Inevitably, when the documentary De Humani Corporis Fabrica premiered in Cannes on the very same day as David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, critics were very quick to draw comparisons between the films.
Both deal in very graphic fashion with bodies – both how they work and how they fall apart. However, filmmakers and anthropologists Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, who spent several gruelling years making their doc, haven’t yet seen the Cronenberg movie. Their film is in a very different register. It was shot in several hospitals in the Paris area.
As the directors acknowledge, there were obvious ethical challenges to be confronted. They were filming patients who were often seriously ill. Some were suffering from dementia. Some were close to death.
“It’s unanswerable, the ethical quandaries to filming all documentaries – inseparable from the ethical quandaries of life itself,” Castaing-Taylor suggests.
In this case, it helped that the documentary makers had a champion and supporter. They originally intended to make the film in Boston, where they run the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. They couldn’t secure the permission they needed. However, in France, François Crémieux, the then director of the hospitals in the north of Paris, was a huge cinephile. He had even worked with legendary director Chris Marker on his Balkan trilogy project. When Paravel and Castaing-Taylor approached him, they were given free rein to film wherever they wanted in the hospitals.
“Even though he gave us carte blanche, obviously we had to negotiate consent with every patient, medic and paramedic that we encountered. To our surprise, they were all pretty forthcoming,” Castaing-Taylor notes.
In the geriatric hospital, the patients were in far too frail a condition to give completely informed consent. The directors, though, have gone to great lengths to ensure that their film never exploits its subjects.
The doc (which has been screening in the Cannes Quinzaine) opens with a recording of a doctor smoking a cigarette on a stairwell outside the wards. Her words are disarmingly frank. “It’s rare to have someone like a doctor being so open and honest and talking about mistreatment [of patients]…” the directors note.
Paravel and Castaing-Taylor spent “night after night after night” in the hospitals, establishing a rapport with the doctors. “Every time, they go smoke a cigarette, we were with them…we followed them to the operating rooms everywhere. When you have access, you have access.”
The doctor smoking the cigarette was taking a brief break from her relentless routine. She was speaking informally but very movingly about the challenges she was facing. She may seem flippant but it’s apparent that she cares deeply about her profession and wishes that the situation was better for her patients.
“When you spend days and hours and weeks with them, they largely forget your presence,” Castaing-Taylor repeats the familiar mantra that documentary subjects become so used to the cameras that they eventually lose all self-consciousness in front of them. This isn’t a voice over or interview. The doctor is talking to colleagues. “She talks a lot about the political economy, the dire straits of public health in France and Europe today. The NHS [in the UK] is not radically different. What is not clear from the film is that there is actually more capital invested by the French state in medicine today than ever before in history. [But] it is going increasingly to hi-tech, to expensive equipment and not to personnel,” Castaing-Taylor says.
Overworked and underpaid nurses are leaving the profession. The filmmakers can easily understand why.
“We couldn’t look aside,” Castaing-Taylor says of the suffering they were witnessing on a daily basis. “It was incredibly debilitating, both psychically and physically…it was exhausting. It was depressing. It was impossible not to be deeply empathetic both with the patients and with the medics.”
The directors themselves became ill during shooting. “I’ve never been so sick,” Paravel observes wryly. “I really loved spending time in the operating room. I could see clearly see the positive side of the hospital – a surgery goes well and will save somebody’s life or improve somebody’s life. But…the suffering is unbearable.”
After spending time in ER (“every minute, somebody coming between life and death”) Verena Paravel began to experience health issues herself. “When you get back at home at four or five in the morning after seeing young people committing suicide, people dying…you drink. You get sick. I had many diseases. I could not feel my arm, my leg for a while. Then I had a heart problem, a frozen shoulder. I had an accident biking to the hospital two times. I had two concussions…I’ve never been so sick,” she repeats. But there were moments of exhalation and pleasure along the way, they point out.
And, yes, the directors are admirers of Fred Wiseman, the legendary US director famous for his docs on institutions like hospitals and schools. They describe him as being like “a godfather, a very good friend. We admire his work tremendously…we, like him, are very invested is showing reality in a way that is untarnished, that is as unfictionalised as possible.”
As for the sequence involving an operation on a patient’s penis, shown in painful close up, they don’t apologise if they’ve managed to make certain squeamish critics wince. Paravel says they approached the penis in the same way as anything else they filmed, whether the brain or the breasts or the innards. “It’s just another space.”
“But I think the phallus is particularly taboo and sacralised,” adds Castaing-Taylor. “It was important for us to desecrate it!”
De Humani Corporis is distributed in France by Les Films du Losange.
