De Humani Corporis Fabrica Review: The Poetry of the Viscera

In Caniba, their up-close-and-uncomfortably-personal documentary portrait of Japanese murderer Sagawa Issei, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel pushed their camera so near to their subject’s cold, expressionless face that it seemed as if we were climbing into his skin. If Caniba questioned what we can understand about a person through a detailed observation of their exterior appearance, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s latest, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, reverses the inquiry, asking what we might glean about mankind by a close inspection of the human body’s vast, mysterious interior. By the end of the film, we’ve traveled so deep inside the corporal form, it begins to feel like we’ve transported to another galaxy.

An exhausting, terrifying, and at times blackly funny depiction of the French hospital system, De Humani Corporis Fabrica takes its place alongside Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes and the BME Pain Olympics series as one of the supreme cinematic examinations of the body’s magnificent malleability. The film offers an anthology of brutally invasive medical procedures, from an eyeball being sliced during a lens transplant, to a urethra being jackhammered by a drill that’s positioned, we’re told, to the “Kalashnikov setting.” If that sounds like a stomach-churning proposition, make no mistake, the film is often pretty-tough sledding, particularly for those of us with an aversion to the sanguinary goop of internal organs.

However, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel never seem to be rubbing our noses in gore just for the hell of it. Rather, suggestive of its namesake, Andreas Vesalius’s groundbreaking 16th-century anatomical study, De Humani Corporis Fabrica evinces a kind of pre-modern wonder in cataloging the remarkable diversity of the human corpus. Using microscopic cameras, the filmmakers plumb the deepest, darkest depths of our interiors, traveling through veins and intestines and into blood-filled surgical incisions with a hypnotic wonder that suggests Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage by way of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As the film traverses the byways and back alleys of the human body, one almost expects to encounter a physical manifestation of the soul. We don’t, of course, but De Humani Corporis Fabrica nevertheless hints that within and around us lurk unexplainable mysteries. To wit, in the film’s first conversation, an unseen hospital worker proposes that some people are simply doomed to suffer repeat medical problems, that one hospital room is cursed because so many patients die in it and that the key to longevity is not clean living but karma.

Most of the doctors and nurses glimpsed throughout the film remain largely concealed from view, and yet, in many ways they are Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s true subjects. For as much as De Humani Corporis Fabrica is a mosaic of the wonder and horror of the human form, it’s also a surprisingly subtle portrait of the emotional struggles and strained working conditions endured by French hospital staff. Though filmed at several different medical institutions throughout France, the documentary suggests a Wiseman-like study of a single institution. With POV-shot traipses through cavernous subterranean walkways and recurring scenes of two elderly women ambling through hallways, Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel evoke a sense that a hospital, like the human body, is a complex, interconnected machine.

Unfortunately, the hospital, like so many of the bodies in De Humani Corporis Fabrica, is in desperate need of some care and attention. Even as they’re performing surgery on patients, we listen as doctors grouse about stress, overwork, and exhaustion. After plunging a phallus with his punishing drill, one doctor grumbles that he’s on the verge of a heart attack from the pressure of his work, moaning—amusingly, given the nature of the operation at hand—that he’s yet to get an erection that day. Another surgeon complains, while fitting screws into a badly twisted spine, of muscle deterioration in his own arm. When his assistant recommends he see somebody for the issue, he simply laughs, “May God preserve me from hand surgeons.”

But these moments pale in comparison to the film’s most terrifying and savagely hilarious scene, in which a doctor, operating outside his area of expertise, performs prostate surgery for the first time based primarily on having watched a MasterClass on the internet by “that one Indian guy.” One can only watch in excruciated horror as the man’s surgical cavity gradually fills with blood while the unseen surgeon says all the sorts of things one would never want to hear during surgery, from “Fuck!” to “This is bad, very bad” to “I never should’ve started this.”

One gets the sense that this procedure is being performed by this woefully undertrained professional because there’s simply not enough surgeons to go around. There’s a vicious cycle at play here: The bodies of doctors, nurses, and hospital attendants are being sacrificed in order to try to preserve the bodies of patients. Meanwhile, the morgue fills up with the bodies of the dead. De Humani Corporis Fabrica proffers that we’re losing the battle against death. It’s a grim, violent vision, no doubt, but the film elects to end on a moment of surreal, erotic elation: As “I Will Survive” blares in some dark corner of the hospital that’s been outfitted as a staff social space, the workers drink, smoke, play foosball, and dance their asses off.

Then, Gloria Gaynor’s song transitions to New Order’s Blue Monday,” and the camera pans across a shockingly pornographic mural depicting what appears to be the hospital staff engaged in a giant orgy. It’s the last place one expects De Humani Corporis Fabrica to leave us, and yet it’s a perfectly cathartic capper to this often-grueling study of our corporeal form: After so much poking and prodding inside people’s interiors in a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable, it’s nice to be reminded that there’s still some fun to be had with our bodies too.