Cellular Features- Microcinematography and Film Theory

Critical Inquiry 31 (Summer 2005)! 2005 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/05/3104-0004$10.00. All rights reserved.

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1. Andre Bazin, “Science Film: Accidental Beauty,” in Science Is Fiction: The Films of JeanPainleve, trans. Jeanine Herman, ed. AndyMasaki Bellows,MarinaMcDougall, and Brigitte Berg(Cambridge,Mass., 2000), p. 145; hereafter abbreviated “SF.”

I would like to thank the staff at the Archives of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and Hans-JorgRheinberger and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science for their assistance during theresearch for this paper, as well as Peter Geimer and Christopher Kelty for their comments. Alltranslations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

2. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” SelectedWritings, trans. RodneyLivingstone et al., ed. MichaelW. Jennings et al., 4 vols. (Cambridge,Mass., 1999), 2:512.

3. Sergey Eisenstein, “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” Film Form: Essays inFilm Theory, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (1949; New York, 1977), p. 37.

4. Emile Vuillermoz, “Before the Screen: Aesthetic,” trans. Richard Abel, in French Film Theoryand Criticism, trans. Abel et al., ed. Abel, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1988), 1:226.

Cellular Features: Microcinematography andFilm Theory

Hannah Landecker

Word is getting out that microbes are the greatest actors in the world. Next year wewill ask them for autographs.

—Andre Bazin, “Science Film: Accidental Beauty,” 19471

Something pullulates below the surface of early theories of film.Cellulartissue, says Walter Benjamin, is “more native to the camera than the at-mospheric landscape or the soulful portrait.”2 Sergey Eisenstein’s writingstheorize the shot as a “montage cell,” which is no mere static element; justas cells divide to “form a phenomenon of another order, the organism orembryo,” so shots formmontage.3 In other work, the living cell and thefilmcell seem to merge: “Hundreds of little fragments of exposed film are therein front of the author . . . . The [artist] will work patiently at juxtaposing,overlapping, paralleling, and opposing all these living cells.”4FromJeanEp-stein’s bookMagnification to Bela Balazs’s notion of the close-up, one canread what seems a fanciful metaphorical connection between seeing life atamicroscopic level and seeing througha camera: “Weskimover the teemingsubstance of life. The camera has uncovered that cell-life of the vital issuesin which all great events are ultimately conceived; for the greatest landslide

904 Hannah Landecker / Cellular Features

5. Bela Balazs,Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (NewYork, 1953), p. 55.

6. GermaineDulac, “The Essence of the Cinema: The Visual Idea,” trans. Robert Lamberton, inThe Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York, 1978), p.39.

7. Siegfried Kracauer,Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960; Princeton, N.J.,1997), p. 50; hereafter abbreviatedTF.

is only the aggregate of the movements of single particles.”5 The shot, then,is a cell; themontage, an organism formed by cell division; andfilmmaking,embryogenesis. Film is “a sort of microscope” that enlarges and frames thefield of view di!erently than the eye alone.6 Such metaphors convey thecamera’s abilities to focus in onplaces and things that theunaidedeyewouldnot or could not naturally see and thus its ability to get at, again meta-phorically, the elemental things that subtend larger phenomena. Micro-scopes and cells are common enough; their abstract invocation seemsunremarkable. But what then accounts for the frequency of these referencesin early twentieth-century writing on themedium of film? These referencesmay also be read much more literally. In the early twentieth century, life sci-entists were using microcinematography and time-lapse techniques tomakefilms of embryogenesis and the cell life of the vital tissues. Sometimes thecinematographer actually was a surgeon, filmwas functioning through ami-croscope, tissue was an event, the screen was teeming, the celluloid cell diddivide to become a whole organism, the close-upwasmagnification ofmanythousand times. What relation might these films have to the metaphoricalpresence of microscope and cell in early critical writings on cinema?In Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, SiegfriedKracauer

suggests that the specificity of the cinematic subject may be related to theorigins of film in scientific practice.

