At Brisbane's CONTAINER FILM SOCIETY - Ben Cho reviews the latest documentary from Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel - DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA (France/Switzerland, 2022)

Still from De Humani Corporis Fabrica

With the release of Terrifier 2 in Australia, there’s been a bit of online chatter (wait, is offline chatter around films still a thing?) about that film’s jaw-dropping gore. Even the Classification Board was helpful enough to point out on their website, “In some scenes, the clown eats pieces of flesh and internal organs of his victims … the film features a series of murders that include copious amounts of blood and graphic injury detail such as mutilation, decapitation and dismemberment.” If you’re working in the Terrifier 2 distributor’s PR department you probably couldn’t ask for a better write-up than that to tease gorehounds around the nation. 

But there’s another R-rated film listed on the Classification Board’s website that will probably not be revving up the Fangoria crowd but is as gory and stomach-churning as anything dreamed up by horror filmmakers: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica. 

If you’ve been reading Sight and Sound, Cinema Scope or Film Comment since the late 2000s, the duo’s names should be familiar. Castaing-Taylor, together with Ilisa Barbash, made headlines with Sweetgrass, a fascinating and minimalist documentary on sheepherding in Montana; later with Paravel, the duo made a big splash at the Locarno Film Festival with Leviathan, a Go-Pro equipped odyssey into the fishing industry featuring spectacular footage strapped onto the people, fish and equipment of the open seas; and then more recently Castaing-Taylor and Paravel examined the life of Japanese cannibal killer Issei Sagawa in the murky Caniba. Sagawa somehow managed to navigate the French and Japanese legal systems to serve a few years in a French clinic and then return to Japan as a free man and turn his notoriety into minor celebrity, writing books, restaurant reviews (a particularly sick irony given his crime) and even appear in an exploitation film as a voyeur. 

In Caniba there was no getting around the icky realities of human flesh and the body’s fragility given the nature of the subject matter, but in De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the filmmakers go for a (sometimes literal) deep dive into what’s really going on beneath the surface of our bodies and the delicate fragility inside us that threatens to break down from any manner of illness or injury. The “gore” of the human body cut open and probed that one could only imagine in Caniba, is now all on display in De Humani Corporis Fabrica but the end result is a piece of anthropological art far superior to Caniba, in terms of visual and editing style and, crucially, in terms of the morality of its enterprise. 

You can argue Caniba had an amorality to it; its fixation on killer and his crimes, and not victim, the implications of focusing on the celebrity of Sagawa and what that might do to further raise his profile with a disturbed fanbase. You might even question the directorial choice of Caniba to limit contextual information from others around the case. But De Humani Corporis Fabrica’s universe is one that finely balances the macro and micro of its concerns with an expanded ‘cast’ of healthcare experts, patients of all ills and those on the periphery of the healthcare industry such as morgue workers and security guards. Once the end credits roll you feel you’ve been fully immersed in the world of hospitals and surgical theaters (and the bodies within) in a manner to properly consider the weighty issues of our health, the healthcare industry and how art transmits imagery of the human body. In Caniba, with its limited focus and aesthetic strategies, you never really felt confident to grapple with the detail of Sagawa’s case or life, but rather you were being steered to consider the academic questions around Sagawa’s lust for flesh and the societal implications of killers likehim, not necessarily the specifics of him and what he did to Renee Hartevelt in 1981. 

Like its write up on Terrifier 2, the Classification Board helpfully informs/warns potential viewers that Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s doco contains, “graphic and prolonged depictions of actual surgical procedures including, but not limited to, a Caesarian, the draining of fluid from an engorged penis and the removal of a tumour near a man’s enlarged prostate”. 

When you’re watching a horror movie, depending on your familiarity with the genre and your cynicism, some part of you is probably going to be focused on how the filmmakers achieved the gory effect and how close to reality the magic approximates reality. Iconic makeup and FX guru Tom Savini (aka the Sultan of Splatter) often discusses how his experience around real dead bodies in the Vietnam war helped inform his understanding of the human body and how it bleeds and decays when he had to do gore effects on horror films like Friday the 13th, Dawn of the Dead, Maniac and The Prowler. 

