The Sensory Ethnography Lab Filmmakers Who Voyaged Inside the Body

By Alexandra Schwartz

The hand, gloved in nitrile, was inserting a notched metal rod into something that took a moment to identify as the tip of a penis. "It's on the machine-gun setting," a woman's voice said, in French, and it was true that the rat-a-tat sound that filled the cinema, as the rod began to plunge in and out of the orifice, was exactly like that of a Kalashnikov. It was October, the first Sunday night of the New York Film Festival, and the Walter Reade Theatre, at Lincoln Center, was packed. More than two hundred and fifty people had come to watch the American début of "De Humani Corporis Fabrica," the latest documentary by the directing duo Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, though some of them were clearly now regretting it. Introducing the film, Paravel had warned that it might be discomforting. "Rather than leaving, you can also use your hand to go like that," she suggested, covering her eyes. So far, viewers had followed her advice, clutching their faces as they watched a metal bolt being screwed into the skull of a man who lay awake, or moaning—Oh my God, oh my God—as an eye, pried open by a speculum, was sliced with a small blade. But the sight of the violated urethra was too much. In the middle of the theatre, a man stood up and fled his row.

"It happens all the time to people watching our films," Paravel had told me the day before. "They puke or they faint." In Milan, in 2017, she and Castaing-Taylor were walking to a post-screening Q. & A. for their movie "Caniba" when an ambulance peeled by, heading to the same place. Last May, when "De Humani Corporis Fabrica" had its première at Cannes, a member of the audience collapsed and had to be hospitalized.

Depicting reality is the goal of documentary films, but depiction alone doesn't satisfy Paravel and Castaing-Taylor. They want to force viewers into a visceral confrontation with the real; if they could find a way to record smell, they would. Their training is in anthropology, and while they like to joke that they are "recovering" anthropologists, estranged from the field, their method of making films is indebted to that discipline's practice of total immersion. Audiences are dropped into their movies like lobsters into a pot: no score to cue a mood, no voice-overs to establish facts—in fact, hardly any facts at all. "I like very much that they don't explain things," the documentarist Frederick Wiseman told me. "I hate didacticism, and I impute the same thing to them." Sometimes, while they are editing a film, they will discover that they have inadvertently made it too legible, foreclosing the viewer's imagination where they had hoped to activate it, so they will scrap that cut and start again.

Their first collaboration, "Leviathan," from 2012, announced their distaste for storytelling. They shot it on a commercial fishing boat off the coast of Massachusetts, but to say that the vertiginous, sea-sloshed result is about the fishing industry would be like saying that "Finnegans Wake" is about a wake. After watching it, a friend of Castaing-Taylor's begged him to make a talking-head documentary, something that wouldn't require Dramamine to sit through. Eventually, he and Paravel did. In "Caniba," the talking head in question belongs to Issei Sagawa, a Japanese man who murdered and ate a classmate while studying abroad in Paris, in 1981. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor didn't try to make sense of his act; instead, its incomprehensible horror seems to seep into the camera, which rests in extreme closeup on Sagawa's clammy, impassive face. A critic called it one of "the most unpleasant movies ever made," and that was a positive review. At Venice, the film won a special jury prize.

Paravel, who is French, is fifty-two, with dark, laughing eyes and a hummingbird energy. Castaing-Taylor is fifty-seven and English, and has the beard and hair of an aging Jesus. Because their films are challenging to watch, they tend to attract ardent cinephiles rather than the viewers who might, say, queue up for a documentary about a rock climber or an octopus. But at Lincoln Center it quickly became apparent that "De Humani Corporis Fabrica" was the duo's most accessible work, and also their most ambitious.

The film, which is in theatres this month, is set in five hospitals in Paris, and what emerges, in the course of its two hours, is an extraordinarily intimate portrait of both the human body and the people who care for it. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor take us into operating rooms, intensive-care units, psychogeriatric wards, and mortuaries, and also into cafeterias and parking lots and dingy corridors—all the uncelebrated places that make up the hospital's own corpus. They even thrust us inside the body itself, by way of medical footage that they incorporate with their own. The effect is awesome, distressing, surprising, moving, and, sometimes, darkly funny. In one scene, we see a nurse dressing a man who is lying on a gurney in a brightly lit room. A radio is playing upbeat music and, as she and a colleague pull a pair of briefs over the man's hips, it comes as a shock to realize that they are handling a corpse.