In its preoccupationwith the small the cinema is comparable to science.Like science, it breaks downmaterial phenomena in tiny particles,thereby sensitizing us to the tremendous energies accumulated in themicroscopic configurations of matter. These analogiesmay well be re-lated to the nature of film. It is quite possible indeed that the construc-tion of the film image from shots of minute phases of movement favorsthe reverse tendency toward decomposing given wholes. Is it really sur-prising that a medium so greatly indebted to nineteenth-century con-cern for science should show characteristics inherent in the scientificapproach?7

Hannah Landecker is assistant professor of anthropology at RiceUniversity. She is currently completing a manuscript about the manipulation oflife in vitro entitled Technologies of Living Substance: Cells and Biotechnology in theTwentieth Century. Her email is [email protected]

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2005 905

8. Quoted inMiriamBratuHansen, introduction to Theory of Film, p. ix. Hansen also takesissue with this criticism.

9. Jean Painleve, “Scientific Film,” in Science Is Fiction, p. 162.10. Onemay assume here that Kracauer had in mind a notion of life not very far from that

elaborated by Foucault because althoughTheory of Filmwas published in 1960, some years beforeLes Mots et les choses, Kracauer accompanies his discussion of “life as such” with the slightly wistfulstatement that “it would be tempting to try to follow the evolution of this concept, say, from the

This comparison of cinematic and scientific procedures might look likean attempt to claim and privilege some sense of scientific objectivity for thecamera’s ability to access physical reality, part of the “naıve realism” Kra-cauer has previously been accusedofdisplaying inTheoryofFilm.8However,this positing of a kinship of science and cinema, out ofwhich grows the veryability to draw an analogy between the two, is not framed in terms of thecamera’s privileged ability to access the truth, some unmediated or mini-mally mediated access to physical reality. For Kracauer, the camera a!ordsaccess not to any physical reality whatsoever but to a “reality of anotherdimension” (TF, p. 53), a phrase Kracauer takes from Epstein. There wasno requirement that one be a scientist, or even a realist, to appreciate thesenew sights or think about their cinematic character.What Kracauer’s analogy between scientific and cinematic procedures

points to is that his and others’ analogies and metaphors are not based oncomparisons of film and scientific objects, that is, artistic filmandmolecule,but are comparisons within the same medium—of artistic film and scien-tific film. The original energy of this comparison comes not from puttingfilm on one side of the metaphor and the abstract concept of cells or par-ticles on the other but from looking at actual moving images of cells, at theliving cell made visible by film. Kracauer, Epstein, and other theorists werelooking at the physiological reality of another dimension made accessibleby biological films.Cinema in early twentieth-century biology consisted of experiments on

film in a doubled sense of the phrase. As Jean Painleve recognized, “itwouldnever have occurred to the pioneers of cinema to dissociate research onfilmfrom research by means of film.”9 For both scientists and film theorists, ex-periments in perceiving life with technical manipulations of space, time,light, and framing generated new ideas of what film was or could be—thusthe possibility of such easy slippage from film cell to living cell. Early mi-crocinematographic films simultaneously used the film camera to investi-gate the properties of living things and used these life science experimentsto investigate the properties of the new medium of cinema, particularly itstemporal characteristics.Kracauer reflects on how film provides access to “the concept of life as

such” or “life as a powerful entity,” an idea concretely related to the successof early biological film (TF, p. 169).10 Time-lapse microcinematography,


time of the Romantics via Nietzsche and Bergson up to our days, but such a study goes beyond thescope of the present book, being a large-scale proposition in its own right” (TF, p. 169).

11. SeeMarta Braun, Picturing Time: TheWork of Etienne-JulesMarey (1830–1904) (Chicago,1992), pp. 150–51.

12. Cartwright has done much to unsettle the usual origin story; as she has demonstratedwithher detailed analysis of physiological,microscopic, and X-ray cinema, scientists did not stopmaking films, and film pioneers such as Auguste Lumiere did not stop being biologists. See LisaCartwright, Screening the Body: TracingMedicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis, 1995). ThierryLefebvre has shown the flourishing of the popular science film in the factories and catalogs of theearly film production companies such as Gaumont and Eclair between 1911 and 1914. See ThierryLefebvre, “The Scientia Production (1911–1914), Scientific Popularization through Pictures,”Gri!thiana 16 (May 1993): 137–55. Oliver Gaycken has expanded this historical focus on popularscience film in “‘A DramaUnites Them in a Fight to the Death’: Some Remarks on the Flourishingof a Cinema of Scientific Vernacularization in France, 1909–1914,”Historical Journal of Film, Radio,and Television 22 (Aug. 2002): 353–74. The work of “hybrid” scientist/filmmaker Jean Painleve hasrecently been documented in Science Is Fiction. On the general subject of early nonfiction film, seethe special issue of 1895, “Images du reel: La Non-Fiction en France (1890–1930),” ed. Lefebvre(Summer 1995). For a discussion of early nature film, see GreggMitman,Reel Nature: America’s

