Director of Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab Lucien Castaing-Taylor and his colleague Véréna Paravel recognize the integral role of image-making in modern medical science. With their unparalleled feel for immersive editing, which they first exhibited in the 2012 fishing industry documentary Leviathan, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel stitch together fragments of footage from a handful of hospitals in France, exploring the insides and outside of the human body and offering a privileged perspective into the professional spaces that make the body their business. The result is a transportive journey into the smallest recesses a camera can access, revealing both the fragility and the robustness of the matter that makes us mortal. ~TW
“Thinking about how modern medicine has used the tools of cinema to develop its own powers of seeing, we wanted to try to do the opposite, to borrow the tools of medicine for cinema, to allow us to see the human body in a way almost none of us ever get to see, and to break open the usual ways we look at our bodies and the world,” Paravel said while describing the process of conceiving the film. “To give us a view of our interior selves that’s more corporeal, more incarnate. But one that also lets us glimpse our vulnerability: the fragility of life and the ever-present specter of death.” ~Castaing-Taylor & Paravel.