The Politics of Transgression in De Humani Corporis Fabrica

Abstract

The film De Humani Corporis Fabrica has repeatedly been dubbed in the English-speaking film criticism media as a “non-fiction shocker” (Chang, 2023), a sample of “tactile cinema” (Mullen, 2023) with “ample gore on display” (Mintzer, 2022). This paper, firstly, aims to contradict these claims, as the film’s goal is not to elicit an immersive representation of the human body but a reflection on how it is instead objectified, abstracted, and interpreted by means of deconstructing the medical gaze and via a complex interplay between the viewer’s quasi-identification and alienation. To this end, it closely analyses the patterns in the camerawork, the various degrees of remediation of the medical imagery, and the relationships between denotation and connotation, highlighting the prevalence of de-dramatization strategies, which run counter to societal taboos and conventional representations of the hospital in popular culture as a sensationalized site of emergencies. As such, we argue that De Humani Corporis Fabrica is an essay film that seeks neither to “shock” viewers nor to mount a narrow institutional critique of the French sanitary system. By delving into the film’s intricate biopolitics, we outline how the various levels of transgression, the emphasis on “malfunction,” and the pervasiveness of technology are framed as symptoms of broader tensions between paternalistic modes of interaction and patient-centred approaches within the Western sanitary system at large. Finally, by interpreting the ending as a counterpoint to the objectifying gaze that the film lures us into adopting throughout, we consequently stress the film’s defiant sense of “anarchy,” as it urges us to reclaim “our” bodies, be them individual or collective.