In another scene, we observe a laparoscopic surgery to remove a cancerous prostate, watching the same feed that the doctors consult as they maneuver around the organ. The prostate is unusually big, and the surgeons seem bumbling and uncertain as the cavity fills with blood. "Why are you irrigating?" one snaps. "I don't know," another responds. "Where is the suction tube?" "It fell on the floor!" In other operating rooms, doctors chat about soaring rents and grumble about their long hours. It's alarming to realize that their minds might be elsewhere—but they, too, are only human.

"I never give interviews," Castaing-Taylor told me, when I interviewed him last September. It was a bright, mild morning, and we were sitting near his office at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, at Harvard, where he teaches. Some might find the international film circuit glamorous. To Castaing-Taylor, it is intolerable. A few weeks earlier, I had watched an interview that he and Paravel gave at Cannes to a British journalist. They were perched on a sofa, Paravel summery in a printed spaghetti-strap dress, Castaing-Taylor piratical in a black blouse unbuttoned nearly to the navel. Paravel sucked contemplatively on an e-cigarette as Castaing-Taylor tore into topics including the people featured in conventional documentaries ("They’re lying through their teeth") and Cannes itself ("one of the most obscene spaces on the face of the earth"). Even the softest of softballs were ritually impaled. What, the journalist wanted to know, could viewers expect from "De Humani Corporis Fabrica"? "If we could tell them what to expect with words," Castaing-Taylor replied, "we wouldn't have made the film."

In a world flooded with turgid artist statements, Castaing-Taylor believes that his work should stand on its own terms. "I put my all into it," he told me. "Whatever I or the film or the world is trying to express through the film, I have really nothing to add." Before my visit, he asked if I had seen any of his and Paravel's work in a movie theatre. Only at home, I admitted. "That's like reading a novel where you read one word out of two," he said. In the Carpenter's basement cinema, he had arranged a film festival for one, with screenings of movies that he and Paravel had made together, as well as others that had come out of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, the cinematic incubator that he founded at Harvard nearly twenty years ago. The Lab acts as a producer, lending equipment, funds, and feedback to filmmakers whose projects, in the words of its mission statement, seek "to explore the aesthetics and ontology of the natural and unnatural world." That description is purposefully abstract. The mission is simply to make work of a kind that has never been seen before.

The SEL is housed in the Vanserg Building, a former radar laboratory, near the edge of campus, that has no truck with the Ivy splendor of its surroundings. This suits Castaing-Taylor. "One of the profligate things Harvard does is delight in tearing buildings down without any particular reason and putting up other buildings that look like Hilton hotels, with fake wainscoting everywhere," he said, as we made our way to the second floor. We stopped at a door set into a blood-red wall, which bore a plaque with the words "Arrête Ton Cinéma"—"Enough drama," in French idiom, although the literal meaning, "Stop your cinema," might be more germane.

Stepping through was like passing from Kansas into Oz. Outside were fluorescent-lit classrooms equipped with whiteboards. Within was a loft painted the color of mango and cherry, appointed with a long wooden dining table and crowded with art work. A cold-water-survival suit hung on one wall, a coyote pelt on another. A third was given over to a massive blackboard, which was covered in scribblings.

Taking off his shoes, Castaing-Taylor opened the fridge to pour himself a drink. "It's Beyoncé's master cleanse," he said. "Lemon juice and cayenne." In the adjoining room, a futon was tucked by a window. For years, Castaing-Taylor lived in a small house in the South of France, but he recently moved to another, in Catalonia, overlooking the Mediterranean. "I hope to die there," he said. During the six or so months that he spends in Cambridge, he often pulls all-nighters at the SEL, showering at the gym. It isn't home, but, filled with the remnants of homes past, it's close enough.

Castaing-Taylor was born in 1966 in Liverpool. His father worked at a company that built ships; his mother stayed home to raise Lucien and his younger brother. "I was a happy kid," Castaing-Taylor said. "But I didn't thrive at anything, particularly. I had no hobbies." At thirteen, he decided to be baptized into the Church of England, a small act of rebellion against his secular parents. He applied to read theology at Cambridge, but had lost his faith by the time he arrived, so he switched to philosophy. When that disappointed, he switched again, to anthropology.

