DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT
Trembling images at the Directors’ Fortnight, with From Humani Corporis Fabrica, from the name of the treatise on anatomy by André Vesalius, published in 1543. The human body throbs under the endoscopic cameras infiltrating its innumerable interior “pipes”, in search of an outgrowth or a cell to be eliminated, the voice-over of a surgeon issuing his order live. “Come on, peel! » Here we are in the “kitchens” of the public hospital, in the heart of various operating theatres, where the anthropologists Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor were authorized to film, as well as to download the medical imagery of the interventions – let us add that the patients agreed to be filmed in this way. These unusual rushes mainly come from the Beaujon hospitals, in Clichy (Hauts-de-Seine), and Bichat in Paris, the directors having shot their own images on their side – outside the bodies, so to speak – at the using a camera specially made for the occasion, close to medical optics. After having filmed the bodily envelope in all its facets for more than a hundred years, can cinema push back its boundaries by taking the camera under the skin?
The tiny cameras weave through at high speed, revealing a stunning backdrop
Going into the “basements”, the directors unquestionably deliver a feast of images, some of which are conducive to fantasy, dreamlike, even if the dream is sometimes interrupted by the aggressive noise of various medical devices (probes, vacuum cleaners). In these moments, the spectator will rather tend to cling to the armchair like in a ghost train. In terms of iconographic intoxication, the two researchers, associated with the sensory ethnography laboratory at Harvard (Massachusetts), are not at their first attempt: in one of their previous films, Leviathan (2012), they embarked a dozen cameras aboard a fishing boat, producing a furious bestiary (fish, birds, wind, storm…), their film revisiting the history of art and cinema.
From Humani… opens with a truly staggering sequence shot, in the footsteps of a security guard and his dog, walking through the underground corridors of the hospital, looking for outsiders who have entered (homeless, taggers, etc.). The filmmakers explore all the circulations, architectural, bodily and mental (an almost burlesque wandering of two old ladies), up to the walls of the guard room, with its orgiastic frescoes – for a sublime and thunderous party scene, revelers off camera .
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