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Interview: Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor on De Humani Corporis Fabrica

Paravel and Castaing-Taylor discuss how gut instincts guide their editing process.

Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor on the Bodily Transgressions of 'De Humani Corporis Fabrica'
Photo: Grasshopper Film

“If we opened up people, you’d find landscapes,” mused Agnès Varda in The Beaches of Agnès. One gets the sense that no one could anticipate quite how literally her sentiment could come to life on screen in De Humani Corporis Fabrica. The latest documentary from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab collaborators Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor utilizes technological breakthroughs to take cameras into previously unimaginable cavities of the human body. Their cinematic excavations of these small spaces within us make for an expansive, enthralling recontextualization of places we can feel but not always see.

But De Humani Corporis Fabrica isn’t reducible to just a newfangled, 21st-century cinema of attractions. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s footage, compiled over several years at hospitals across France, also surveys the organizational apparatus and how it imprints itself on practitioners and patients alike. The film’s remarkable gaze can contain both an individual and institutional corpus, observing both in ways that can feel simultaneously familiar and foreign.

I spoke to Paravel and Castaing-Taylor in October of last year after the U.S. premiere of De Humani Corporis Fabrica at the New York Film Festival. Our conversation covered how the project originated and developed, why gut instincts had to guide their editing process, and what they learned about doctors from making the film.

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The title of your film comes from Andreas Vesalius’s 16th-century textbook of the same name. How were you thinking about De Humani Corporis Fabrica within the history and evolution of surgery?

Lucien Castaing-Taylor: We’re not really even engaging with Vesalius. The point of departure, actually, is to see what moving images and contemporary medical imaging technologies could do that Vesalius couldn’t do. He had all these line drawings in the seven books of De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Anatomy was conceived as something static, structural, ossified, and lifeless. And also often, but not exclusively, very male.

Verena Paravel: Very male in what way?

LCT: Most of his models.

VP: There were prostitutes too.

LCT: They would also kill people. He wouldn’t kill people, actually, but people would kill people to sell bodies that they would pretend they’d dug up to donate for science. But we don’t really engage with that because it’s not a historical documentary. With cameras and scoping devices now, you have things like movement, color, texture, and sound that afford us completely different access to a way of allowing the body to express itself using contemporary, cutting-edge technology. Most of the technologies that we see in the film are relatively present-day [inventions]. But by virtue of being non-historical, it oddly becomes trans-historical. We weren’t interested in either Vesalius or his precursors as an object of study. But I think the way in which the body has been represented by doctors, pre-doctors, and para-doctors who tried to transgress the body to repair and heal wasn’t of interest to us. It wasn’t like Vesalius was the starting point. Everyone says that he’s the starting point of modern Western medicine, but he still had loads of insane notions despite his working with real bodies. [He thought there were] two different kinds of blood in the body, that blood in the veins wasn’t the same as blood in the arteries.

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Did you all see a connection between yourselves as filmmakers and surgeons themselves given the way that they’re kind of using a lot of the same tools that you all are? Light, color, camera movement, just to name a few.

VP: I actually wrote something about that for the grant application. [To Castaing-Taylor] And then you kind of told me that you thought it was not super interesting.

LCT: The connection between early medicine and early cinema?

VP: No, I’m talking about something else, but, of course, there’s something about cinema and medicine that’s extremely [interwoven]. Especially because we know that the Lumière brothers invented the cinematograph for science, and for medicine in particular. But you were talking about light and color, and I’m thinking about gesture. I don’t know if it’s the case in English, but in France, when you perform a surgery, you don’t say, “I am performing a surgery.” You say, “I’m making a gesture.” The comparison isn’t literally about the lexicon, but it’s mostly that the doctor has to be extremely precise. They operate on the body but are looking away from the body most of the time. In 80% of laparoscopic surgery, they look at the screen, and then their hands are guided through the view that they have on the screen. And somehow, [this film’s camera makes] the same gesture. We were filming, and our hand was disconnected from our eyes. Our eyes were either looking directly at the body or looking down at the monitor.

LCT: It’s also different because we didn’t film that much. The original idea was that the film would be entirely composed of medical footage shot by the doctors all in and around the body. But then because we’re so impetuous, we started filming and ended up using some of that footage. When doctors are using the footage, they’re using it in a very reductive, instrumentalist way for obvious reasons. They’re not actually interested in the body as such. They’re interested in how to repair the body and where organs are, whereas the expressiveness of the body is just so much larger than what can be reduced for medicine. It was really the body that interested us.

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Is that how you started seeing abstraction enter the film? From my understanding, you whittled it down from its original form, which also leveraged lectures and instructional voiceovers. In the finished film, the images guide people.

LCT: It’s true that there were many more words there, but there was never a didactic voiceover of a lecture. We only ever used sync sounds [of them] talking to us. We didn’t say they couldn’t talk to us, but we didn’t want them to explain themselves for non-doctors. We wanted to be able to evoke the whole act or gesture of this surgical intervention through what would happen naturally as if we weren’t there. [The discourse between them] was not about what pizza they’re going to eat for lunch or about who’s fucking who. It was about, “What’s going on? Look at this, this is weird. This is different from another body. This is the spleen.” We did have a lot more of that commentary, and it wasn’t didactic to outsiders. But it was inherently didactic to insiders. When we started showing it to people, we felt it closing the spectators’ imagination because then they were constantly trying to understand what the point of each operation was.

