The US Avant-Premiere of the new film DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA by Verna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor

This Wednesday, February 15th, the Department's Social Anthropology Seminar Series presents a special event: The US Avant-Premiere of the new film DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA by Verna Paravel, Visiting Professor on Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, John Cowles Professor of Art and Anthropology and Director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard University. 

The screening will be held at 7PM at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts Theater at 24 Quincy Street in Cambridge, MA. 

Five centuries ago, anatomist Andreas Vesalius opened up the human body to Western science for the first time in history. Today, De Humani Corporis Fabrica opens the body to the cinema. It reveals that human flesh is a landscape of unknown and unforgettable forms, which, like all landscapes, only exists through the gaze and attention - by turns benevolent and malevolent of others. As places of devotion and negligence, suffering and hope, hospitals are laboratories that connect every body in the world.

The film is a hymn to life, and to death. Having had its world premiere in Cannes last summer, the latest work to come out of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Laboratory is an exploration of the inside of the body as it spills out into the public hospital system in Paris. A film about the humanity of doctors and patients, the materiality of their bodies, and the institutions that slice through them, De Human Corporis Fabrica brings an altogether novel approach to medical anthropology.

Verena Paravel, Master Class Professor at SPEAP, Sciences Po, Paris, and Visiting Professor in Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Professor of Anthropology and AFVS, will be present for a conversation following the screening.