Despite much excellent work over the years, the vast history of scientific filmmaking is still largely unknown.Footnote ¹ Historians of science have long been concerned with visual culture, communication and the public sphere on the one hand, and with expertise, knowledge production and experimental practice on the other. Scientists, we know, drew pictures, took photographs and made three-dimensional models.Footnote ² Rather like models, films could not be printed in journals until the digital era, and this limited their usefulness as evidence.Footnote ³ But that did not stop researchers from 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. Historians of science are more likely to be found in the library, archive or museum than the darkened screening room, and much work is still needed to demonstrate the major effects of cinema on scientific knowledge. Film may have taken as long to change science as other areas of social life, but one can begin to glimpse important ways in which ‘image machines’ (cameras, projectors and the like) were beginning to mediate between backstage experimental work and more public demonstration even around 1900.Footnote ⁴

This essay reviews two recent books by film historians that explore different aspects of the intersection of cinema and science during that key period in the history of visual culture when the first mass audience also came routinely to see halftone illustrations and X-ray photographs.Footnote ⁵ Together covering England, France, Germany and the United States, Oliver Gaycken's Devices of Curiosity (2015) and Scott Curtis's The Shape of Spectatorship (2015) invite historians of science to reconsider visual displays in relation to the power and limitations of moving images and the machines that made and projected them. Reviewing the books against the backdrop of a nascent historical field of ‘science and cinema’, I aim to encourage historians of science to watch more movies, engage more seriously with film history and start thinking about cinema as a potentially vital part of our stories after 1895.Footnote ⁶ Just as Curtis has pushed film historians to take ‘science lessons’, so more historians of science, having become proficient with books and models, should consider taking film lessons too.Footnote ⁷

Gaycken and Curtis are historians of ‘early cinema’, a seemingly bland term that in fact denotes a specific period from 1895 to around 1913, when narrative ‘feature’ films began to take over as the dominant form. Since the landmark 1978 meeting of the Fédération internationale des archives du film in Brighton garnered public support for the preservation of highly flammable nitrate film, scholars have reimagined the earliest years of cinema as a time when the moving image as such, not the story it told (or did not tell), was the main event.Footnote ⁸ Tom Gunning's influential 1986 essay on the ‘cinema of attractions’ decisively shifted the teleological understanding of early cinema from a primitive stage of what became dominant later to a historicized understanding of a distinctive and fully realized, though to us foreign, culture.Footnote ⁹ Gaycken and Curtis are leading practitioners in this rewardingly exotic, if somewhat ghettoized, domain of film history. Historians of science, and not just those immersed in the years around 1900, should get to know it better.

An oft-repeated story of the public debut of cinema in the basement of a Paris café on 28 December 1895 has Georges Méliès, the great fantasist of early film, offering to purchase a cinematograph from Antoine Lumière. Lumière, Gaycken explains, replies that his invention is not for sale; it is a ‘scientific curiosity’ with no commercial future (p. 3). For Gaycken, who teaches English at the University of Maryland, the key word ‘curiosity’ denotes the scientist's (intellectual and morbid) curiosity about the natural world as well as continuities with the venerable cabinet of curiosities. By underscoring the multiple modern and archaic valences of the word, Gaycken usefully moves the debate over techniques of visualization on from bodily discipline and social control, on the one hand, and the hegemony of mechanical objectivity, on the other.Footnote ¹⁰ Through a series of striking case studies, he shows how mechanically produced moving images re-enchanted nature with scientific magic. Gaycken's titular devices include not only mechanical cameras and projectors, but also methods of producing new kinds of optical illusion such as slow motion, magnification and time-lapse.

Devices of Curiosity is divided into five chapters. The first two chart the rise of what Gaycken calls the ‘popular-science film’ through the Charles Urban Trading Company's key collaborators, F. Martin Duncan and Percy Smith.Footnote ¹¹ Smith, a former civil servant who introduced innovations such as time-lapse and animated maps, also wrote detective stories, a genre to which Gaycken returns in the final chapter.Footnote ¹² A third chapter examines the films produced from around 1910 in France by the companies Pathé, Gaumont and Eclair, beginning with those by the medical researcher and pioneering microcinematographer Jean Comandon.Footnote ¹³ Chapter 4 shifts to the United States, and George Kleine's ‘educational motion picture films’, an eclectic collection that Gaycken likens to a modern cabinet of curiosities. In something of a departure, the final chapter examines Louis Feuillade's crime film serials Fantômas (1913) and Les Vampires (1915–16) to identify stylistic affinities with popular-science films and a shared preoccupation with modern science and technology.