through magnification and acceleration, was generative simultaneously oftheories of life and theories of film. These technical forms of filmic powercould not come from themoving image of the cell in andby itself, nomatterits novelty or beauty, but were inextricably bound to a perception of theliving, moving cell on screen as a more profound manifestation of life thanthose phenomena visible without cinematography. For both biologists andcultural observers, these films were experiments in seeing and perceivinglife, not just living things, but that which was understood and narrated asthe fundament of life. These films seemed to get at not just the things con-stituting all life but at the previously imperceptible processes of their au-tonomous lives.One reason that this film-to-film comparison between biological and

artistic examples of early cinema remains unrecognized by contemporaryreaders of film theory is simply that we don’t know very much about bio-logical film of the early twentieth century. Paradoxically, this may havearisen in part from the attention paid to origin stories of cinema in thephysiological work of Etienne-Jules Marey. We have done much thinkingabout the analytics of movement produced by Marey within a scientificframework of chronophotography, but little about the later syntheses ofmovement within a scientific framework of cinematography. The assump-tion of a radical bifurcation of scientific imaging of movement and enter-tainment cinema appears explicable via Marey’s avowed disinterest inreproducing movement as the eye would normally perceive it.11 With someimportant exceptions, such as the work of Lisa Cartwright, we know littleabout scientific cinematography after Marey’s death in 1904 and thus havefew resources to work with, especially in comparison to the depth of schol-arship on other early film.12


Romance withWildlife on Film (Cambridge,Mass., 1999). The work of Scott Curtis,ManagingModernity: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany (forthcoming), promises to be animportant contribution to the history of German scientific andmedical film.

13. See TomGunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulousSpectator,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy andMarshallCohen (1974; Oxford, 1999), pp. 818–32.

14. Yuri Tsivian, “Media Fantasies and Penetrating Vision: Some Links between X-Rays, theMicroscope, and Film,” in Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and CulturalExperiment, ed. John E. Bowlt and OlgaMatich (Stanford, Calif., 1996), p. 82.

15. SeeMary Ann Doane,The Emergence of Cinematic Time:Modernity, Contingency, theArchive (Cambridge,Mass., 2002).

I contend that scientific films are important to the genealogy of criticalattempts to define the filmmedium. This is not a story of impact, of thingsmoving out of the laboratory and landing in society, but of a dense set ofinterconnected works dealing with life, time, and film, connections thathave become obscured only by our own contemporary demarcations be-tween science and the humanities and between film studies and the historyof science. There are somehopeful signs that theseboundariesarebecomingless distinct. By interpreting these films as onemore type of novel attractionamong others available in the early years of cinematography, TomGunninghas facilitated the conceptualization of scientific experimental films andworks of science popularization as part and parcel of early film.13 Yuri Tsi-vian accordingly sees science as “part of the cinematic text,” of early film.Furthermore, Tsivian argues, these early microscopic and X-ray films wereincorporated into criticism and film making. Their representation of thenormally unseen—the very small and the interior of the body—generateda concept of “penetrating vision” that was reappropriated metaphoricallyinto techniques such as the dissolve by “writers and directors biased towardartistic experiment.”14 Thus, as Mary Ann Doane has shown, the relation-ship of science and cinema lies not just in the surviving physical objects weretrospectively categorize as science film but in overlapping concepts andtechnical practices of seeing the physical world, including the importantproblem of the representability of time.15

What follows is a consideration of the teeming presence of the cell inearly film and film theory as a key part of a simultaneously scientific andcinematic problem of seeing life—the representation by film of life as such.It is di"cult to operate the word and concept life with any precision, so Iwould like to ground it in the specifics of the time-lapse microcinematog-raphy of two scientists, Jean Comandon and Alexis Carrel. They were prac-titioners of both biology and filmmaking, and their laboratories wereintensely generative of ideas and practices for examining and exhibiting lifeand movement, including texts, procedures, images, theories, and films.


