InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 16

Re-Interrogating the Body
An Interview With Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel
Anthropologist-filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and
Véréna Paravel’s work dissolves the space between their camera and their subject. Previous films
Leviathan and Caniba both treat their respective subjects — the marine landscapes of commercial fishing, the domestic world of an
infamous cannibal — with startling intimacy, but the proximity of their filmmaking finds new extremes with De Humani Corporis
Fabrica, an observational exploration of eight Parisian hospitals. This new film unfolds across subterranean infirmary tunnels,
operating tables, and inside patients’ bodies; it was assembled over the course of six years, and presents an unflinching document of
state-of-the-art surgical procedures, directing our gaze to otherwise unseeable sights of the human interior.
In the spirit of Stan Brakhage’s monumental autopsy documentation The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, De Humani probes the
experience of looking at otherwise imperceptible depths of the human body. The film facilitates an encounter between spectators
and the most disavowed corners of their biology. There’s no shortage of haunting corporeal images, visions of the body at its most
frail and vulnerable — and yet the film asks us to reckon with what it means to be repelled by the sight of our own biology. At the crux
of De Humani’s ambitious feat (both formally and thematically) is the groundwork for a new relationship with our own bodies, beyond
fear and abjection. I spoke with Castaing-Taylor and Paravel about bodily anxiety and the political imperative of looking at the body in
De Humani; Alice Diop’s reaction to the film; David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future; the work of Walter Benjamin; and plenty more.
As I understand it, the idea for your last movie, Caniba, began with you researching Japanese Pink films and then reorienting
your focus towards Issei Sagawa when you realized he appeared in a Hisayasu Satō film. Did De Humani have a similar
trajectory of shifting focus, or was the central concept solidified from the beginning of your research?
LCT: We read an interview that we apparently gave to a French newspaper called Libération — a New York Times-y thing for France — I
think in 2011 that said we were already working on this project, which is hard to believe. I think it was just in the idea stage. There
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