Gaycken takes readers on a vivid and often entertaining tour of fascinating and previously little-known films, several of which have recently been rescued from archival obscurity and made available on DVD and online for convenient repeat viewing.Footnote ¹⁴ Duncan's The Cheese Mites (1903), for example, shows a gentleman, played by the naturalist–filmmaker himself, comically reacting in astonishment to a magnified view of his infested lunch. Recently published on YouTube by the BFI, this is a humorous trick film as well as microcosmic nature documentary; it inspired other films, including a parody using windup mechanical beetles. But Gaycken's most striking example of the fluidity of genres and the tensions between them is Percy Smith's The Acrobatic Fly (1910). Also available online, the film stars a fly that appears to juggle various objects, when in fact it is tied on its back and merely attempting to walk. Reminiscent of the flea circus, the film stretched credibility, and critics initially dismissed it as a clever fake until a strategic screening at the Royal Photographic Society garnered legitimacy. The insect returns in Chapter 4 in The Fly Pest (1909), ‘the most educational as well as the most revolting motion picture film that has ever been exhibited anywhere’, according to one review (p. 148). This film evoked fascination and wonder (for example, at the marvellously magnified structures of the fly's intricate mouthparts), even as it tested the limits of public decency.

Framed in terms of the key word ‘intertextuality’, Gaycken's study convincingly shows how early cinema was in continual dialogue with older representational techniques such as the magic lantern show, illustrated science magazines and satirical cartoons. Some historians, however, might take issue with his decision to isolate the ‘popular-science film’ as a distinct genre. Though he takes pains to justify his choice of terminology, the category does seem to run into trouble at times, perhaps especially when we learn that Comandon's films were first exhibited to elite scientific and medical audiences. Nevertheless, Gaycken has succeeded admirably in recovering a vast and little-studied commercial industry at the edges of research and entertainment, and his efforts ought to make it more difficult for historians of late Victorian and post-Victorian science to ignore the circulation of moving images in the wider cultural marketplace.Footnote ¹⁵

In The Shape of Spectatorship Curtis is also concerned with the decades before the First World War, but he focuses on imperial Germany, and is less concerned with science as public culture than with communities of experts, research programmes and experimental systems. Whereas Gaycken thematizes cinema's power to stimulate public wonder and curiosity, Curtis marries the archaeological project of excavating the wealth of non-theatrical, or ‘useful’, films made for a range of purposes other than commercial entertainment with questions of the sort that historians and sociologists of science like to ask about expertise, disciplinary agendas and research programmes.Footnote ¹⁶ Curtis wants to know how cinema was variously embraced or rejected as the solution to problems confronted by members of different professional communities. Case by case, he explores the ‘intimate and complex relationship’ between technologies, users and their projects (p. 2).

The Shape of Spectatorship explores in four chapters cinema's encounters with laboratory science, clinical medicine, educational reform and aesthetic theory. Director of the programme in communication at Northwestern University in Qatar and president of Domitor, the international society for the study of early cinema, Curtis presents this structure as roughly mirroring the trajectory of early cinema, ‘from its roots in scientific research to its early bids for acceptance as an art form’ (p. 2). Though experimental analysis and public display were entangled from the start, and perhaps rather more than either Gaycken or Curtis let on, Curtis's richly contextualized case studies underscore the heterogeneity of early cinema and the variety of ends to which film was put beyond the entertainment industry.Footnote ¹⁷ Collectively they demonstrate how different groups of experts engaged with or avoided the new image machines.

The first chapter, on science, is the most directly relevant to readers of this journal. Following a discussion of Henri Bergson's cinematic philosophy of science, it focuses not on spectatorship, as later chapters do, but on what Curtis calls ‘inscription’, in the cinematographic study of human motion, Brownian motion and cellular growth. The second chapter explores medical filmmaking, including the use of still and moving images in clinical research and in diagnostics. It contrasts expert modes of viewing with elite diagnosis of film's distracting flicker as one of the most threatening ills of modern society. Film reformers, as we learn in Chapter 3, attempted to fashion film screenings for educational use that would conform to methods of visual instruction and observational training as well as models of aesthetic contemplation and ideological goals. Chapter 4 revisits an influential debate over cinema's challenge to literary values from the perspective of art theorists who valued aesthetic contemplation. Curtis concludes by calling for a more ‘tactile’ approach to filmmaking and the management of venues, audiences and discourses.