Growing up in Liverpool had made Castaing-Taylor feel "very provincial." He sensed that anthropology could open the world to him, and it did. After his second year at university, he got a grant to travel to Africa, and spent a summer hitchhiking across the continent. "I hadn't really travelled much outside of England, so it was just completely amazing to be this sort of rinky-dink country-bumpkin-from-Liverpool white guy in Zaire," he said. He thought of staying at Cambridge to pursue a Ph.D., but he longed to flee both England, with its obsession with class, and academia, with its obsession with words. He heard about a master's program in visual anthropology at the University of Southern California. Los Angeles seemed about as far from Britain as he could get, so he decided to apply.

At Cambridge, Castaing-Taylor had begun to work with a 35-mm. Nikon camera, photographing classic anthropological subjects like the Dogon people of West Africa. "I was still thinking like a self-taught 101 photographer, just wanting to compose shots," he said. At U.S.C., though, the focus was on moving images.

Anthropology is not much older than cinema itself. People have always looked at other groups of people and drawn conclusions about them, but the modern basis for the field—the idea that humans might be studied scientifically, in relation to their environment, and that doing so might tell us something about the species as a whole—emerged from Darwin's theory of evolution. Observation was the method, objectivity the goal, and the motion-picture camera seemed to satisfy both. Anthropologists embraced the camera as a device that could expand the scope of their work, and films like "Nanook of the North," Robert J. Flaherty's 1922 landmark portrait of an Inuit family in Quebec, in turn expanded the possibilities of cinema.

Over time, anthropologists began to wonder whether the camera was truly neutral. In 1976, the former collaborators—and former spouses—Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson sat down for a conversation on the subject. In the thirties, they had spent two years in Bali and returned with some twenty-two thousand feet of 16-mm. film. They had since reached opposite conclusions about the medium's purpose. Mead felt that film should be used as a data-gathering tool; she dreamed of a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree camera that could capture an environment in its totality. For Bateson, this was a fool's game.

Bateson: By the way, I don't like cameras on tripods, just grinding. . . .

Mead: And you don't like that?

Bateson: Disastrous.

Mead: Why?

Bateson: Because I think the photographic record should be an art form.

Mead: Oh why? Why shouldn't you have some records that aren't an art form? Because if it's an art form, it has been altered.

Bateson: It's undoubtedly been altered. I don't think it exists unaltered.

Mead: I think it's very important, if you’re going to be scientific about behavior, to give other people access to the material, as comparable as possible to the access you had. You don't, then, alter the material. There's a bunch of filmmakers now that are saying, "It should be art," and wrecking everything that we’re trying to do. Why the hell should it be art?

On they go, arguing like the married couple they once were. Castaing-Taylor is on Team Bateson. "He wanted editing, he wanted subjectivity, he wanted embodied experience," he told me. A piece of writing could tell you what an anthropologist had learned; a still photograph could show you what the photographer had seen. But film, as Castaing-Taylor later wrote, "can offer its audience a sensory experience that reflects and reflects on the actual experiences of others (including the filmmakers themselves)." Why the hell should that be art? How could it not be?

At U.S.C., Castaing-Taylor met another visual-anthropology student, Ilisa Barbash. They became a couple, and began to make films together. "Made in USA" (1990) dealt with sweatshops and child labor in the L.A. garment industry; "In and Out of Africa" (1992) explored the cultural and racial politics of the trade in African art. That movie won a number of awards, though Castaing-Taylor disavows its style now—"very talking-heavy." It wasn't until their third collaboration that he felt they had made something that might be considered art. "Sweetgrass" was released in 2009, but it had been shot at the beginning of the decade, while Barbash and Castaing-Taylor were teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder. They had heard about a family of sheep ranchers in Montana, second-generation Norwegian Americans who were the last people in the area to practice transhumance, the act of moving a flock from the lowlands, in winter, to the mountains for summer grazing. "I just went up there one spring by myself," he said. He was immediately entranced by the beauty of the landscape, and by the cyclical rhythm of the work: the shearing in the cold, early spring, followed by the lambing, and then the arduous, ten-day trip into the mountains, where a handful of men cared for three thousand sheep.

