De Humani Corporis Fabrica

The documentary by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor takes its title from Vesalius's sixteenth-century anatomy book and was shot in several hospitals around Paris. The camera attaches itself to the tiny devices that enter the body during surgery; what we watch is a spine, an eye, a vessel, surfaces we often identify only afterwards. Both directors come out of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, and their method is not to explain but to dislodge the way we look. The tired talk of staff in operating theatre corridors also makes the institution itself visible. The film screened in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2022. Some of the imagery is extremely graphic. Who it's for: viewers interested in experimental documentary and in cinema about the body. Who it's not for: anyone who cannot bear surgical and bloody imagery, or who wants an explanatory account.