16. Benjamin, “TheWork of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: ThirdVersion,” trans. Edmund Jephcott andHarry Zohn, SelectedWritings, 4:265; hereafter abbreviated“WA.”

Comandon was located at the interface of the Parisian medical researchcommunity and the young entertainment film industry; he trainedas adoc-tor, did biological research, and, at the same time, worked within the PatheFreres film production establishment and contributed to their catalogue.One of his early time-lapse films, Survival of a Fragment of the Heart andSpleen of the Chicken Embryo: Cell Division (c. 1913), was made by filmingembryonic somatic cells living in culture. Tissue culture, a technique forfragmenting and externalizing the cellular life of complex opaque bodies,was adopted from Alexis Carrel, a Nobel-prize winning surgeon at theRockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Carrel in turn adopted micro-cinematography from Comandon and used it to further develop his tech-niques for growing somatic tissues outside the body. Carrel experimentedwith film both as a mechanism for observing the physiological detail of cel-lular life and as a vehicle for a new theoretical basis for cytology—whichalso drew heavily on the philosophy of Henri Bergson.Both scientists were public figures. Comandon worked within an enter-

tainment film enterprise and traveled, lectured, and taught with his filmsconstantly; Carrel though less visible was more famous—a man whosepress-clipping collection occupies many feet of archival space. Their ex-periments did not take place in isolated laboratories far from the publicsphere occupied by cultural critics and other filmmakers; not only werethose commentators and filmmakers themselves in some cases educated inmedicine or biology before their turn to cinema but these films and ac-counts of these films circulated widely for many years. In fact, both are partof the discourse of early film. This paper is an exploration of biological ex-periments on film and the traces they have left in early film theory.

1Was Benjamin overly optimistic when he predicted that one of the rev-

olutionary functions of film would be “demonstrating that the artistic usesof photography are identical to its scientific uses”? Or, perhaps, was this infact demonstrated, but we have forgotten about it? Benjamin saw a kind oftwentieth-century implosion of artistic and scientific enquiry in film,caused by that medium’s specific analytic habits of isolation and focus,which made it di"cult for viewers “to say which is more fascinating, itsartistic value or its value for science.”16 Jean Comandon specifically chosefilm as his experimental medium to take advantage of the technical possi-bility of isolating a very particular segment of time and space, and the re-


17. Comandon’s thesis, “De l’usage en clinique de l’ultra-microscope en particulier pour larecherche et l’etude des spirochetes,”was published in Paris in 1909 and can be found in theCountway Library of Medicine, HarvardUniversity.

18. Compare Ludwik Fleck,Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. FrederickBradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn, ed. Trenn and RobertMerton (Chicago, 1979). Fleck, detailing thedevelopment of theWassermanTest for the diagnosis of syphilis, provides an interesting contextfor this hope on the part of Comandon that certain identificationwould come from film, notbiochemistry.

19. Chevreton andHenri were making these films in the laboratory of Charles Emile Francois-Franck, assistant to Etienne-JulesMarey and his successor in the chair of physiology at the Collegede France.

ception of Comandon’s cinematic work shows that it was indeed seen aspossessing both an artistic and a scientific value and that it was actuallydi"cult to distinguish between the two. These films were originally madeas scientific investigations, not as popularizations, though that line toowasindefinite. I focus below on experimental films in order to follow out Ben-jamin’s suggestion that the analytic opportunities specific to the film me-dium—due to the isolation of action and the precise delineation ofsituation—“foster the interpenetration of art and science” (“WA,” 4:265).This interpenetration introduces the cell into early film theory.Comandon became a filmmaker by way of medical research, writing a

thesis on methods for the visualization of syphilis bacteria in patients’blood samples.17 As a young student inheriting the bacteriological princi-ples of Pasteur and Koch, success meant isolating and identifying the syph-ilis bacterium, providing means to distinguish this unique organism froma million other possibilities, and thus arriving at the certitude of cause, ef-fect, and diagnosis.18 For this purpose, he worked with the newly developedtechnique of dark-field microscopy, or ultramicroscopy, which lit speci-mens from the side so that they stood out as bright objects against the blackbackground of the field of view. This enabled the microscopic observationof weakly refringent organisms not visible with conventional light micros-copy. Comandon explored the idea of diagnosing syphilis by distinguishingsyphilis spirochetes from other bacteria by their characteristic movement.To capture movement, he turned to film.Comandon reports that hewas inspiredbyfilmsofBrownianmovement,

