Cinematography, Seriality, and the Sciences Or: Was there a cinematographic turn in the (life) sciences around 1900?

Obviously the emergence of cinematographic technology around 1900 had an enormous impact on modern culture. The relation of science and film has been studied widely. Yet, the question whether there was an epistemological leap in the sciences since the emergence of moving images, remains to be answered. Departing from the notion of cinematographic turn (coined by Jimena Canales in 2002) the workshop aims to explore specific interrelations between the new medium of the film and the (life) sciences. For this purpose we will conceive cinematography as dispositive: On the one hand, cinematography can show us how it links, models and functionalizes different elements in technology and aesthetics, and science and society. On the other hand we will use cinematography as an analytical instrument for scrutinizing scientific practices and their epistemologies.

The new medium of film had consequences on many aspects of the scientific endeavor: e.g. as a new kind of practice of observation, as a means for visual representation, as a medium for the production and reproduction of scientific data. Similarly, new forms of serial, respectively cinematographic representations brought about a new kind of epistemological reflection. They touched upon some of the fundamental notions of science, in particular the understanding of time and motion, essential for the life sciences. The historical evidence of scientists who have actually employed the new technology in their investigations is relatively limited, raising the question of the actual impact of cinematography on the sciences. Did - around 1900 - the introduction of cinematographic techniques to science have a significant impact on the underlying understanding of explored processes, especially the organic and its physiological processes? Or did it merely provide a new means for a more suggestive representation of the sequentiality of life processes, i.e. worked as an 'amplifier'?

The relation between early cinematography and the sciences is a question of modernity and, in turn, touches on the question to what extent science, especially the life sciences, could be considered in the context of these modernity-related phenomena. Film as a mass medium interrelates with 'crowds and power', and marks a change in perception concerning aesthetics and politics. With its qualitative new culture of spectatorship the cinema was a social event, in instruction and entertainment, constituting a new structure of relating the intersubjective with the objective. We will scrutinize what impact this medial rupture had on the perception and demonstration of scientific objects and problems, the specific 'making' of knowledge, the way scientists communicated knowledge, the reproducibility of the scientific object, and its popularization.

The workshop at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin (ZfL) brings together a group of scholars from a variety of fields – history of science, philosophy, media studies, and art history – interested in studying the epistemology of seriality, cinematographic techniques and visual representation in the (life) sciences.

PROGRAMME Update: 2008 December 08


Wednesday, December 10

13.30
Welcome

Christine Blaettler (ZfL) & Janina Wellmann (Berlin)
Introductory remarks

Jimena Canales (Harvard)
A History of 1/10

14.40 coffee break

15.00
Christof Windgätter (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin)
Inscribing time. A new paradigm in 19th century physiology

Margarete Vöhringer (ZfL)
Circular screens. An iconography of shapes in physiological laboratories and early cinema

16.40 coffee break

17.00
Oliver Gaycken (Temple University)
"The Swarming of Life": Visions of cinema as a modern educator, 1898-1907


Thursday, December 11

9.30
Janina Wellmann (Berlin)
Was there a cinematographic turn in biology – around 1800? The view from embryology

10.20 coffee break

10.40
Phillip Prodger (Peabody Essex)
A scientific turn in the cinematic arts?

Marta Braun (Ryerson University)
The beginnings of cinema and pathological locomotion at the end of the nineteenth century

13.20
Charlotte Bigg (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin)
Seriality transposed. On the techniques of studying the motion of organisms and molecules ca. 1900

Lisa Cartwright (UC San Diego)
The hand of the projectionist: On apparatus and intersubjectivity in physiological motion study