getting in touch - a journey into all the glandulars, tissulars, holes of the human body. a bloody mess of humanism and medical normality.

Cronenberg would be proud of this type of body-horror. the most visceral, physically attacking and angst-inducing stuff i've seen in a while. makes Cannibal Holocaust feel like a kindergarten play.

has some Frederick Wiseman vibes when looking "outside" of the human body (the gerontological psychiatry and morgue sequences). the best stuff remains the sweet dialectics of interior body images and exterior human communication - interactions about working conditions, upper class real estate property, cynical evaluations or simply ridiculous errors, flaws and lapses. priceless (and scary on so many levels).

sure, in a way this is just…

“It’s all getting a bit abstract now” - anonymous, scared surgeon pulling out a massive prostate.

We have to delimit! We’re this and not that, otherwise we wouldnt be at all. We are bodies and workers and chatters, otherwise we wouldn’t be anything. This film is suffused with images which remind us that limits are strange things: that to draw a limit is to implicate a thing in what it’s not in a decidedly weird way. 

Principally of course the endoscope is the tool which creates this effect. It is a camera which constructs an alien reality from our most intimate cracks, crevices and alleyways. At times it feels like it’s representing the human being as it really is: beyond…

69/100

If surgery is the new sex, here's some hardcore porn. Initially, I felt as if Paravel and Castaing-Taylor were wasting their time on this particular subject—Leviathan's arresting nightmare images wouldn't exist had they not brought their cameras onto that trawler, whereas you can find countless laparoscopic videos out there, all of which provide more or less the same discomfiting survey of human innards. No sensory ethnography required. Should've given these filmmakers more credit, especially since they open with shots following hospital security (and a dog) through dimly lit passages and then hold for a long time on a reflected (?) shot of doctors (?) that's barely visually "legible," forcing us to concentrate on their shop talk. Subsequent sequences find…

Not too different an experience on second viewing, but watching it this time, I was far more attuned to how judicious Castaing-Taylor and Paravel's editing choices are. Scene length and construction isn't necessarily determined by suspense or procedural detail, but rather by the extent to which the abstracted imagery does (or does not) start to take on meaning via a progressive recognition of the situation. The tension derives from the extent to which each sequence permits identification with the ostensible human element involved—the extent to which it is able to take on a "dimensionality," so to speak, for the viewer. Contrast for instance the brief early scene of the man having screws tapped into his head, which creates a direct…

This has probably my favourite final shot of all the films I saw at MIFF this year. Some doctors are at a dingy bar, blowing off steam – I don’t think we ever see them, we just hear snatches of their conversation as voiceover. There is a huge mural on one wall depicting fantastical winged creatures like gargoyles, and many of them have giant erect penises that are almost the length of their bodies. The camera slowly pans across this mural, lit by ever-changing coloured disco lights, as the entirety of ‘Blue Monday’ by New Order plays diagetically, with the reverberating bass characteristic of a straining sound system in a sleazy nightclub. It’s an apt summation of Humani’s concerns: the profound…