Container #10: De Humani Corporis Fabrica
As introduced by Associate Professor Elizabeth Stephens (UQ) and in partnership with the Australasian Health & Medical Humanities Network.
Hello. Thank you once again for joining us.
Next Screening:
De Humani Corporis Fabrica | Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel
7pm Tuesday 15 November at The Elizabeth
Five centuries ago, anatomist André Vésale opened up the human body to science for the first time in history with his momentous work De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem (On the fabric of the human body in seven books) which married new modes of biological observation and inquiry with Renaissance breakthroughs in visual representation and engraving print technologies. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica opens the human body to the cinema. Drawing on custom-made cameras and microphones and the filmmakers’ distinct style, the film reveals that human flesh is an extraordinary landscape that exists only through the gaze and attention of others. As places of care, suffering and hope, hospitals are laboratories that connect every body in the world.
The latest film from Castaing-Taylor and Paravel, leading figures within Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, is a culmination of the pair’s previous work, synthesising the whirlwind of Leviathan’s 360-degree miniature camerawork with the intense bodily fixation of their Caniba. At its widest sense, the film is about the exposure of the human being to the hospital system—whether filmmaker, doctor or patient—and the film’s pleasures (again in the widest possible sense) come from the comingling of awe at medical footage, the everyday nature of hospital work, and the inherent tender brutality of surgical practice and life.
WARNING: this film is rated R18+ for High Impact Surgery Scenes and Nudity
We’re delighted that this screening will be introduced by Associate Professor Elizabeth Stephens (University of Queensland). As the author of Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present and co-author of A Critical Genealogy of Normality, it is hard think of anybody more appropriate for contextualising and thinking through this film.
Presented in partnership with the Australasian Health & Medical Humanities Network and with thanks to Madman.
For further context on the film, here are two interviews—in Filmmaker and Reverse Shot—with Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel. The latter opens with what could be considered a spoiler (if such a film can be spoiled) but both thoughtfully go into the wider context of the film, its social and technological context and their “desublimation” aims.
Upcoming Screenings:
15 November: Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Pictured Below)
29 November: Helena Wittmann’s Human Flowers of Flesh (Pictured Above)
6 December: Albert Serra’s Pacifiction
13 December: Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum
Thank you. We hope to catch you on tonight for our screening of Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Then on the 29th of November we enter our summer series with Helena Wittmann’s Human Flowers of Flesh—we’re not going to spoil anything, but it’s been nice working with her to prepare a few things for the Australian premiere with us at Container.