Betzy Bromberg Body Politic (God melts bad meat) USA, 1988, 40 mins, 16mm

The Brothers Quay The Phantom Museum UK, 2003, 12 mins, video

Nigel Maudsley Chance Encounter UK, 1997, 7 mins, video

This is a list of works which address issues around the human body. Despite their enormous variety of approaches to the subject, they all attempt to unsettle our ordinary relationship to the body by reframing it, fragmenting its image, or imagining its interior. These films raise questions about, amongst other things, science, sexuality, the senses, motherhood and death.

See also:
PERFORMANCE
SEX & SEXUALITY

STAN BRAKHAGE
THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES
1971, silent, colour, 32 mins, 16mm.
In the Fall of 1971, I began photographing in the Allegheny Coroner's office in downtown Pittsburgh. Thanks to the help of Sally Dixon, head of the Film Department of the Carnegie Museum, and the kind cooperation of Coroner Wecht, I was to be permitted to photograph Autopsy- a term which comes from the Greek meaning: The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes. Within two weeks I had completed the photography, and felt at the time this would be the third in a trilogy beginning with the film Eyes and followed by Deus Ex. The film-maker Hollis Frampton writes with the most objective clarity about the finished film.

'[...]Stan Brakhage, entering with his camera, one of the forbidden, terrific locations of our culture, the autopsy room. It is a place wherein, inversely, life is cherished, for it exists to affirm that none of us may die without our knowing exactly why. All of us, in the person of the coroner, must see that for ourselves, with our own eyes. It is a room full of appalling particular intimacies, the last ditch of individuation. Here our vague nightmare of mortality acquires the name and faces of others. 'This is the last process that requires a witness, and what 'idea' may finally have inserted itself into the sensible world we can still scarcely guess, for the camera would seem the perfect Eidetic Witness, staring with perfect compassion where we can scarcely bear to glance.'

'What was to be done in that room, Stan? and then, later, with the footage? I think it must have been mostly to 'stand aside', to 'clear out', as much as possible with the baggage of our own expectations, even ,as to what a work of art must look like, and to see with your own eyes, what coherence might arise within a universe for which you could decree only the boundaries.' (Written for the premiere of the film at the Millennium Film Workshop...these three pieces excerpted from a longer piece)

BETZY BROMBERG
BODY POLITIC (GOD MELTS BAD MEAT)
USA, 1988, sound, colour, 40 mins, 16mm.
...travels a realm of modern moral dilemma as it examines the relationship between high technology, medicine, religion, politics and the American family. - B.B.

'The body, culture and nature are at stake in 'Body Politic', a film that goes to a hospital operating room, research laboratories and a family picnic to outline the issues raised by genetic experimentation. With her typical serious-humour, Bromberg explores both the claims of science (we can improve human life) and the claims of religion (God made perfect beings) and implicitly asks the question, 'How do we know when we've gone too far?'... There's no voice-over and the argument is made by an athletic juxtaposition of imagery and testimony.' - Helen Knode, L.A.Weekly.

KATE CRAIG
DELICATE ISSUE
UK, 1979, 12 mins, video
Delicate Issue was shot with an extreme close-up lens, the camera passing over a naked body. The sound is a mix of a spoken text and the sound of breathing and a heart beat.

GABRIELLE DOLAN
REPLICA
UK, 1997, sound, colour, 3 mins, 16 mm
'The film is a visualisation of the interior of the body. It represents replication, the basis of living beings. Internal physical activity is interpreted through images of fleshiness and viscous fluidity. It attempts to embody the genetic pattern and pace involved in the cycle of cellular reproduction. Explosives follicles, embryonic shapes and granular imagery describe the nature of a variety of the corporal processes which allows life to continue.'

TONY DONOGHUE
BODY PROJECTIONS
UK, 1998, 5 mins, video
Inside Out uses the human body, painting, sound and pixillation, in a personal examination of the relationship between the decorated body, the biological body and the social body.
AN ANIMATE! FILM

CATHERINE ELWES
THERE IS A MYTH
UK, 1984, 18 mins, video
'I wanted to make an image of a breast that was an object of nourishment. In Oxford where I live the only place where you can bare your breast to feed a child is in the café at the Museum of Modern Art. However, bare breasts are on display on display across top rack magazines at every newsagent in the city.' - C.E.

KAREN INGHAM
THE CUTTING EDGE
UK, 1986, 7 mins, video
An incisive analysis of the media taboos surrounding the public display of female body hair, shaving, waxing, messy, smelly creams: women appearing as eternally smooth and hairless - an image that connotes powerlessness.

DAVID LEISTER
MEDICINE BOX
UK, 2004, sound, B&W, 11 mins, 16mm
Medicine Box is a 16mm film project that takes as its starting point the interior of the medicine cabinet. The doors of the medicine cabinet open revealing its contents. Hands rearrange, remove and add to the collection of pill bottles and medicinal cures stored inside. Blurred bottles float past the screen and quantities of pills are dispensed. Pills of different shapes and sizes are arranged in Morse Code fashion, providing cryptic clues to ‘cure-alls’. The intention of the work is to make the viewer question the necessity of medication, to be aware of its power and to respect the influence that a small pill can have on one’s health. The film is a response to the artist’s own attitude to and experience of medication and the effect it can have within family relationships. It was prompted by a realisation of the difference between necessity, dependency and addiction.