I liked that there wasn’t a sense that the operations were building toward some sort of outcome. You just take in the majesty of the body through the images.

LCT: I think the sounds that remain are really important. Maybe not as important as the image. But among the sounds are words. We only kept a hundred of the words that were spoken. But the words that we did end up keeping, even if they feel incidental, I think are very important.

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That dialogue is helpful to get a sense of the hospital as a contemporary workplace. Their use of humor really struck me, especially when it’s of the gallows variety.

VP: I think [it’s important to understand that] doctors allow themselves to be trivial. But this is part of the possibility of transgression—putting the body and the identity of the patient at a distance. For me, it’s not just an observation. I think it’s very important for them to be able to crack jokes and speak about very mundane things while they are operating.

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Is that sense of distance from the body related to the murals at the end?

VP: Yeah, that is part of the same carnivalesque. It shows how heavy the transgression is and how complicated it must be for the doctor to be able to perform those transgressions every single day. They have to have this moment with the fresco. Their idea is a condensation of everything: sex, religion, death, everything is there.

LCT: The obvious difference is that the daily banter is profane, at times sacrilegious or ostensibly shocking, but it’s not being performed quite well. If it’s a performance, it’s a lowercase-p “performance” among themselves. Sometimes they might be more deliberately shocking, and at times it’s just so normalized to talk in this way that it’s shocking to us but not at all to them. Whereas the frescos are capital-P “Performance.” All of this bundled sensation of fear, desire, and power. They’re divinities, but they’re devils, too, depending on the person looking at the time. They’re in a very inhuman position. Even though many of them desire to be in this position, it also exacts an incredible toll on their being and psyche. And this is one kind of cathartic, carnivalesque release. It’s an ostensibly peculiar kind of secret society with rituals that we don’t show in this space. We only show one part of it.

You spent several years making this film. What were the early years like?

VP: It really is different for every project. In the beginning, we read and talk to people, but every single time we have the opportunity to be in the field working somewhere, we always ask if we can use a camera. We start shooting from the get-go. But at the start [of the image-making process], we never know [how exactly we’re going to proceed]. It could be to try a camera. It could be to see what it looks like, and it usually takes a long time before we find a way of filming that’s satisfactory to us. The right distance, the right somewhere where the political dimension of the subject we try to tackle or approach is in dialogue with the aesthetic dimension that we will try to develop. Something needs to resonate between something aesthetical, conceptual, political. Because there are always so many films, and no need to have another film about the hospital [nods at Frederick Wiseman, who’s sitting next to us in the room].

LCT: I think this film is different from most of our earlier films. In Foreign Parts, Leviathan, and Sweetgrass—and to a degree in Caniba—we were homing in on a place and spending a lot of time there. The more time you spend there, the more embedded you get. Obviously, when you’re there at the start, it’s about assimilating yourself into a position of invisibility. People do look at our films like cinema verité films, wondering how the hell we [shot them], but I don’t think there’s any secret to it. We just hang out a lot, and we’re curious. We don’t talk when we’re filming generally. We’re a tabula rasa, fascinated by everything. In the case of this film, we never really assimilated—with the exception of one or two places like the morgue. We spent an enormous amount of time [in hospitals] because the pluribus of hospitals is infinite, and we only touch the surface of it in the film. Even in our 300-plus hours, every couple of months we’d [record] a new specialty, and we were starting from the beginning again.

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How did you both come to the narrative structuring of the film, especially with regard to putting the Cesarean section in the middle of De Humani Corporis Fabrica? When birth is portrayed on film, it’s oftentimes a cliché at the end to suggest new life. Was that somewhere in your minds as well?

VP: [laughing] Of course, we try to avoid this kind of thing! We didn’t have a formula. These hospitals are humongous, diseases are endless, the body is impossible to understand. So where do we go and how do we structure the film? I think we just try. We were editing all along the way. We knew because of what we filmed, [and from] capturing the surgery directly from plugging our recorder into their machinery, we had the possibility to go from the inside to the outside. But also, we realized that a hospital is about circulation, like the body. Circulating things like food, blood, air, everything in flux. When you go to a hospital, you’re just going from one place to the other. You see just people walking from one place to the other. We didn’t think of how we were going to mimic the inside of the body and extend the metaphor, but it came kind of naturally by trying and trying and trying. I don’t know if you saw logic in the editing, but I’m not even sure that there’s one. This film could be a million different films.

LCT: I don’t think we have the words to describe it. It was a very hard film to edit—we almost quit a couple of times. It was really hard to find the order but also what should be included in the first place. Even at the time, our words failed us. It was really about gut instincts. Most of it was nonverbal and unconscious. But there were certain ideas and things [that we avoided]. Certain surgeries, if they came too early, would overpower others and foreclose viewers’ interest in the others. Surgeries that were super interesting but more demanding, or were rewarding a certain species of patients. One procedure at the end originally came earlier. There’s a certain sense [during it] that it’s going poorly and that the patient didn’t survive. [At the end of the film, it provides a more] conventional cinematic sense of suspense that attenuates the attentional structure. It was clear that if were to include that in the film, it had to come almost at the end.

Marshall Shaffer

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based film journalist. His interviews, reviews, and other commentary on film also appear regularly in Slashfilm, Decider, and Little White Lies.

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