The latest film by the directors of Leviathan combines disorientating, brutal surgery closeups with doctors’ candid chats to powerful effect
Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel are the French documentary film-makers who in 2012 gave us Leviathan, an experimental and immersively strange account of life on a fishing trawler in the north Atlantic. In 2017 their Somniloquies was a hallucinatory, image-driven film about sleep-talking, while Caniba was about the notorious Japanese murderer and cannibal Issei Sagawa and the strange half-life of his later years, when he was immobilised by a cerebral infarction.
Their new film does for the human body what Leviathan did for the alien world of the sea: an account of surgical and clinical procedures in a number of Paris hospitals, with extreme, disorientating closeups and some deeply disturbing images, including one mortuary scene of a dead body being dressed in the “civilian” clothes of the living. It gives us brutally...
Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel are the French documentary film-makers who in 2012 gave us Leviathan, an experimental and immersively strange account of life on a fishing trawler in the north Atlantic. In 2017 their Somniloquies was a hallucinatory, image-driven film about sleep-talking, while Caniba was about the notorious Japanese murderer and cannibal Issei Sagawa and the strange half-life of his later years, when he was immobilised by a cerebral infarction.
Their new film does for the human body what Leviathan did for the alien world of the sea: an account of surgical and clinical procedures in a number of Paris hospitals, with extreme, disorientating closeups and some deeply disturbing images, including one mortuary scene of a dead body being dressed in the “civilian” clothes of the living. It gives us brutally...
- 5/15/2023
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Step aside, David Cronenberg, there’s a new master of body horror in town. Or rather, masters, in the case of co-directors Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Leviathan, Caniba), whose latest ethnographic opus takes us not only inside the world of invasive medical procedures as practiced in various hospitals around Paris, but about as far inside the human body as a feature-length documentary has ever gone.
To say that De Humani Corporis Fabrica is not for the fainthearted is an understatement, because unlike in Cronenberg’s movies, the ample gore on display is very much the real thing — so much so that it can be painful to watch. And yet, for viewers who resist the temptation to flee for the nearest exit, this fascinating and probing look at modern surgery is a memorable experience, making us ponder our own humanity as we watch humans reduced to pure flesh-and-blood organisms.
For more than a decade,...
To say that De Humani Corporis Fabrica is not for the fainthearted is an understatement, because unlike in Cronenberg’s movies, the ample gore on display is very much the real thing — so much so that it can be painful to watch. And yet, for viewers who resist the temptation to flee for the nearest exit, this fascinating and probing look at modern surgery is a memorable experience, making us ponder our own humanity as we watch humans reduced to pure flesh-and-blood organisms.
For more than a decade,...
- 5/23/2022
- by Jordan Mintzer
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
‘Crimes of the Future’ Could Cause Walkouts? Wait Till This Human Body Doc Debuts — Watch the Teaser
It’s hard to think of two bolder voices in the documentary film space than Verena Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor. The directors made their names with “Leviathan,” an immersive fishing documentary that gleefully defied genre conventions to show fishing in all of its gruesome beauty. Realistic approaches to flesh, both living and decaying, have defined their style for years, and the filmmakers’ latest work appears to be no exception.
In “De Humani Corporis Fabrica,” Paravel and Castaing-Taylor turn their unique camera techniques to the human body, combining medical footage with a cinematic sensibility to portray the body in a way it has never been seen before.
“Thinking about how modern medicine has used the tools of cinema to develop its own powers of seeing, we wanted to try to do the opposite, to borrow the tools of medicine for cinema, to allow us to see the human body in a way...
In “De Humani Corporis Fabrica,” Paravel and Castaing-Taylor turn their unique camera techniques to the human body, combining medical footage with a cinematic sensibility to portray the body in a way it has never been seen before.
“Thinking about how modern medicine has used the tools of cinema to develop its own powers of seeing, we wanted to try to do the opposite, to borrow the tools of medicine for cinema, to allow us to see the human body in a way...
- 5/22/2022
- by Christian Zilko
- Indiewire
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