De Humani Cor­poris Fab­ri­ca – first-look review

In their aston­ish­ing new fea­ture De Humani Cor­poris Fab­ri­ca, film­mak­ers Ver­e­na Par­avel and Lucien Cas­taing-Tay­lor once more tease and prod con­ven­tion­al def­i­n­i­tions of the term ​“doc­u­men­tary”. In this instance, they ask whether it’s the human body itself that’s a mir­a­cle, or the work done by peo­ple whose job it is to repair the body when it breaks.

De Humani Cor­poris Fab­ri­ca escorts us on a whirl­wind tour of var­i­ous Parisian hos­pi­tals and spe­cial­ist units as seen through the shal­low-focus eye of a tricked-out endoscopy cam­era. Once through the doors of each insti­tu­tion, we then bur­row deep­er, into the clois­tered pri­va­cy of oper­at­ing the­atres and, occa­sion­al­ly, inside the dam­aged bod­ies of the patients themselves.

The first thing this film does which is of par­tic­u­lar note is that its pur­pose-built cam­era has synched sound, so it is not only able to pick up the sym­pho­ny of bog­gy squelch­es that come when for­ceps are pulling at flesh and organs, but also the com­i­cal­ly banal con­ver­sa­tions being had by the doc­tors and sur­geons as they’re work­ing. At one point, we zoom Inner Space-style through a small intes­tine in search of lesions or lac­er­a­tions while ear­wig­ging on a con­ver­sa­tion about rent hikes in Clichy.

The film’s open­ing sequence lays out the polit­i­cal frame­work for the project at large, as an over­worked nurse com­plains to a col­league about nev­er-end­ing shifts, lack of resource, dwin­dling sup­port and the des­per­ate need for extra hands on deck. She claims that the trin­kets and prizes giv­en out in recog­ni­tion of duty from gov­ern­ment health bod­ies acts as a cov­er-up for the fact that this already-pre­car­i­ous sys­tem is on the verge of crumbling.

This handy and artic­u­late tirade in turn makes the ensu­ing sequences of surgery all the more astound­ing, as the tech­ni­cal mar­vels on show are being car­ried out by peo­ple with thick stub­ble, droop­ing eye­lids and faint mem­o­ries of their last prop­er break. Along­side 2012’s game-chang­ing Leviathan, De Humani Cor­poris Fab­ri­ca is the pair’s most overt­ly social­ly con­scious work, and while there is cer­tain­ly focus on the suf­fer­ing of patients and health­care work­ers alike, the selec­tion of mate­r­i­al tends to err on the affir­ma­tive, if not down­right transcendent.

To those who might be put off by the prospect of mon­i­tor­ing a diverse array of sur­gi­cal pro­ce­dures in extreme close-quar­ters, fear not: there’s noth­ing here that’s intend­ed to pro­voke or repel, and the film­mak­ers can nev­er be accused of exploit­ing their images as exam­ple of moral­ly-detached gore. Quite the oppo­site in fact, as we are shown: the hard (but nec­es­sary) real­i­ties of, say, an emer­gency cesare­an sec­tion; the jaw-drop­ping array of instru­ments and tech­niques used in a key­hole prostate exam­i­na­tion; and the resilience of a dam­aged spinal col­umn as it takes a pum­melling from mal­lets, drills and wrench­es while hav­ing met­al struts attached to it.

One thing that lifts this above the type of hos­pi­tal-based docu-dra­ma that are ten-a-pen­ny on the small screen is that Par­avel and Cas­taing-Tay­lor locate a unique­ly cin­e­mat­ic qual­i­ty to the footage. The visu­al won­der­ment of flash­ing through slides of metas­ta­sized can­cer cells that have been dyed pur­ple harks back to vivid abstract expres­sion­ist can­vas­es while nev­er los­ing sight of their true, grave­ly seri­ous application.

There are also many ref­er­ences to clas­sic movies that emanate from many of the episodes, such as an awe-strik­ing eye­ball exam­i­na­tion that plays like a reverse of the famous razor slice in Sal­vador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. There are also shots of an elder­ly patient yelp­ing, along, in a share that are framed like Carl Dreyer’s The Pas­sion of Joan of Arc, while the trip sequence of Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is sub­tly name-checked in a sequence when a med­ical sam­ple is blast­ed at high speeds through a postal tube.

Along­side these allu­sions to art and cin­e­ma, the film also draws intrigu­ing con­nec­tions between the med­ical pro­fes­sion and gam­ing, as sur­geons ply their trade no longer while lean­ing over clamped-open rib cages, but with advance con­trollers which they manœu­vre while look­ing at a screen. 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.