The ability to capture impressions of movement and to store them for replay as a more or less stable record of the world are without doubt film’s most celebrated features. Although this double function of film as a perceptual and a mnemonic medium has lent itself to a variety of uses, it has been studied mostly in its narrative application: the recording of perceptual experiences and their reproduction within a narrative frame. As film historians such as Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault have pointed out, the predominant focus on narrative cinema in orthodox film histories has led to a bias that defines early cinema for what it lacks rather than study early films on their own terms and in their historical contexts. This article proposes an alternative approach. Instead of subsuming the perceptual and mnemonic functions of film exclusively within a narrative scope, I will examine them as mediated practices of autopsy and autography. These notions of seeing with one’s own eyes and recording with one’s own hand are defining constituents of testimonial genres such as travelogues, diaries and notebooks, which played a key role in the early development of film. As these notions and their generic contexts lend themselves to narrative as well as non-narrative uses, they are particularly apt to address the diversity of early cinema and its intersections with artistic, scientific, legal and medical discourses. Further, the deeper meanings of these concepts draw attention to the meta-implications of media use: Just as autopsy not only refers to an act of eyewitnessing but also signifies reflecting on the self and being in the absence of life, the autograph extends its literal meaning when it promises to trace something (about the writer or writing) that seems irreplaceable and individual. Discussing early film criticism and films from the first two decades of the twentieth century, I will examine instances of filmic autopsy and autography as strategies of exploring a novel medium and self through that medium.