This startlingly eye-opening documentary brings us deep into the human body, finding abstract beauty in its grotesque sights of tissue and organs, yet at the same time, it is also about the sounds of life and death—within and outside of bodies as surgeons chatter, equipment beep and hospitals bustle.
Review #2,632
Dir. Verena Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor
2022 | France | Documentary | 118 min | 1.78:1 | French
R21 (passed clean) for mature content
Cast: –
Plot: Focuses on five hospitals in northern Paris neighbourhoods. It reveals that human flesh is an extraordinary landscape that exists only through the gaze and attention of others.
Awards: Nom. for Golden Eye (Cannes)
International Sales: Les Films du Losange
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Mature – Human Body; Medical Field
Narrative Style: Straightforward
Pace: Slightly Slow
Audience Type: Niche Arthouse
Viewed: MUBI
Spoilers: No
I challenged myself to watch this over lunch and dinner and I think I turned out fine, but it is not something I would recommend for those who cannot stomach the sight of blood, tissue and organs within or outside of human bodies.
A startlingly eye-opening documentary by the duo that made Leviathan (2012), De Humani Corporis Fabrica (or ‘The Fabric of the Human Body’) may be argued as a breakthrough in documentary filmmaking about the human body.
While we may look pleasant on the outside, our insides are another thing altogether—an alien environment, and in the context of this film, a space riddled with diseases, cancerous tumours and dead tissue.
While it is easy to reduce the documentary to its grotesque ‘surgical’ or ‘medical’ dimensions, the filmmakers seem to be eyeing something more poetic, that is to say, like art, there could be a sense of abstract beauty in encountering flesh and bone.
“But we’re in no rush for anyone to die.”
Fabrica is not just about the body, it is also about capturing the sounds of life and death. How does it sound like when surgeons operate on a person, and you hear them chattering (or more accurately, complaining) about work from within the body?
Maybe much like aliens trying to dissect you… There are also sounds of medical equipment beeping, tools clanging—and even a surgical drill (!), as operating theatres bustle with activity.
We are deep in Northern France, in several nondescript hospitals serving patients who are physically ill, and in some segments, elderly patients suffering from mental afflictions.
Perhaps it is more frightening to think about the existential condition of ageing than the pathological/oncological penetration of bodies with all manner of technology. And in one segment, it takes ‘eye-opening’ documentaries to a whole new level.
Grade: A-
Trailer:
Eternality Tan 
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