It may seem a little stupid to be referencing the horror genre when discussing a serious, Quinzaine-screening documentary about French hospitals and the business of patient care, but it’s hard to not think about what you’re seeing here for real and what has been the meat-and-bones of horror setpieces for decades: drilling into the head brings back memories of Abel Ferrara’s scuzzy Driller Killer, the cutting open of the pregnant woman recalls the French shocker Inside, we’ve certainly seen breasts cut off in roughies, the close ups of wounds links to Cronenberg, the sequence on the eye will make you think back to many a Fulci picture, there’s stuff that wouldn’t look out of place in Miike’s Ichi the Killer or Audition… 

But you don’t get any kind of luxury to consider the artifice of what’s on screen in De Humani Corporis Fabrica the way you do in those horror films, it’s all terrifyingly real here, captured with stunning precision by microscopic cameras, endoscopic imagery and ultrasound technology. Excepting what you may have been privy to in the context of a private healthcare consult where professionals may share such footage with you as patient, the sort of stunning visuals on offer haven’t been seen before with such clarity and there’s a good chance won’t be again quite like this. 

Now, there’s a question about whether you really want to see such things and I can imagine if you’ve been through some medical trauma giving birth, surviving cancer or had invasive surgery on your body, this won’t be ranking high on your to-watch list. 

Frankly the scenes involving the bagging of the prostate, the fluid-spurting penis, the drilling into the brain - these are very difficult to watch without wincing a little. But it’s a sobering reminder of that entire biological circus buzzing away inside you and a good reminder you can’t ignore warning signs of cancers or other serious illnesses. 

The other sobering reality captured is the documentary makes clear throughout that when you step into a hospital as a patient, while you have to have faith that the doctors, specialists and nurses are like infallible Gods who will guide you to safety for your procedure, these are in fact very human, normal people whose workplace just happens to be your body and they’re just as likely to experience the ups and downs of their workplace like anyone else. We see workers griping about their colleagues’ “slices” of cancerous body parts, they drop a suction tube on the floor and swear at each other for a clean one during invasive surgery, they complain about long stretches of sleepless nights on the job where the only credit is a badge or a pen as thanks. Like Australia and the current crises gripping hospital systems around the nation, it appears France isn’t immune from similar challenges in the sector. 

The film’s extraordinary finale ends on these workers blowing off some steam at a staff party, with a thumping soundtrack of New Order’s “Blue Monday” blasting on the stereo. We’ve been subjected to numerous shots of the human body but now the reproductive organs are reconceptualised in a crude, sexualised manner - the camera lingers over a mural depicting a cartoonish orgy of excess; copulation, ejaculation, skeletons, rats. The film eventually settles on a mock Last Supper tableau as a staffer sits in front of it, “Blue Monday” still playing … 

An interesting detour about New Order’s “Blue Monday”: the story behind the title of “Blue Monday” goes that one of the band members got the idea for the title from a book he was reading, Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday. In that book’s preface Vonnegut says he tends to think of humans as “huge, rubbery test tubes with chemical reactions seething inside”. It’s a brilliant way to describe the human body and it completely jives with what we see of bodies in De Humani Corporis Fabrica. 

You may not want to be confronted by such disturbing visions of yourself as a huge, rubbery test tube with chemical reactions seething inside but if you can stomach it, this is a documentary of significant technical prowess and intellectual rigor. A century ago it would have been unthinkable we could see ourselves like this on the big screen but we’re living in an era of wild possibilities and progress even if the shadow of nuclear war and climate change threatens to render all of it obsolete. I’m not sure what Castaing-Taylor and Paravel have next to turn their attentions to but be excited there’s people like them to go places where few filmmakers dare to tread as new camera technology aids expeditions into the little-seen places of our world and ourselves. 

Oh, and a few words about the terrific programming work Container, a Brisbane Film Society, is doing in the city. With Container’s screening of this documentary, recent screenings of films like Il Buco and Artavazd Peleshyan’s Nature and future screenings of Albert Serra’s Pacifiction lined up, it’s clear Brisbane has a great organisation dedicated to important world cinema, curated by minds that seriously know their stuff. This year’s rather lackluster programming at the Brisbane International Film Festival (BIFF) further demonstrated why something like Container is so important as a credible alternative to the major festivals for Brisbane cinephiles. No longer do cinephiles have to wait for BIFF to roll around to maybe get a glimpse of some exciting title that has been getting critical praise at Cannes or Locarno, they can pay a modest annual membership for a full year of great cinema. With BIFF charging $150 for ten tickets during the festival versus Container charging $100 for 12 months of screenings (and with superior programming), you can work out for yourself who is giving the best bang for your cinephile buck.  Membership enquiries via THE CONTAINER WEBSITE