The bulk of "Sweetgrass" was filmed during two summers. Barbash stayed with the ranchers and the couple's two young children; Castaing-Taylor went up with the herders and the flock. They lived a lonely, difficult life: sleeping in tents, trying to keep bears and wolverines at bay. Castaing-Taylor, too, was doing physical work. He kept his shoulder-mounted, forty-pound Sony DVCAM strapped to his body with a steel-spined harness that he wore whenever he wasn't sleeping, and sometimes even then. "It was so that it could become part of my identity," he said.

Castaing-Taylor loved making "Sweetgrass," and you can feel that love in the film. Much of it is shot in long, unbroken takes, the kind that Margaret Mead would have approved of, but they are not neutral. A sense of melancholy creeps in. At the end, it is revealed that the sheep ranch was sold in 2004; transhumance, a practice as old as humankind itself, has, here, come to an end. "There's this whole genre of anthropology called salvage ethnography, " Castaing-Taylor told me. "The idea was to save disappearing cultures, to come up with a record before they disappeared in the face of colonialism and modernity and everything else." By the time "Sweetgrass" was made, the genre had fallen out of favor. "Anthropologists were, like, ‘We’re not going to lament worlds on the wane. Everything's emergent. Everything's syncretic. We can't even talk about discrete cultures, because cultures are constantly in flux.’ I wasn't contesting that, necessarily, but I thought, actually, there are still cultures. And it's not that one has to romanticize them, or be uncritically nostalgic about them, but there are ways of being in the world that are disappearing at a rate that is basically without historical precedent."

He paused. "But I also liked the fact that it was retro," he said. "Especially sheep. I mean, who the hell would study sheepherders, you know?"

While Castaing-Taylor was contemplating livestock, Paravel was living in New York, pursuing a postdoc in sociology. "I was never a cinephile," she told me. "I never watched films. But I knew that I wanted to make one." It was 2004, and she was having trouble concentrating. In France, she had studied the sciences humaines; her mentor was the renowned philosopher-anthropologist Bruno Latour, and she had assumed that she, too, would be an academic. But she was sick of teaching, and writing felt like torture. "If I hated you, I’d say, ‘You know, you should read my thesis,’ " she said. She wanted to look at the world, not analyze it.

Paravel was an anthropologist in fact long before she became one in name. She was born in Switzerland, to French parents, but her father was in oil, and the family followed his work to Algeria, Togo, Ivory Coast, and Russia. Paravel was left to decrypt her surroundings on her own. Why, in Ufa, was she followed by men who sorted through the trash when she threw something away? What was the meaning of the voodoo ceremony that her parents took her to in Togo, where people gave her water to drink and spit on her?

At Columbia, she asked a sociology professor with filmmaking experience if he could lend her a camera. She wanted to trace the route of the 7 train on foot, beginning in Flushing and ending at Times Square, recording the people she met along the way. The professor told her that she would never get any money for a project like that. To be taken seriously in the discipline, you were supposed to plant yourself in one place for years, not wander around having fleeting encounters during a single day. She kept mentioning her idea to people anyway, and one, then another, then a third, said that she should meet someone at Harvard named Lucien Castaing-Taylor.

A year or two went by. Paravel's husband got a job at M.I.T., and the couple moved to Cambridge. One day, she found herself at a brunch. "I’m speaking to this guy, and as soon as we start talking it feels totally natural," she said. "We talked and talked and talked. He had a little house in Ariège. I thought, How does this guy have a house in Ariège? He asked me a ton of questions. It was fantastic. And then I realized all of a sudden that I was talking to the famous Lucien Castaing-Taylor."

Castaing-Taylor had arrived at Harvard in 2002, recruited by the anthropologist Robert Gardner to direct the university's Film Study Center. In the world of ethnographic filmmaking, Gardner, then in his seventies, was a titan, best known for "Dead Birds," his 1963 documentary about the ritual warfare practiced by the Dani people of New Guinea. The grandson of Isabella Stewart Gardner, he was a Boston Brahmin—"very patrician, very debonair, six foot two, very New England, just capital-‘H’ handsome," Castaing-Taylor recalled.

Gardner had founded the Film Study Center in 1957 and run it for decades. It quickly became apparent to Castaing-Taylor that he had walked into a trap. Gardner wasn't looking for someone to take over; he was looking for someone to control.

