GUT FEELINGS

The filmmakers trying to capture experience—from inside the body.

- 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 CastaingTaylor 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.