwreck We Die Going Into Ourselves, together with a series of still photographs. I filmed four autopsies during the project, but the completed film remains entirely with the first.

I grew up around medicine. My father was a surgeon and sometimes brought me into the operating room, hoping that I might also become a doctor. I briefly entered medical school before leaving it for art. The surgical environment was therefore familiar to me, but filming an autopsy became a way of confronting my fear of death and lessening the distance between myself and what I saw.

Much of my work begins with a sense of separation between myself and the external world. I am drawn to subjects that intensify this estrangement because they test whether that separation can be overcome. Death presents the most extreme test: could I remain with it long enough for fear and separation to give way, however briefly, to intimacy? Filming becomes a way of attempting that crossing. The film’s visual language emerged from this effort to look closely without turning away. In Nascentes Morimur, flesh, cavities, organs, and instruments move between anatomical recognition and abstraction, emerging from darkness and disappearing into it again.

Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes—the title gives the literal meaning of the Greek word autopsy—was an important precedent, not merely because of the shared subject. In Brakhage’s film, the handheld camera has a raw, quivering intensity; one feels the filmmaker undergoing an overwhelming experience and nevertheless continuing to look. Nascentes Morimur has a similar aim, yet it is composed differently. Filmed largely from a tripod, it proceeds through slow, carefully lit tableaux in which the body emerges from darkness and recedes into it again. The controlled framing does not remove the horror, but holds it at a different pitch. Both films are silent.

As I said in an earlier interview about the work:

“In the end, doubt has been raised. One starts to look around the room at the living and the dead and question how real one’s own and others’ identities are. At the same time, one may be filled with simultaneous wonder and dread at the sheer fact of being alive in the body.”

Writing on the Film

Scott MacDonald, “Perception as Transcendence: Interview with Paweł Wojtasik,” Film Quarterly, Winter 2011

In this extensive interview, MacDonald discusses Nascentes Morimur as Wojtasik’s most direct confrontation with death. Their exchange considers the film’s relationship to Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, its silence, and its use of variable framing, including dark shapes that create frames within the frame and sometimes echo the incisions of the autopsy. The discussion opens into Wojtasik’s larger understanding of filmmaking as a movement from fear toward intimacy with what is difficult to face, and of perception as a possible path beyond fear.

Read the interview (PDF)

Robert Shuster, “Fall Preview: Jesper Just’s Schizo Enigma,” The Village Voice, September 4, 2008

Reviewing the Martos Gallery presentation of the work, Shuster describes its silent autopsy images as moving between bodily fact and abstraction. He singles out the “purplish skin, darkened cavities, and whorls of red viscera,” emphasizing the strange visual transformation produced by the film’s darkness, proximity, and framing.

Read the review at The Village Voice

Selected Presentations

REDCAT, Los Angeles, 2017
Cruel Radiance: Moving Image Work by Paweł Wojtasik

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, 2014
The Films of Paweł Wojtasik

Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, 2011

International House Philadelphia, 2011

Drexel University, Philadelphia, 2011

Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, 2009

Martos Gallery, New York, 2008
Solo exhibition; first presented under the title Autopsy as part of Like a Shipwreck We Die Going Into Ourselves

Distribution

Nascentes Morimur is distributed by Video Data Bank.

View the film at Video Data Bank