the unceasing, random movement of particles in liquids or gases. In 1908,Victor Henri and Louise Chevreton filmed a microscopic preparation oflatex of rubber diluted with water, an emulsion containing enough rubberparticles to see their movement, but few enough that each particle could befollowed from frame to frame of the film.19 This frame comparison allowedHenri to diagram the trajectories of single particles over time: “The trajec-tory described by one grain is very complex; it varies from one grain to


20. VictorHenri, “Etude cinematographiquedes mouvements browniens: Presentee parM.Dastre,”Comptes Rendus des Academies Sciences, 18 May 1908, pp. 1024–26.

21. Mary Jo Nye,Molecular Reality: A Perspective on the ScientificWork of Jean Perrin (London,1972), p. ix.

22. Henri, “Etude cinematographiquedes mouvements browniens,” p. 1024.23. See Albert Einstein, Investigations on the Theory of the BrownianMovement, trans. A. D.

Cowper, ed. R. Furth (London, 1926), p. 102.24. See Jean Perrin, Les Atomes (Paris, 1914), p. 157.25. Jean Comandon, “Cinematographie, a l’ultra-microscope, de microbes vivants et des

particulesmobiles,”Comptes rendus des Academie des Sciences, 22 Nov. 1909, p. 940.

another and is absolutely independent for each grain . . . . That trajectoryoften presents very abrupt changes of direction.”20 Seeing Brownianmove-ment was in itself controversial; although identified in 1828, it was part ofan intense debate about the atomic or molecular structure of matter. Prov-ing the existence of molecules and measuring their motion was part of themore fundamental question of the “discontinuity ofmatterwhichunderliesvisible reality.”21 Just looking at Brownian movement through the micro-scope allowed the perceptionof thephenomenon,butnot itsquantification,“because of the rapidity and the faint trajectory of these movements.”22

Henri’s photographically traced trajectories allowed precise quantificationof the distance traveled by each particle over time, allowing him to exper-imentally confirm the proportionality of movement squared to durationpredicted by Albert Einstein’s earlier theoretical calculations.23

More than the analogy of cells and particles drew Comandon to Henri’swork as a model for filming cells through the microscope, though he toomade his own films of Brownian movement of molecules in colloidal sus-pensions, which were noted by physical chemist Jean Perrin as furnishingproof of the molecular structure of matter and the existence of Brownianmovement.24 Comandon was drawn to the promise of quantitative studyofmicroscopic movement—the exact specification of this bacterium’smove-ment—which required not just making a trace of the movement but keep-ing very precise track of time passed and space traveled in the microscopicfield. Comandon presented his first successful films to the FrenchAcademyof Science in 1909. These were of syphilis spirochetes, trypanosomes, con-stituents of blood, andBrownianmovement. The emphasis of thepublishedreport was on the apparatus itself and the mechanism by which one could“materialize time and space in a fashion analogous to that employed byVictor Henri and Mlle Chevreton to study Brownian motion: one films, atthe same time as the preparation, a scale of 1/100 of a millimeter and theshadow of a pendulum beating the seconds which passes through the rayof light.”25

This “materialization” through cinematography allowed the “study ofmovements ofmicroscopic living beings in their normal state”—incontrast


26. Ibid., p. 941.27. See Comandon’s own account in “LaMicro-Cinematographie,”Protoplasma 6 (1929): 627.

See also Isabelle DoO’Gomes, “L’Oeuvre de Jean Comandon,” in Le Cinema et la science, ed.Alexis Martinet (Paris, 1994), pp. 78–85.

28. See Jean-JacquesMeusy, “La Di!usion des films de ‘non-fiction’ dans les etablissementsParisiens,” 1895 18 (Summer 1995): 186.

