DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA Documentary

This revelatory new entry from the avant-garde duo of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (LEVIATHAN, AFI FEST 2014), reveals the human body in ways previously unseen in the cinematic medium. Using a combination of specially rigged endoscopic devices and scialytic medical cameras and shot over the course of five years at various Parisian hospitals, the film surveys, probes and rips open the grotesquely marvelous flesh and blood of the corporeal. Rejecting traditional documentary narrative in favor of the impressionistic abstraction of images guided solely by the banter of doctors and nurses, we witness the entire spectrum of the institution, from an unflinching look at a cesarean delivery to a glimpse of the psychogeriatric ward. Borrowing its title from André Vésale’s eponymous texts written in the 16th century, DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA plunges us into the visceral spectatorship of life and death. –Anna Li