by Jason Adams
Do you ever find yourself zoning out to one of those surgery shows they sometimes have on basic cable? Titles like Botched or Plastic Surgery: Before and After where they stick their reality-show cameras into people’s literal guts and poke around? Yeah me neither. A lurid dramatization like the series Nip/Tuck I could handle, but the real stuff’s always been a bridge too far. But then I’ve always had that line drawn in the sand when it came to Horror Movies as well – I’ll watch all sorts of gruesomeness as long as I know it’s fake but you’d have to tie me down to get me to watch one of those Faces of Death videos.
So why then did I find myself so lulled into hypnotic contemplation by directors Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s surreal-ish surgery documentary De Humani Corporis Fabrica (meaning “Of the Structure of the Human Body” and named after the legendary 1555 anatomical texts) at the New York Film Festival this week?
The former filmmakers behind the well-feted 2012 doc Leviathan here use microscopic cameras to burrow inside the human body... turning us all into characters from the Jules Verne story Fantastic Voyage (or if you prefer the 1987 comedy rip-off Innerspace, which starred Dennis Quaid at his peak of hotness) – we swim down human canals like miniaturized aquanauts, squeezing in between organs and watching as the doctors outside pull and snip and pluck the most infinitesimal incisions, tying tubes into knots with mind-blowing precision.
Perhaps it’s that the telescoped-in scope of everything renders so much abstract – you’re not always sure what you’re looking at and so it sometimes becomes a phantasmagoria (emphasis on “gore”) of colors and textures, pulsing and swirling. But still Paravel and Castaing-Taylor always insist on pulling out – literally, often, as the camera zooms backwards through tubes and shoots out the side of a body like Star Wars warp speed in reverse. The filmmakers play with abstraction but they never let the viewer off the hook – there were several walk-outs at the screening I attended, and it’s a perfectly understandable reaction when the screen will all of a sudden be filled with the image of blood pouring out of some random penis staring back at you.
There is something comforting in watching the body be reduced to a practical, tactile matter though. It’s the gift of staring our flesh down; of understanding, like most doctors are taught to do and must by necessity understand, that we’re just this improbable pile of moving parts. We’re allowed by the film to listen to the doctors performing these surgeries banal chatter as they do – I was reminded most fiercely of Ben Whishaw’s recent (and marvelous) series This Is Going To Hurt, which explored similar territory; about what it means to live in the place where humanity gets all mushy-like.
When the filmmakers camera zooms in on the face of a newborn infant – one so newborn we’ve literally just watched it be pulled out of its mother’s body – and we’re so close, so intimate, with it that we can truly commiserate with what it is going through at that moment as it takes the chaos of the world in for the very first time, I truly don’t know that I have ever experienced such an exhilaration by proxy in my entire life. For those of us who don’t believe in religion this is ours – this is life. This film probes so deep it becomes an ecstatic experience – nigh holy.