What do actor Cary Grant, first-year medical students and cadavers all have in common?
They are all featured in the documentary Still Life: The Humanity of Anatomy, a film produced by a Texas-based company called ttweak. The short will be screened Friday at 10 p.m. as part of the DoubleTake Documentary Film Festival at the Durham Arts Council.
The film's collaborators were inspired to create the documentary for public education. "For the last 20 years, I have tried to teach medical students about the humanistic aspects of anatomy and I've been continually frustrated because the visual tactics we've used have barely scratched the surface," said the film's creator and executive producer Dr. Thomas Cole, a professor and graduate program director at the Institute for Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch.
"I want to help medical students open themselves up in a deeper way to the moral and spiritual debates involved in [human] dissection," Cole said. "We chose film as the art form because documentary art in particular can break through our emotional barriers with questions we wouldn't ordinarily want to think about."
The movie opens with a clip from the 1951 movie "People Will Talk," in which Grant plays a cold medical doctor who urges his student to dissociate the human body from the human being. In subsequent interviews, however, first-year medical students from UTMB said that dissociation was difficult. The students overwhelmingly expressed feelings of fear and guilt, especially because they believed they were "hurting" the cadaver with each incision.
"We could be selective about the parts of the drapery that we could remove, so I insisted that we drape it back from the neck down because I was kind of afraid of becoming at least that familiar with the body [by seeing the face]," said Jason Morrow, a student at UTMB.
Personal accounts from students are interspersed with clips from an interview with Bob Harvey, an elderly man who plans to donate his body for medical education.
The producers found some surprising responses to human dissection. "The students were so squeamish about being in the [anatomy] lab and Bob seemed perfectly comfortable. I think since students are still so young and so attached to their bodies, the idea of doing anything to a body, whether living or dead, seems like it would hurt. Harvey has lived so long that he's not as attached to his body and is willing to give it up," said co-producer Randy Twaddle.
The producers also noted the lack of solemnity in the classroom. "I expected more of a library atmosphere, but it was like a cocktail party," Thompson said. "I think when faced with such a serious situation, people deal with it by laughing and talking to each other--it's a natural coping mechanism."
When the movie was shown to first-year medical students at UTMB, the reaction was dramatic. "People were very emotional, but it was also clear that some were still closed off," said co-producer Dave Thompson. "Some people were even resentful of it because they felt like it interfered with their goals. They felt like they were there to learn about human structures and this was somehow a distraction and they didn't want to be reminded of it."
Still, Cole hopes this film will help people better understand death and create dialogue between donors and their dissectors. "I think the general public has the potential to grow in terms of their own human development. We're all mortal and we're all going to die, and the more conscious and aware we are, no matter how hard it is, the more wiser and compassionate we can be," he said.
"I have heard a lot over the last 30 years about death and dying, but we still don't know what to do. We need to clearly think about our relationship to the dead and our relationship with ourselves," Cole added.
The documentary was one of about 50 selected from 600 films to be screened at DoubleTake. "This film not only tackles an unusual subject, but is also well executed," said Nancy Buirski, founder and executive director of the festival.
"I think this film is a great reflection of the incredible range of documentary work," she said.
Student passes to the four-day festival are $50 and available at www.ddff.org.
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