‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica’ Review: Fascinating Deep Dive Into Hospital Practice Shows the Body as a Temple, a Dreamscape and a Battleground
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic It’s nearly 30 years since the global franchise of Body Worlds exhibitions — collections of dissected and plastinated human cadavers, equal parts science lesson and carnival attraction — racked up ticket sales and stoked controversy in multiple international markets.
Anatomist (or ringmaster) Gunther von Hagens professed to display the body as it had never been publicly viewed before, and there was certainly a lurid fascination to Body Worlds’ vision of what we look like under the skin.
That sense of revelation is recalled in Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s extraordinary new documentary “De Humani Corporis Fabrica,” which likewise delves dizzyingly beneath the flesh to show organs, systems and actions that we know are inside us, but tend to keep tidily out of mind.
But where the Body Worlds exhibits were lifelessly embalmed, missing the crucial dimension granted by breath and motion, “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” — named for Andreas Vesalius’ landmark 16th-century anatomy books, and translating to “of the structure of the human body” — takes us into the living, heaving, breathing body, using microscopes, ultrasounds and endoscopic and scialytic cameras to present its inner workings about as vividly as any nonfiction film has ever managed.
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