The second film in the trilogy appropriates surgical and medical footage sourced from YouTube, Archive.org, medical practitioners, and online archives to investigate how clinical observation assigns identity to bodies. Unobserved, our internal organs form a universal, non-gendered landscape of life. There is no self inside the body, no identity markers, just organic matter functioning identically across all humans. The moment a camera enters the body through endoscopy, colonoscopy, MRI, or ultrasound, observation imposes categorization. The body is filed under a name, gender, diagnosis. The universal interior becomes a specific, identified subject. In one sense the film investigates this violence of observation, how the medical gaze transforms the universal into the particular, but in another reveres the beautiful universality of our internal landscapes.

Part of The Body Trilogy · Previous: I. Softer Skin · Next: III. Meridian