Curtis's first exhibit of cinematic science is an example of chronophotography, the late nineteenth-century technique of visualizing motion strongly associated with Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge.Footnote ¹⁸ Leipzig physiologists Wilhelm Braune and Otto Fischer, who built on Marey's work to publish influential studies on ‘the human gait’ between 1889 and 1904, painstakingly abstracted the photographic material they produced into equations, tables, graphs and finally a three-dimensional model. His second and third exhibits are of Marburg physicist Max Seddig's attempt to confirm Albert Einstein's theory of Brownian motion using chronophotographic images of microscopic particles affected by molecular activity, and of Heidelberg anatomist Hermann Braus, who changed his mind about how nerve cells grow because of filmic evidence.Footnote ¹⁹ Curtis uses the three cases to show how different kinds of scientist used film differently, in accordance with divergent research agendas: Braune and Fischer produced analysable still images, Seddig was after the precision measurement of time intervals, and Braus wanted a temporal record of growth. The camera was a flexible research tool.

The Shape of Spectatorship, as Curtis admits, ‘concentrates on the correspondence between film form and discipline, rather than the impact of form on that discipline’ (p. 14, original emphasis). Likewise, Gaycken's project does not ask whether film transformed the production of scientific knowledge about the natural world. Investigating how cinema shaped science would be a logical next step for anyone curious about scientists' engagement with film. The two books reviewed here provide a good place to start and suggest several potentially fruitful avenues of research. For one thing, and along the lines of Curtis's concluding call for a tactile historiography, it would be helpful to know more about scientific cinema's technologies, which for the most part remain black-boxed by both authors.Footnote ²⁰

Historians of science are well equipped for a more sustained analysis of technologies in use.Footnote ²¹ The cine camera, like Nicolas Rasmussen's electron microscope, which was also used to make movies, might be given a starring role in a more materialist history of scientific filmmaking.Footnote ²² Historical ethnographies of experimental analysis and public demonstration would do much to shed light on the entanglements of laboratory science and cinematic display at the turn of the twentieth century and beyond. Importantly, they would tell us about not only the promises of film, but also the constraints imposed by new and only partially flexible technologies. As it stands, while both authors treat early cinema as heterogeneous and malleable, they take the hardware more or less for granted. We do not learn much about the labour that surely went into making cinematography the right tool for the job; film appears on the scene, more or less intact and ready to go. Historians of science might investigate how scientist–filmmakers were constrained by the limitations of particular innovations or how research programmes and commercial agendas drove technological change.

Yet we are given some tantalizing hints of a still-hidden history. From Gaycken we learn that Smith kept detailed records of expenses for stock and equipment, and it would be good to know more about the financial side of the story. Gaycken mentions in passing that Comandon and Pathé jointly filed a patent for a modified apparatus, and Curtis notes that early motion picture equipment was expensive, cumbersome and sufficiently difficult to adapt that only the wealthiest and most resourceful laboratories could afford it. The material and economic dimensions of the story of science and cinema await their historian.Footnote ²³

Finally, it is worth emphasizing that while histories of ‘early cinema’ typically end around the start of the First World War, there is no good reason for historians of science to follow suit. It seems likely that use of the moving image in knowledge production intensified in later decades. The early promise of X-ray cinematography, as Curtis tells us, was realized only in the 1930s, and leading American child psychologists, anatomists and sexologists independently turned to filmmaking in the mid-twentieth century.Footnote ²⁴ In West Germany the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica maintained an international reference collection of scientific films from 1952 to 1994, and by the 1970s the BBC had become adept at ‘revealing aspects of the natural word that had previously escaped scientists’ attention.’Footnote ²⁵

‘Movie making’, as a pair of cell biologists recently put it, ‘is now a ubiquitous experimental tool that biologists use alongside more traditional techniques such as molecular biology and biochemistry’.Footnote ²⁶ Yet we do not have a clear picture of how biology or other sciences were affected (or not) by the democratization of filmmaking and viewing technologies – from cheaper 16 mm film stock and portable projectors to digital capture and handheld screens.Footnote ²⁷ Today, computational ‘movie analysis tools’ are freely available online, while leading journals encourage authors to submit ‘video data’ for e-publication.Footnote ²⁸ Scientific films are used in teaching and for public engagement, archived on YouTube and appropriated as ‘found footage’ by artists (not to mention historians) – activities which feed back into the research process.Footnote ²⁹ A sensitivity to the seemingly boundless transaction between backstage analysis and public display, liberated from the disciplinary bounds of ‘early cinema’, is something else that historians of science can bring to the table. Bon cinéma!