...watching this movie frequently hurts like hell, and not just physically. With a camera that furiously navigates its subjects’ myriad intestinal tracts, cranial cavities, and other, mercifully unidentifiable visceral miscellany, De Humani Corporis Fabrica is very probably the most aesthetically interoceptive movie ever made for theatrical exhibition.

As far as I’ve been able to tell—from having had the misfortune to watch some or all of close to a thousand films so far this year—the quality of product available to festivals in 2012 is inferior to 2011. But that doesn’t excuse some of the stinkers that are making their way over to North…

Let’s start with a coincidence. The title of Part I, Chap. 1 of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan: “Of Sense.” The name of the Harvard project headed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, whose new film, made in collaboration with Véréna Paravel, shares a title with Hobbes’ seminal work of political philosophy: the Sensory Ethnography Lab. This isn’t to say…

By Scott MacDonald Not all young filmmakers are young filmmakers. Lucien Castaing-Taylor completed Sweetgrass (2009), the film he made with Ilisa Barbash, after a considerable career as an anthropology student (he studied with Timothy Asch at USC, got his Ph.D. at Berkeley); editor (he was founding editor of Visual Anthropological Review and had edited Visualizing…