De Humani Corporis Fabrica

Five centuries after anatomist Andreas Vesalius opened the human body to science, De Humani Corporis Fabrica opens it to cinema. Revealing flesh as an extraordinary landscape shaped by care, suffering and hope, the film presents hospitals as laboratories that connect every body in the world.

Véréna Paravel: "The film doesn't claim to play a role comparable to that of Vesalius in the history of medicine. But we do try to open up our bodies and look at them with new eyes, [...] one that adds movement, time, texture, and sound to still anatomical imagery. This has physical, technical, political, spiritual, and existential implications, which are all being reconfigured in the present moment [...] The film's ambition is to help us reinterpret our body and its relationship to the world.’

Lucien Castaing-Taylor: "We started filming with a regular camera, but were unhappy with our footage: it seemed too déjà vu and distanced us from both patients and surgeons. So then we asked our friend Patrick Lindenmaier to build a very small camera with an aesthetic very close to that of medical lenses, with a miniature lens that would give us as much freedom to move around as possible. Practically everything we filmed was with this camera, and it provided us with images whose texture links us to the tools used by doctors and surgeons, material that makes up maybe half of the film. The hope was that the similarities (in terms of depth of field and angle of view) between the footage inside and outside the body would encourage viewers to rethink the relationship between interiority and exteriority, the self and other, and generally evoke the infinite interdependencies between different bodies — human and non-human, animate and inanimate.’

— Excerpted from an interview with Jean-Michel Frodon