I often find experimental film both provocative and meditative. The best of them seem like visual poetry, and Barbara Hammer certainly elicits that for me with this film. For a document about the fragility and hidden natures of the human body; Sanctus is surprisingly delightful. Ms. Hammer finds many engaging ways to make, what is predominantly medical footage, playfully whimsical. When her accentuating color choices are pastel, things like intestinal ballooning procedures take on a practically party atmosphere. Her frequent tilting of images within the frame, overlapping Rorschach-style double exposures, and blending of images and patterns, all lend to a welcome lightness - which juxtaposes with the murkily blurred darker toned images, with bodily fluid reds and yellows, mysteriously shaped presences within the bodies, loaded triggering words ('diagnosis', 'cancer', etc) and the decay of chemically assaulted filmstocks. 'Sanctus' (taken from the title of the accompany sound composition), is a brief look behind the curtain of flesh to the discomforting and surreal world inside.
