De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the title of a 2022 documentary made by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, is based on 16th century anatomy treatise first released 1543 and, later,in a second edition in 1555. The groundbreaking treatise written by the Brussels-educated Andreas Vesalius was written to correct the Greek anatomist, Galen's, mistakes -- Galen based his anatomy on animals; Vesalius had the benefit of human cadavers. Vesalius' book is copiously, and beautifully illustrated with woodcuts that are either grotesque or noble, depending upon your perspective. It is the pictorial aspect of Vesalius' book that informs Castaing-Taylor and Paravel's film -- the movie illustrates human physiology by depicting without narrative or commentary various procedures that invade the body, traverse its slimy tubes and tunnels, and display in massive close-up "the fabric" (fabrica) from which we are made. Reviews of the film often emphasize its graphic, unstinting qualities -- some reviews suggest that more sensitive viewers will (or should) head to the exits. I didn't find the picture particularly disturbing because the style of the documentary is dehumanizing and estranges the viewers. We see dripping tunnels that we can't identify and watch procedures that are not described so that they are merely exercises, for the most part, in suctioning and snipping. One of the film's tactics is to use such extreme close-ups that we can't figure out what we are seeing -- most notably, there's a scene in which a couple of pathologists are probing a football-sized mass of burnt-looking meat, studded with yellow fat globules. A pathologist points out a ropy orangish tumor in the roast. Then, incidentally, the gob of flesh is turned over and we see very briefly some skin with a nipple in the middle of it -- we have been looking at an amputated breast. The people to whom these slick tunnels and sphincters belong are rarely shown -- there is a voice-over but it's not really informative, the chatter of the surgeons and assistants kvetching about their long hours or gruffly ordering nurses about. In many scenes, this chatter is muted since our point of view is far within the body itself and we seem to be hearing the doctors' grousing about their work through layers of fat and flesh. There are only a couple of scenes in which we see actual whole figures, as opposed to guts and gore, pools of blood, and doctors with their faces eerily masked. Even in the opening shots, which show a mean-looking German shepherd patrolling the tunnels under the hospital with security guards, the camera is so close to the moving dog that we see the animal only in fragments. The film is immersive but not in a way that is analytically useful -- the picture is the product of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, undoubtedly shot by the anthropologists Castaing-Taylor and Paravel over many years, and the films made under the Lab's auspices usually feature photography from within inches of the subject, editing that doesn't use establishing shots of any kind at all and very jumpy, agitated handheld camera work. With everything viewed from within a few inches (and the endoscopy shot on an almost microscopic level), the picture is very disorienting, an effect that mimics some of the sequences which feature doctors peering into screens connected to endoscopes or robotic probes and complaining that they aren't oriented and have no idea what they are seeing.
The film begins with security guards and a dog prowling around in a graffiti-smeared tunnel that, for some reason, connects directly into the vaults below the hospital. The tunnels underground are rhymed with the oozing tubes that we see in the endoscopy sequences and, so, from the outset, the film establishes the metaphor that the hospital itself is like a human body, a great pulsating hunk of flesh. (The metaphor is expanded in a scene in which pathology assistants bottle up specimens of tumor and diseased flesh in the sort of canisters that banks use to transmit checks and cash; a canister is dropped into a tube and the camera follows it through the guts of the hospital on an implausibly long journey in the darkness that never really ends -- the movie just cuts away from the canister speeding through the tube. I think the shot is intended as a joke.) After the scene with dog in the tunnel, there is an extended overture, as it were to the film, an ICU nurse musing about her experiences -- she mentions a room that is cursed (everyone who is housed there dies) and various other patients who met grim fates in the hospital. "What will be will be," she says with resignation. A doctor is boring a hole in the skull of a patient who is alert but numbed by local anesthetic -- he's asked about his pain: "It's between four and five," the poor guy says. The hole drilled in the man's head is, then, intubated with a camera which probes around in the patient's brain -- it's covered by a fine filmy substance that is described (accurately) as looking like cotton candy. Two old biddies from a psychiatric ward who can barely walk, try to escape confinement -- they shuffle along in slow motion, passing a locked room in which a man beckons to them through a sort of porthole. A cry like a newborn baby sounds in the air. A woman is having a baby while her husband stands in a spray of golden light through a window playing with his phone. The woman is bleeding badly and needs a caesarean section. The surgeon slices open her belly like a watermelon, rummage around in the bloody crater and, then, pull out a child covered in greyish-white caul. The child screams with indignation. We see an eye clipped open with clamps on its lids; a gloved finger drives a probe into the eye asking the victim if he can still see -- then, some sort of vacuum is poked into the cornea to hoover out debris floating in the orb. A camera explores a meaty tunnel, looping around tight corners and duct-like strictures. After a while, an outside shot shows us that the lens has been inserted into a penis through the urethra. The urologist is bitching about his workload and seems very bitter. He makes the peculiar