De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2022) (Patreon)

TIFF WAVELENGTHS 2022

After the genre-redefining triumph that was Leviathan, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor took their Sensory Ethnography down a dead end street with Caniba, a literally unblinking portrait of infamous murderer-cannibal Issei Sagawa. It's difficult to conceive the thought process behind making such a film because, among other things, the duo's consistent strength has been the articulation of specific environments, the cooperation of parts that go to form a particular milieu or community -- shepherds, fishermen, and now, surgeons. If Sagawa took apart a human body to fuel his perverted God complex, the French medical establishment in De Humani Corporis Fabrica are dedicated to putting it back together. 

It is a delicate, painstaking process. Shot over a couple of years in around twelve different Parisian hospitals, DHCF combines the directors' usual immersive, handheld cinematography with images taken from micro-surgical procedures, alternating between the two in a manner that suggests that the institutional functioning of a hospital -- security, sanitation, orderlies moving things around -- exists in service of nearly abstract instance of human plumbing, with doctors controlling their tools and performing their jobs like high-stakes videogaming. And as we see, it's this abstraction that seems to allow these doctors to separate themselves from the individual lives that hang in the balance.

Let me explain with an example. There is really only one recurring scenario in the film that focuses on the identity and behavior of actual patients. This is in the geriatric psych ward, where Paravel and Castaing-Taylor show us a handful of elderly dementia sufferers. Their speech and behavior is characterized by compulsive, nattering repetition ("hurry up, hurry up..."), and their presence in the film seems almost designed to irritate the viewer. So when we see hospital staff dealing with them, firmly but fairly, we are impressed with their patience. But at the same time, these are individuals who cannot be cured, only contained. They appear in DHCF as avatars of modern medicine's failures.

By contrast, the high-tech surgical sequences take us deep into the human body, showing us aspects of ourselves that, under the best circumstances, are unseen and nearly unimaginable. An orthopedic surgeon works a titanium spinal brace into place with hammer and chisel. An OB-GYN performs a Caesarian, pulling the mother's abdomen apart like she's stretching out dough. A probe enters a hole in a man's brain, allowing the doctors to remove cancerous tissue. Cross-section slides of cancer cells in a deceased person's organs resemble paisley patterns or sickly-pink Abstract Expressionism. The specialization of the surgeons, their ability to operate not one people but on spines, livers, brains, and the like, both sharpens the scientific knowledge gained, and allows the surgeons sufficient distance to be able to ply their trade with few humanist distractions.

Sometimes this detachment is bracing, at other times comical. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor mostly use direct audio throughout the film, and so we hear surgeons talking through procedures, but also bantering like auto mechanics or food service workers. One doctor cracks sexist jokes about his penis. Another vehemently berates a colleague for a sloppy mistake, and soon he is yelling at everyone in the OP. In probably the most memorable sequence in the film, someone assisting on an operation drops the suction tube on the floor, and there isn't another to be had. As talented as the doctors in the film may be, DHCF implies that, with everything that can go wrong, it's amazing anyone survives major surgery.

What Paravel and Castaing-Taylor attempt here is not exactly unprecedented. Certain segments recall Frederick Wiseman's Hospital (1970), and the building-and-maintenance shots are reminiscent of Nikolaus Geyrhalter's underseen Danube Hospital (2012). The geriatric sequencesare a lot like portions of Allan King's final two films, Dying at Grace (2003) and Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company (2005). What is unique, obviously, is the now nearly-absolute imbrication of medical care and digital imaging, be it MRIs, digital X-rays, or microscopic cameras that guide the way for equally microscopic instruments. We're experiencing the logical outcome of Western medicine's drive for isolated data that Foucault described in The Birth of the Clinic. The body holds few secrets any longer.

This ever-increasing transparency means that those aspects of human bodily dysfunction that elude the medical gaze, such as dementia, are all the more frustrating. In the final sequence of DHCF, a doctor's retirement gradually leads Paravel and Castaing-Taylor to a bar / nightclub frequented by a group of doctors. [see below] Any number of "Grey's Anatomy" episodes end at the bar down the street from the hospital, where colleagues hoist a few and reflect on the day's successes and failures. But on the darkened dancefloor seen in DHCF, we are given no new insights about any particular physician. Instead, the filmmakers provide a summation of medical detachment, the emotional compartmentalization that allows these men and women to save lives.

As "I Will Survive" and "Blue Monday" blare on the soundtrack, we are shown lighted fragments of a massive mural on the club's wall. It features caricatures of doctors, working on patients, pushing gurneys, groping each other, and consorting with skeletons. It's a crass, almost orgiastic depiction of contemporary medicine as a set of disconnected actions and foolhardy lunges toward uncertain ends. It's the most French thing imaginable, cartoonish and macabre, a dive-bar Breugel that wouldn't be at all out of place in Lars von Trier's The Kingdom. It does kind of overstate its point as the sequence goes on and on; as a conclusion to what we've been witnessing, it's not especially poignant. But it conveys a steely Existentialism regarding the human body in disrepair. You fix what you can fix, and learn from what you can't. It reminds me of the final line of dialogue in Albert Serra's The Death of Louis XIV: "gentlemen, we'll do better next time."

NOTE: I was just informed that the end scene is not a bar or a club, but a hospital's onsite doctors' lounge. Insane.