Film: Ready for Our Close-up
Originally published in The Walrus. Read the full text here.
At Montreal’s Expo 67, 2.5 million people lined up—some for as long as seven hours—to see Miracles in Modern Medicine, a nineteen-minute documentary. Before entering the theatre, audience members passed through a dark antechamber, where they encountered such oddities as the “spare parts man” (a Frankensteinian assemblage of prosthetic limbs, glass eyes, and genitalia), as well as light boxes depicting human organs, each glinting like crown jewels. From there, visitors entered a spiral viewing gallery overlooking a hexagonal rotunda, where the film played every half hour on three wall-mounted screens. At the centre of the room, actors performed the onscreen action.
Miracles, which premiered fifty years ago, depicted medical procedures that had never before been widely seen: a six-year-old boy undergoing heart surgery, a woman with Parkinson’s disease having an electrode implanted in her brain, and a thalidomide child learning to use a pair of mechanical arms. More shocking still, it featured a birth scene that included full-frontal nudity. “On April 28, 1967, when the film opened, that sequence would have been the most taboo media image in Western society,” says Steven Palmer, a medical historian at the University of Windsor who, in 2014, rediscovered the film at Library and Archives Canada. At the Expo screenings, some 200 people fainted from shock each day—about 15,000 in total were treated at two St. John Ambulance posts on-site.
Miracles isn’t just sensational—it’s surreal, with vertiginous camera angles, sharp jump cuts, and loopy montages. Images of machines are superimposed over human bodies. An eerie Hieronymus Bosch painting that depicts medieval trepanation cuts to a sequence about brain surgery. One scene worthy of Stanley Kubrick depicts a heart operation from the vantage point of the organ: masked, scalpel-wielding surgeons lean ominously into the frame. The final shot features a disembodied arm spinning as it sinks into darkness. To comply with the pavilion’s educational mandate, organizers hired narrators to dispassionately explain the procedures in both official languages—the contrast between the audio and visuals only intensifies the uncanniness.
Before Expo, a work such as Miracles would have been considered obscene and relegated to the art-house fringes. At the fair, though, it was a hit. The film is also a missing link: its debut was the moment that the uncensored human body—vulnerable, messy, and abject—found its place in popular culture.
This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.