DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA
A film by Verena Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor
2022, 118 minutes
2022, 118 minutes
No. 384
Documentary
Documentary
Description
Five centuries ago, anatomist André Vésale opened up the human body to science for the first time in history. Today, De Humani Corporis Fabrica opens the human body to the cinema. It reveals that human flesh is an extraordinary landscape that exists only through the gaze and attention of others. As places of care, suffering and hope, hospitals are laboratories that connect every body in the world.
In their thrilling new work of nonfiction exploration, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Leviathan) burrow deeper than ever, using microscopic cameras and specially designed recording devices to survey the wondrous landscape of the human body. More transfixing than clinical, the film eschews the normal narrative parameters for medical documentation in favor of a rigorously detached, expressionistic look at our tactile yet essentially unknowable flesh and viscera.
De Humani Corporis Fabrica is the latest feature film from the groundbreaking Sensory Ethnography Lab, who's previous work included Leviathan, Sweetgrass, Caniba, and Manakamana, among others.
Festivals
Official Selection, Director's Fortnight, Cannes
Official Selection, New York Film Festival
Official Selection, Toronto International Film Festival
Reviews
"Extraordinary... digs deep into the human body and opens up landscapes as otherworldly—and harrowing—as any you're likely to see. The result is a work of purest corporeal poetry... and a remarkably unvarnished, sympathetic portrait of doctors and nurses at work."
– Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
“An astonishing dive into the human body. A real-life Fantastic Voyage. It left this writer with a deeper understanding of the proverbial, universal self — and maybe with what it means to be human.”
“An astonishing dive into the human body. A real-life Fantastic Voyage. It left this writer with a deeper understanding of the proverbial, universal self — and maybe with what it means to be human.”
– A.A. Dowd, Digital Trends
"The magic of Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s work is that so much of it is open for abstract interpretation, and this magnificent new one is no exception."
“Grade: A-. A wild tour of the human body.”
– Indiewire
“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.”
– Slant
“The best film of the year. Like Leviathan, De Humani Corporis Fabrica redefines the way we see the world, only this time in a way that inspires awe more than fear.”
– The Film Stage
"The magic of Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s work is that so much of it is open for abstract interpretation, and this magnificent new one is no exception."
– David Jenkins, Little White Lies
“A revelation. A radical cinematic work that is able to muse on what it means to be human in such an original way.”
– Filmmaker Magazine
