Science and Cinema

Abstract

This issue of Science in Context is dedicated to the question of whether there was a “cinematographic turn” in the sciences around the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1895, the Lumière brothers presented their projection apparatus to the Parisian public for the first time. In 1897, the Scottish medical doctor John McIntyre filmed the movement of a frog's leg; in Vienna, in 1898, Ludwig Braun made film recordings of the contractions of a living dog's heart (cf. Cartwright 1992); in 1904, Lucien Bull filmed in slow motion a bullet entering a soap bubble. In 1907 and 1908, respectively, Max Seddig and Victor Henri recorded Brownian motion with the help of a cinematograph (Curtis 2005). In 1909, the Swiss Julius Ries was one of the first to film fertilization and cell division in sea urchins (Ries 1909). In that same year in Paris, Louise Chevroton and Frédéric Vlès used a film camera to observe cell division in the same object (Chevroton and Vlès 1909). As early as 1898, the Parisian surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen began filming several of his operations, among them the spectacular separation of the Siamese twins Doodica and Radica (Bonah and Laukötter 2009). And in England, the scientist and zoologist Francis Martin Duncan produced an array of popular-scientific films for Charles Urban: “The unseen world: A series of microscopic studies” was presented to the public in the Alhambra Theatre in London for the first time in 1903 (see Gaycken in this issue).

Introduction: From “The Popularization of Science through Film” to “The Public Understanding of Science”

“…1). While in the late nineteenth century some disapproved of the mixture of film as a scientific tool and as an increasingly central element of mass culture, the historical fact is that science and film companies were linked from the very origins of motion pictures; that the cinema was not only a social event and a form of entertainment, but also “a new structure of relating the inter-subjective with the objective” (Wellmann 2011, 314); and that, in spite of the “mad scientists” who proliferated since the 1920s, filmic forms, from the scientific to the educational to the recreational, are better seen as a continuum than as a rigid hierarchy (Ritzmann, Schmutz, and Wolff 2009).…”

“Self-testimony of a Past Present”: Reuses of Historical Film Documents

“…In recent years, scientific film has repeatedly become the subject of studies within the field of the history of knowledge. Particularly noteworthy are the works of Lisa Cartwright, Scott Curtis, Oliver Gaycken, Hannah Landecker and others (for example, Cartwright 2011 ; Curtis 2015 ; Landecker 2011 ; Wellmann 2011 ; Gaycken 2015 ). Others have focused on the role of educational films (Orgeron et al.…”

1960–1962. The international science film exhibition at the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica “Leonardo da Vinci” in Milan: The engineer’s solution to the problem of bridging museum, science, and cinema

“…In the first half of the twentieth century, under the label “scientific film,” we find a complex galaxy of genres, including dissemination, didactic and research films. Since the very beginning, film-making played a pivotal role in the production of scientific knowledge (Wellmann, 2011: 325) as well as in the popularization of science (Boon, 2008; Gouyon, 2016; Vidal, 2018). Researchers used films for “making movies for projection at conferences as well as in lecture halls, museums and other public venues, not to mention for breaking down into individual frames for analysis” (Olszynko-Gryn, 2016: 279).…”

“…Researchers used films for “making movies for projection at conferences as well as in lecture halls, museums and other public venues, not to mention for breaking down into individual frames for analysis” (Olszynko-Gryn, 2016: 279). The relationship cinema enjoys with science, however, has always been “imprecise” (Gouyon, 2016: 19), and its study has only been undertaken recently by science historians (Gaycken, 2015: 7; Wellmann, 2011: 312). The fruitful tension occurring when cinema intersects with science, “between artifice/entertainment on one side, and evidence/science on the other” (Gouyon, 2016: 19), becomes even more cogent if we think of the use of film in scientific museums, where research and education are traditionally requested to coexist with entertainment and aesthetic pleasure.…”