JANIS CRYSTAL LIPZIN
OTHER RECKLESS THINGS
USA, 1984, sound, colour, 20 mins, 16mm
"Other Reckless Things, a response to a bizarre newspaper account of a woman in Ithica, N.Y. who performed a Caesarean section on herself, is a daring yet subtle reflection on the anomalies of birth and self - mutilation." - Kate Regan, San Francisco Chronicle.

"the film alternates clinical medical footage of a conventional Caesarean section in a hospital with clips of the news report bringing into question issues of invasion of privacy, of voyeurism, control over one's body and the use of technology in situations that may not require it. Zweig's text - sound...is chilling and charged as the film images." - Will Torphy, Artweek.

MARA MATTUSCHKA
KUGELKOPF (AN ODE TO IBM)
Austria, 1985, 6 mins, 16mm
"In 'Kugelkopf', Mara Mattuschka subversively challenges the printing press and modern technology with her own body's power. Starting by shaving and slitting her head with a razor in sheer pleasure, she proceeds to make marks and patterns with the blood on a glass sheet. The staccato motion of the ritual duplicates the golfball sound of a typewriter. This self-empowering act satirises violence against women, in particular the eye-slitting seqence in Luis Bunuel's 'Un Chien Andalou'." - Film and Video Umbrella

NIGEL MAUDSLEY
CHANCE ENCOUNTER
UK, 1997, 7 mins, video
Computer animation symbolically exploring what is allowed to cross the division between the outside and the inside of the body and how that informs our notion of self and identity. Metaphors of space, location, geography and mapping are used to refer to the mapping and policing of desire.

ANNE M. PARISIO
BODYWORK
UK, 1980, sound, colour, 14 mins, 16mm.
Bodywork is an experimental film made under laboratory conditions in which differing physical states of the human body are measured with a physiograph. The physiograph translates the frequencies of functioning organs of the human body, (heart rate, alpha waves, respiration, muscle response etc.) into drawn lines but these frequencies have also been translated via a synthesizer and vocoder into sound patterns which form soundtrack on the film.

The film is a record of five very differing states:
(i) Normal state.
(ii) Nicotine (a fast acting drug).
(iii) Deprivation of sleep.
(iv) Pain ( random white noise).
(v) Hypnotism (induced revulsion).

One could create a visual and aural environment merely by existing...

THE BROTHERS QUAY
THE PHANTOM MUSEUM
UK, 2003, 12 mins, video
Sir Henry Wellcome (1853-1936) amassed one of the world's largest museum collections, capturing human culture and history through medical eyes. The Phantom Museum uses animation to imaginatively 'document' this extraordinary assemblage and simultaneously reveal an extremely beautiful yet odd inner cosmos of things.
An animate! Film

AGGY READ
BOOBS ALOT
Australia, 1968, sound, B&W, 3 mins, 16mm
Three thousand tits in three minutes with music by the Fugs. The film was banned by the Australian Commonwealth censor for 18 months before the ban was lifted on appeal.

'A truly onetrack film' - Sidney Festival Programme Notes, 1968.

'An air of innocent purity.' - Arthur Cantrill.

'Too many tits.' - Tuli Kupferberg.

JOEL SCHLEMOWITZ
ON THE FRAGILITY OF EXISTENCE
USA, 1992, sound, B&W, 5 min, 16mm
'A short, lyrical, horrific and abstract film-essay, which uses illustrations from a book on surgical techniques as a springboard to examine the ephemeral nature of our fleshy entanglements.' - J.S.

VIVIENNE SILLAR
THREE STUDIES IN LIGHT PROJECTION WITH THE BODY IN MOTION
UK, 1982, 15 mins video
My work originally derived from an interest in tribal body painting. The three studies are an attempt to describe and simplify the form of the human figure using projected lines and movement of the body.

CATHY SISLER
BACKWARDS
Canada, 1992, 9 mins, video
This single shot of a bare back thwarts our desire to see. A woman's voice tells a story. It talks about her back, about the body which is not transparent, about pain, the difficulty of sharing pain. 'I have a big broad back. It measures 18 across. Is that big for a woman?'.

IRM & ED SOMMER
AMICOTHEK
Germany, 1969, sound, B&W, 10 mins, 16mm
Structuralized segmentation of body fragments, in various sequential order juxtaposed against the verbal reading of the people's names. Fragments of heads, backs, knees, genitals, etc. A demystification of the body as such, is the sought for effect.

STELARC
REMOTE CONTROL SUSPENSION
Australia, 1987, 18 mins, video
Radical performance artist and technological experimenter Stelarc describes what he does as redefining what is human while re-designing the body. For more than twenty years, he has been extending the capabilities of his own body through adding various mechanical and electrical devices. By pushing the body to extreme limits, Stelarc's work creates an alternative aesthetic for the human-machine interface.

BARBARA THIEL
BLUE'S TRANSIT
Germany, 1988, silent, colour and B&W, 8 mins, 16mm.
The film wants to demonstrate a person's bodily sensation and excitability with and through itself. It shows the extension of the genital area so that the whole body, the entire skin becomes a sensual surface. - B.T.