Five centuries ago, anatomist Andreas Vesalius opened up the body to science for the first time in history. Today, human flesh is revealed as a landscape that exists only through others’ attention. As places of care, suffering and hope, hospitals are laboratories that connect every body in the world.
EN
“It gives us brutally candid images of operations on the eye, the brain and the penis, and takes us into the surreal, microsurgical inner-space of the body: you might find yourself thinking of the 60s sci-fi classic Fantastic Voyage with Raquel Welch and other miniaturised adventurers journeying through the body’s macrocosmos. The title is taken from Andreas Vesalius’s classic anatomical study of 1543, revolutionary in its day for its fiercely rationalist, materialist emphasis on examining what the body really is, but with bizarre, nonrational illustrations of animated corpses appearing to open themselves up, like Jesus and the sacred heart.”
Peter Bradshaw1
“The film needs some breathing moments. But we understood that the hospital works as a body too: it has its own arteries that patients go through and where doctors walk, and a kind of circulatory system made of those sci-fi-looking tubes that transport organs, biopsies, and blood tests around the hospital. So at some point it made sense to include other aspects of the hospital – there are so many inhabitants in and around hospitals that contribute to this movement: homeless people, drug dealers, prostitutes, security guards, people just passing through.”
Véréna Paravel2
- 1Peter Bradshaw, “De Humani Corporis Fabrica review – gruesome surgery film gets under the skin,” The Guardian, May 2023.
- 2Jordan Cronk, “Under the Skin: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel Discuss ‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica’,” Notebook, July 2022.
