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This introduction outlines the threefold contribution that this Focus section on research film offers. First, it introduces the vast collection of films from the former Institute for Scientific Film (Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film [IWF]), arguably the most ambitious endeavor ever undertaken to manage the distribution, production, and archiving of research films. At the same time, the institute's questionable roots in the National Socialist education system and in war research are addressed. Second, the introduction points out that the Focus section enters largely uncharted terrain in the history of research films. Third, it argues that a focus on the multiple reuses of research films, as this section attempts, not only suits the medium specificity of film but helps us to map the aesthetic, intermedial, and cultural-political practices of disseminating knowledge. In this vein, the organizers asked established scholars working on film and science to share with us a short story of a reused research film. Scott Curtis, Vinzenz Hediger, Anja Laukötter, and Hanna Rose Shell responded. Their contributions can be found in the supplementary materials to the online edition.

This essay focuses on the reuse of film footage from a 1920s German hydrodynamics laboratory in U.S. science education films of the 1960s. By pointing out how these U.S. science education films were seen as a means of recruitment in the Cold War, it makes a case for the power of film as a medium of knowledge circulation with the ability to bridge geographical, chronological, and political gaps. The old footage of flow experiments served as a convenient tool to mobilize people for aerodynamic research. This reuse thus shows that research films were not only used to render visible something that is usually not visible to the human eye, but also for engaging people to serve the government. This essay argues that searching for such reuses of research films can enrich our understanding of the way laboratory traces actually make their way into education, society, and politics.S ince mid-2018, my colleague Sarine Waltenspül and I have focused our research mainly on the history of one film: Production of Vortices of Bodies Travelling in Water (that was its title at its public premiere in London in 1927), by Ludwig Prandtl, one of the founders of modern aerodynamics, and his assistant Oskar Tietjens. It tackles basic research questions in fluid dynamics, and it has a remarkable history spanning almost a hundred years. This contribution will discuss only one rather late episode in the film's history. A very short recap of its earlier history is necessary, though. 1 At first, Prandtl and Tietjens had a tough time working with cinematography, mainly because they were failing to retrieve measurement data from the celluloid. Nonetheless, they produced the above-mentioned film in their new hydrodynamic laboratory in Göttingen. Prandtl learned to appreciate the evidentiary potential of his film. It became an indispensable companion for him at conferences and presentations. He carried the film reel around the globe-literally. Later, a revised version was widely used as a university teaching film in National Socialist Germany and subsequently in the Federal Republic of Germany, distributed by the Institute for Scientific