Plot

After its provocative opening sequence - the first graphic depiction of a live birth on film ever seen by a general public mass audience - director Robert Cordier's film followed six cutting-edge medical procedures in Montreal-area hospitals that loosely suggested the cycle of life from birth to death. The film was the centerpiece of the Meditheatre, a hexagonal stage and screen chamber with spiral viewing gallery at the core of the Man and His Health pavilion. The film used experimental and surrealist techniques from the French new wave and the new American documentary cinema, and was graced by a deft editing rhythm years ahead of its time. The combined content and cinematic novelty had a dizzying effect and the film itself became a medical event, with an average of 200 viewers a day fainting. It was accompanied by a stilted, often highly technical and didactic narration track that was occasionally handed off to a troupe of six actors on a series of hexagonal stages rigged out with state-of-the-art hospital equipment. Part re-enactment, part chorus, part dumb show, the theatre component gave the film a live feel. Three sequences offered close-ups of invasive procedures including a Caesarian section, open-heart surgery and the insertion of stereo-tactic stimulation needles into the brain of a Parkinson's patient. Two others were portraits of sufferers: a kidney patient on a dialysis ward and a child thalidomide victim without arms being introduced to a robotic arm prosthesis. The other sequence depicted an experimental nuclear medicine apparatus for mapping lung function with xenon gas. The film explores a number of themes like the inseparability of humans and machines in modern medicine, the circulation of blood in a variety of apparatuses, the overlap between medical representation and high and popular art, medical masks, and the human hand.