Castaing-Taylor decided to branch out. Along with two professors in the anthropology department, he applied for a grant to start what would become the SEL. Soon afterward, he began teaching a yearlong course in sensory ethnography that drew students from all disciplines, graduate and undergrad—summers were for shooting. "There was something special there when it was getting started—a hunger to make work," the filmmaker Stephanie Spray told me. She was a doctoral student, studying Buddhism and Hinduism after spending years living among musicians in Nepal, but she had never picked up a camera before. Castaing-Taylor accepted her, anyway. He styled himself as the anti-Gardner, non-hierarchical, open to any idea as long as it was pursued with seriousness. "Lucien was always insistent and very vocal about ‘I’m learning from you all,’ " J. P. Sniadecki, another early alum, said. "He created a climate of wonder, of radical experimentation. Of course, there's always competition, and grad-school bullshit. But, for the most part, I think people felt galvanized. It became the most meaningful thing that we were engaged in."

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"Work coming out of the Lab felt very different than what we think of as American documentary," Dennis Lim, the artistic director of the New York Film Festival, told me. Over time, the form had "calcified into this very informational, didactic genre," partly because of the influence of television. The films that emerged from the SEL unearthed new aesthetic possibilities. Spray's "Manakamana" (2013), which she directed with Pacho Velez, takes viewers into the cable cars used by pilgrims to travel to a temple in Nepal. In "Dry Ground Burning," which is in theatres now, Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós cast residents of a favela near Brasília to create a work that is part documentary, part speculative fiction. "Expedition Content" (2020), by Veronika Kusumaryati and Ernst Karel, is hardly a film at all. It includes only one minute of footage, an outtake from Gardner's "Dead Birds"; the rest is audio recording, deployed to explosive effect.

This was the world that Paravel had been looking for. She began auditing Castaing-Taylor's class, which she now co-teaches, and made "7 Queens," her film about the subway line. Along the way, she discovered Willets Point, a neighborhood of junkyards and chop shops, near Citi Field, that was threatened by gentrification. She asked Castaing-Taylor if he would film it with her, but he was busy finishing "Sweetgrass," and suggested Sniadecki instead. Their feature, "Foreign Parts" (2010), was an education in an intrepid, gonzo style of collaboration: little money, no crew. "We just let the camera flow between us," Sniadecki recalled—not least because one camera was all they had.

In the meantime, "Sweetgrass" had become an art-house hit; Manohla Dargis, of the Times, declared it the year's "first essential movie," and another critic compared it to a Beethoven symphony. Castaing-Taylor began to look for a new project. He was interested in New Bedford, the old Massachusetts whaling town where Ishmael starts his journey in "Moby-Dick." "It's the biggest fishing port in the country," he told me—and one of the poorest places in the state. He began to hang out by the docks alone. It was winter, and he was told that if he fell into the water he’d have thirty seconds, sixty at most, to get out. "I was lonely and weak and cold and miserable," he said. He asked Paravel if she wanted to join him.

"The initial idea was that you would never see the sea," Castaing-Taylor told me. He had planned to focus on various industries in town: people making or repairing nets, stevedores loading and unloading cargo. Paravel's presence changed the project. "She's a woman—a French woman," Castaing-Taylor said. "She doesn't look like everyone else on the port." Fishermen began to invite the duo out in their boats, and they decided to go along, just once, to shoot for their private records. "It was just so extraordinary and so powerful," Castaing-Taylor said. "Just completely bamboozling and overwhelming metaphysically, existentially, cosmologically, in a purely corporeal kind of banal way as well, that we wanted to go out again and again and again."

Making "Leviathan," Paravel told me, "was an amniotic experience." The New Bedford boats went trawling in Georges Bank, whose shoals run up to Nova Scotia; the voyages could last for weeks at a time. "The captain said, ‘We don't know where the fish are or how long it will be. I’ll take you out on the condition that no matter what happens to you, if you die or whatever, I’m not coming back,’ " Castaing-Taylor recalled. On their first voyage, a storm hit. "Véréna was filming me in my berth vomiting into a ziplock bag," he said. When he finally emerged, the captain asked if he wanted a gun. "He said, ‘If you don't want to kill yourself, you don't even know what seasick is.’ ‘Sweetgrass’ was macho, but this blew it away."