comment that he "hasn't had an erection all day -- an odd thing to say but, after all, he is a Frenchman. A gush of blood belches out of the penis. The doctor uses a probe that he calls a "machine-gun" or Kalishnakov apparatus to ream out the channel through the penis. Then, he calls it a day and continues his complaints while the poor dink,neglected, sullenly oozes blood. Next, we are inside someone's abdominal cavity trying to remove the prostate. The assistant can't tell up from down and there's a big fight about the surgery -- "Are you playing legos?" the knife says; the other guy indignantly says he's not "playing legos." The surgery seems to be going wrong -- it's conducted robotically by the doctor manipulating some stainless-steel handles which drive the scalpels and tweezers. The enlarged prostate is too big to fit into a baggy that the surgeons have pushed into the man's guts. There's excess bleeding and the surgeon and assistant blame one another to the point that they suspend the surgery -- we're left looking at a big hole full of blood. "I don't know what I'm seeing," the assistant says. The two old ladies have reached the locked door on the ward and they turn around, shuffling in ultra-slow motion back past the man confined in the room who beckons to them. The baby keeps shrieking but now we see that the cries come from an old woman who is screaming in a sharp, high-pitched tone -- earlier we saw her slumbering in a chair. Some surgeons are straightening a spine that is afflicted with severe scoliosis -- it looks like an operation committed on a large rack of well-sauced ribs. The doctors chip out bone with chisels and hammer the bones as hard as they can and, then, call for power tools to drive screws through the meat and bone. One of the surgeons has suffered a biceps injury and retains only 30% of his muscle tissue in that part of his body. He also has hand problems. "God preserve us from hand surgeons," one of the surgeons says, chuckling. Histologists are studying slides of breast tissue infiltrated with cancer -- "I can't use these images," one of the pathologists says, "they have big gaps; the tumor cells I'm looking for could be in the gap." The other doctor blames the poor quality of the images on a gynecologist -- "this is typical gynecology for you," the doctor complains. Some Haitian nursing assistants are in the morgue listening to jaunty Caribbean music on the radio -- they are briskly dressing a cadaver. The camera moves a little and we see that there are, at least, a dozen other corpses on white tables waiting to be dressed. Upstairs, in the Psych ward, the old woman is still screaming. The two old biddies let out the guy in the locked room who has been signaling to them. He makes his way through the Day-Room to the elevator, but it won't work. Muttering frantically to himself he presses buttons but nothing happens. It's as if he's trying to use his call-light to summon bedside-assistance. Two orderlies gently escort him back to his room. Someone is either retiring, or, perhaps, leaving this Paris Hospital for a job at a hospital in Montreal. A woman reads a witty poem about the departing colleague. Then, we are in a shadowy dance-hall. People are frenetically jumping up and down to songs by Gloria Gaynor ("I will Survive") and New Order. We can only see smidgens of figures, arms upraised or legs kicking at the air against splotches of yellowish light. Then, the camera tours a bizarre fresco on the wall, a mural that shows detailed portraits of faces attached to bodies that are naked with huge phalluses or giant bellies. Some the figures are copulating. There are piles of bones under a mandorla-shaped vagina painted on the wall. Little angels and corpulent women with wings fire cupid's arrows at couples who seem to be painted as caricatures of real people. Skeletons are dancing on the wall. The camera shows us only parts of this mural as the disco music pulsates. Then, the camera pulls back to show a parody of Last Supper by DaVinci with an old Black man wearing a surgical mask sitting under it. Above the Last Supper, there is an inscription De Profundis Beaulonie! I have no idea what we are supposed to be looking at here or why the film ends in this way.
As is the case with many highly conceptual projects (and the works of Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab are nothing if not rule-oriented and constructed according to strict theoretical principles), the film is self-defeating. It's proposed as an alienating spectacle but the movie is about human beings, real suffering patients, and, in the end, our curiosity gets the better of us. We want to know what is being done to these people, why? and how things turned out for them? There's some faint, ineffectual social commentary -- the hospital is too busy, with only one nurse for every twenty patients, and the doctors are all seriously pissed-off about time constraints and overwork. But there's no sketch as to why these conditions plague the hospital. The film is certainly not a call to arms, nor even a call to any action at all. It's a collection of striking images that imply all sorts of things, but don't really communicate anything except that modern medicine is a profoundly dehumanizing activity. Notwithstanding these objections, the movie is well worth accessing and watching -- there isn't a minute of it that is not interesting in a morbid kind of way. I just wish the presentation wasn't so self-indulgently claustrophobic -- rules for non-intervention in anthropology, of course, are made to be broken. (After writing this note, I read some reviews on the movie. Some writers surmise that the pornographic mural, caricaturing doctors in the hospital, is hidden in some corner of the place. I was interested to learn that the scenes in the film were shot in a number of different hospitals, perhaps, as many as eight. The mural is claimed to be a Carabin, or mocking mural featuring senior staff with faux Latin inscriptions. The dance scene takes place in a Salle de Garde, or staff break room, in one of the hospitals. I believe De Profundis Beaulonie is simply "Out of the depths! Bologny!")
No comments:
Post a Comment