Sanctus

“Sanctus” is a film of the rephotographed moving x-rays originally shot by Dr. James Sibley Watson (‘Fall of the House of Usher,’ 1929) and his colleagues. Making the invisible visible, the film reveals the skeletal structure of the human body as its protection on a polluted planet where immune system disorders proliferate. “In ‘Sanctus,’ Barbara Hammer addresses in a visually and aurally stunning fashion the co-fragility of both human existence and the film emulsion, the raw material onto which she cretes images. She has transformed ‘found footage’ – scientific x-ray films from the 1950s – into a lyrical journey, into a celebration of the body as a physical and spiritual temple. For 19 mesmerizing minutes – between the SMPTE test film which contains the static image of a woman’s face used for focus purposes at the head of the film, to the rumbling sprockets at the tail of the film – discarded x-ray images of human forms performing everyday functions are vividly given a new life.” – Jon Gartenberg, Film Dept. Museum of Modern Art, NY