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De humani corporis fabrica

Director Lucien Castaing-Taylor in person!

De humani corporis fabrica

The latest adventure in perception from Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor takes its title from Vesalius's 1543 catalog of the human form that was both scientific compendium and work of art. "De Humani Corporis Fabrica," Paravel and Castaing-Taylor's experimental nonfiction film, also explores the many landscapes and textures of our bodies, as examined and broached within the institutional settings of French hospitals. Through these directors' eyes, these bodies look wondrous and unsettling, macabre and beautiful, and often uncannily unfamiliar.

That viewpoint feels novel because your average person (who isn't a doctor) hasn't spent much time poking around inside abdomens and skulls, or eavesdropping on surgeons chatting during operations. But the body is also an unfamiliar spectacle here because Paravel and Castaing-Taylor are adepts of Harvard University's formally innovative Sensory Ethnography Lab. They bear witness in ways that foster different perspectives on being in our world.

In their brilliant 2012 film "Leviathan," that meant setting small GoPro cameras loose on a fishing vessel at sea. "De Humani" deploys custom-made cameras and incorporates medical imagery including laparoscopic surgery and unexpectedly magnificent slides of tissue samples. Instead of a comprehensive view, this is a largely phantasmagorical journey through color and texture punctuated with unfiltered glimpses of medical staff at work. The movie's first half-hour, for example, goes from a doctor's musing monologue to a patient being prepped for a brain operation while awake.

This transition — from stream of consciousness to physically being inside someone's head — reflects the movie's darkly comic streak, which starts to feel like a sane response to the fragile-feeling reality of human tissue. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor embrace the physical, hard-core facts of repairing a body: the trippy insertion of a lens into someone's unblinking pale blue eye, or a shambolic prostate procedure with horrific-hilarious surgeon dialogue ("This is a nightmare!").

Next to these scenes, the care shown by an all-woman team of doctors and nurses during a C-section and subsequent newborn exam feels especially tender. The film's sometimes brusque transitions and decentered perspectives are just as transgressive as any of the graphic imagery. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor like to wrench us into and out of close-up settings instead of offering traditional establishing shots. They also occasionally drop in on guards circulating through graffiti-covered subterranean corridors — the infrastructure of buildings where bodily infrastructure is treated.

The riotous visuals of innards illustrate the many ways in which our lives are embodied, but, equally or more so, that we are basically meat. (The vibe of the film's Latin title oscillates between philosophy and heavy metal.) We also keep returning to vexing sequences in a geriatric unit, especially two older women inching along hallways, repeating phrases. The camera is near yet eerily unplaceable, suggesting a purgatorial daze, and there's a profound sense of the vulnerability of our existence in the world.

Vesalius dedicated his work to the Holy Roman Emperor; centuries later, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor conclude theirs with a disco inferno. It's an unexpected scene of celebration and release but, as so often with this team, it resists what you might expect. The avant-garde director Stan Brakhage titled his filmed visit to a morgue "The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes." These two filmmakers too keep pushing themselves and us to look anew.

— Nicolas Rapold, The New York Times

De humani corporis fabrica

Free show!

Sponsored by NEST Studios for the Arts

Sun September 17, 7:00 PM, Muenzinger Auditorium

France, Switzerland; 2023; in French; 118 min • official site

Director: Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel

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Tickets

10 films for $60 with punch card
$9 general admission. $7 w/UCB student ID, $7 for senior citizens
$1 discount to anyone with a bike helmet
Free on your birthday! CU Cinema Studies students get in free.

Parking

Pay lot 360 (now only $1/hour!), across from the buffalo statue and next to the Duane Physics tower, is closest to Muenzinger. Free parking can be found after 5pm at the meters along Colorado Ave east of Folsom stadium and along University Ave west of Macky.

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International Film Series

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Established 1941 by James Sandoe.

First Person Cinema

(Originally called The Experimental Cinema Group)
Established 1955 by Carla Selby, Gladney Oakley, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage.

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(AKA The Rocky Mountain Film Center)
First offered degrees in filmmaking and critical studies in 1989 under the guidance of Virgil Grillo.

Celebrating Stan

Created by Suranjan Ganguly in 2003.

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Established 2017 by Chair Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz.

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