Commercial fishing has one of the highest fatality rates of any industry in the United States. The work attracts tough types; Paravel was the lone woman in their world, and made to feel it. "I showered once, maybe twice," she said. "Lucien was always in front of the door." Everyone has a different way of managing fear, and Paravel tends to fall back on superstition. She won't leave home without a white stone in her pocket for luck. Whenever she takes a plane, she dresses up so that her body, if found after a crash, will at least be presentable. When she films, though, she doesn't think that she needs protection. The camera makes her feel invincible, as if she were in a trance.

It quickly became clear that the cameras they had been using on land weren't fit for sea. In "Sweetgrass," Castaing-Taylor had experimented with attaching lav mikes to sheep, capturing sound right at its source. Now he and Paravel tried GoPros, affixing the tiny cameras to the wrists and heads of the fishermen. "We were bowled over by it," Castaing-Taylor said. The cameras captured a consciousness independent of intentionality, a perspective unique to the sea itself. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor placed the cameras in waterproof boxes, which they taped to fifteen-foot-long poles, submerging them deep into the water then raising them as a flock of gulls circled—a literal bird's-eye point of view.

"Leviathan" is a film with many subjects. There's the labor that takes place on the boat, the brutal work of shucking hundreds of shellfish, or of thrusting skate after skate onto a grappling hook to slash off the edible wings, the savaged body thrown back into the sea. That sense of plunder, of the degradation of the environment, is a theme, too. Above all, there is the ocean, seductive and illegible, nightmarish and exalted, with no land in sight.

"When you spend time at sea for weeks and weeks, in storms and everything, obviously you need to have a relationship that is much more interesting than a couple's relationship," Paravel told me. It was the day before the New York screening of "De Humani Corporis Fabrica," and we were strolling through Riverside Park. Paravel, who had warned me that she walked very fast, was staying nearby, in an apartment occupied by her husband. Both she and Castaing-Taylor have separated from their spouses. Naturally, people wonder if they are romantic. Paravel blew air through her lips in the dismissive French way: pfft. "The magnitude of our relationship is beyond all that," she said. "It's very mysterious, and actually mysterious to us, too."

In the world of American documentary, "Sweetgrass" opened a door. "Leviathan" blew it off its hinges. But some people acted as if Castaing-Taylor had made it alone. "I remember the world première, at Locarno," Paravel told me. "Lucien didn't come, because he wanted to see a soccer game. He went to Liverpool with his son." After the screening, a journalist tapped her on the shoulder. "He said, ‘You have to tell Lucien congratulations on this film.’ I could give you fifty examples like that." In the credits of their subsequent films, Paravel's name is given first, at Castaing-Taylor's insistence. "It's not like one does more than the other," she told me. "It's a pure collaboration." She has the ideas—"a million ideas a minute," Castaing-Taylor said, "I have one idea a year"—and he has the follow-through. Often, when they edit, they will argue over whether to include one shot or another. An hour later, they will discover that they were each convinced by the other's case, and will have to hash it out again, from opposite points of view.

Usually, though, debate isn't required. A few years ago, Paravel read about a medical student who discovered that one of the corpses her class was supposed to be dissecting was that of her great-aunt. The story both horrified and fascinated her. What did it mean to donate your body to science—to let it be violated for the sake of the species? What, for that matter, did it mean to have a body at all? This was the question that all their work had been circling, but they had never gone at it directly. "At the same time, we said, ‘Oh, we should make a film about that,’ " Paravel told me. "You know, when you have to do the thing with the pinkie? Jinx."

Spending time in a hospital seemed a good way to start. They wanted to shoot in Boston, but American hospitals are squeamish about cameras; in the event of a lawsuit, film could be used as evidence. Through mutual acquaintances, they met a Parisian hospital administrator—a cinephile, as it happened. He gave them carte blanche to shoot whatever they liked.

