Five centuries ago, anatomist Andreas Vesalius opened up the human body to science for the first time in history. Today, De Humani Corporis Fabrica opens the human body to the cinema. It reveals that human flesh is an extraordinary landscape that exists only through the gaze and attention of others. As places of care, suffering and hope, hospitals are laboratories that connect everyone in the world.
“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. 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 spectre of death. At the same time we realized that the hospital is a theatrical space, and a tragic one: it is itself a kind of body that contains other bodies and works on them.” (Verena Paravel)