It was gruelling to make "Leviathan," but "De Humani Corporis Fabrica" was, in some ways, their most demanding project yet. One year of filming became two, then three, until half a decade had gone by. Early on, they named their project for the Renaissance physician Andreas Vesalius's book "De Humani Corporis Fabrica," the first accurate work of human anatomy in Western medicine. Published in 1543, it featured descriptions of the body's parts alongside richly detailed woodcut illustrations, which allowed readers to peer beneath the flesh for themselves. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor, too, wanted to depict the body in a new way. The film's imagery is exquisite, uncanny. A lump of flesh, as charred as a well-done steak, is suddenly revealed to be a cancerous breast; a curved spine is hammered into shape like so much length of railroad track. Filming took on a logic of its own. "We were trying to understand something about what it is to be fragile, to be vulnerable," Paravel said. "There's a very beautiful term in medicine, ‘incidentalomas.’ They’re fortuitous discoveries. As in, when you’re looking for one illness and find another." The more they looked, the more they saw.

In all, they produced more than three hundred hours of footage—much of it taken with cameras, the size of lipstick tubes, that were fashioned by the Swiss cinematographer Patrick Lindenmaier, who has collaborated with Castaing-Taylor since "Sweetgrass." They wanted their equipment to be as unobtrusive as possible, but doctors liked having them around. (One liver specialist called whenever he had a particularly "beautiful" surgery to show off.) Like "Leviathan" and "Sweetgrass," "De Humani Corporis Fabrica" is a work about labor and its toll. The penis scene, for instance. You might be able to glean that the procedure is a kidney-stone removal, or you might not; it doesn't much matter. But listen. The doctor in charge is complaining. The pace of operations at the hospital is too slow; he wants more porters, more efficient nurses. "This shit is so tiring," he says. "I see a hundred patients a week . . . I’m a robot." He's being eaten alive by anxiety. "I shouldn't feel this constant pit in my stomach. It isn't normal. I haven't even had an erection today. That's even less normal." He is sacrificing his own body in order to heal someone else's.

All the while, we see nothing of the patient except his exposed genitals. Is this how the doctor sees him, too? "It's really hard to transgress every day," Paravel said: to handle someone else's insensate body, to cut it open, to gaze inside. This is what the audience at Walter Reade was reacting to so vehemently—the act of looking. Before Paravel and Castaing-Taylor started shooting, they had wondered whether patients might feel uncomfortable with having some of the most fearful and private moments of their lives recorded, but the opposite turned out to be true. Some even asked them to come film when they knew they would be under anesthetic. The camera wasn't some alien, invasive presence, but it wasn't neutral, either. It turned out to be a guardian, a substitute for consciousness.

At Lincoln Center, the lights came up, to enthusiastic applause. The walk-outs, in the end, had been few. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor took the stage for a Q. & A. led by Dennis Lim. Castaing-Taylor was in one of his terse, conscientious-objector moods, and for a long time said nothing, leaving his microphone on the floor. "Lucien!" Paravel chided.

A young woman stood to ask a question. "I was wondering if there was a singular moment or insight that you experienced while you were making this film that was the most disturbing or surprising or enlightening," she said. She volunteered her own: the corpses being dressed in the morgue.

"Curiously, the morgue is the funniest place," Paravel said. "Funniest, in the way that it's the most joyous. All the people working there are there because they’re fed up with suffering."

She grew thoughtful. "It's actually a very sensitive question," she said. During the shoot, she had faced a medical ordeal of her own—a few of them, actually. She had learned what it was to become a patient as she was documenting other people's pain. "I think the idea we had was just, like, how about we make a film where at the end people feel differently about themselves?" she said. "Where they feel we are inhabiting this thing that is so fragile, so resilient, so full of vital forces. . . ."

She trailed off. Language was failing her. "We’re making films that exhaust the possibility of words," Paravel had told me. "Do you really want a Q. & A.? Let's go drink a whiskey or something. Or lie down and dream. Or touch your body. Or do—something!"

For all their suspicion of narrative, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel did give "De Humani Corporis Fabrica" a structure of sorts. The film begins in Stygian darkness, watchmen making the night rounds with their dogs. It ends in darkness of a totally different kind. The doctors are having a party in their private cafeteria, honoring a departing colleague. The overhead lights have been turned off; the camera pans slowly to show bodies dancing, bodies smoking, bodies drinking and laughing and playing foosball, before drifting away to focus on the room's walls, which are covered in a mural of elaborate pornographic cartoons: smiling, priapic men and huge-breasted women engaged in the most flagrante of delictos. New Order blares in the background; beneath the figures lie a bed of skulls. Talk about transgression. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor had been to the land of the interior and returned. Where could they go that would be deeper than that? "We’ll find it," Paravel said. "We have to." ♦