29. Anonymous, “Microkinematography,”Nature, 14 Dec. 1911, p. 213; hereafter abbreviated“M.”

with then-dominant histologicalmethods, whichmeant killing the cellwithstains and fixatives in order to view it.26 The example he gave was the abilityto count fat particles (hemokinies) in the blood by doing a frame-by-frameanalysis, allowing one to quantitatively compare di!erent blood samples.Thus, at the outset, Comandon was using the separate frames of the film inan analytic manner very similar to physiological chronophotography as es-tablished by Marey; the comparison of sequential images allowed quanti-tative comparisons and the construction of graphic traces ofmovement (offat particles, spirochetes, and blood cells). Like the studies of Brownianmo-tion, the aim was to reconstruct continuity between frames in the form ofa linear trace of movement from which quantitative data could be drawn.Comandon was able to make these films because he approached Charles

Pathe in 1908 with a request for aid in pursuing microscopy with a cinemat-ograph.27 Pathe, of the company Pathe Freres, allowed Comandon to workin his production laboratories at Vincenneswith the proviso thatComandonhimself contribute to Pathe’s catalogue of films. This was not a simple act ofpatronage but a commercial decision on Pathe’s part, a response to the needto continuously attract audiences to salons bypromising themahighlyvariedprogram of films.28 Indeed, it was not the quantitative static aspect of Com-andon’s films that impressed viewers, scientific or not, but the films in pro-jection, the microbes and blood stream in movement. Not just the sight butthe very possibility of the sight of such “incredible activity and energy ofmo-tion” of bacteria and trypanosomes was, even for the scientific observer usedto the microscope and its sights, something of a shock:

It is only by artificially increasing the contrast bymeans of stains and soforth that we can obtain a clear di!erentiationof even amotionless ob-ject. To take in oneminute some thousands of successive photographs ofa living, unstained object, magnified six hundred or a thousand times, anobject, moreover, which is moving rapidly, and therefore continually al-tering its focal plane, is a task whichmight easily seem impossible.29

Seeing the living, unstained object over time gave embodied form to theunderlying causes of the disease sequence in the larger body, a certain senseof watching disease happen, directly.


30. Vuillermoz, “Before the Screen,” 1:227.31. Henri Fescourt and Jean-Louis Bouquet, “Idea and Screen: Opinions on the Cinema,” trans.

Abel, in French Film Theory and Criticism, 1:380.

We see the blood as it may appear at the height of an attack of the dis-ease. It is now full of foreign organisms, long, slender spiral threads,which dart hither and thither upon the screen, now hooking themselvestogether and again disentangling themselves, impinging on the red cellsand recoiling in amazing numbers and activity. The whole blood historyof an attack is shown on these films, from the interval between the criseswhen no organisms are present, through the period of multiplication tothe termination of the attack. [“M,” p. 214]

It is here that a crucial transition from chronophotography to cinema-tography within scientific activity is manifest. Even though Comandon be-gan by analyzing his films chronographically, he almost immediatelysuperseded this technique by using projection. In particular, the time-lapsefilms that Comandon began to make after 1909 relied on the di!erence be-tween the time of the experiment (hours) and the time of projection (min-utes) and the resulting acceleration of very slow, otherwise utterlyimperceptible movements. While scientific observers were welcoming thescientific value of Comandon’s demonstrations of living cells over time,these films were being shown in a wide variety of public venues, and con-siderationof their artistic valuewasnotdistinct fromthis scientificnarrativeof putting dead or still entities into motion. Emile Vuillermoz commented:“At the base of every art there is a stereotypical element, inert material tobring to life, dead cells to resurrect.”30 In an imagined debate between anavant-garde enthusiast and two skeptics who speak here, Comandon’s filmis the vehicle for argument; the speakers are insisting that cinema need notutterly sacrifice narrative and meaning:

You want to feel emotion, and seek out a rhythm; we want to think, andseek out meaning. You know the film of Dr. Comandon,TheMovementof Leucocytes, recorded with the aid of the microscopic camera?Whatdoes the eye of the layman see on the screen? Forms which for him haveno objective value, but which are nevertheless harmonious, decorative,and whose elements change position like the crystals of a kaleidoscope.That has to be su"cient for your happiness. However, does this filmmean anything?Don’t the learned see a drama there? Don’t the imagesof the film, in succession, develop a logical action?31

The cellular film, an infinitely reproducible inscription of a continuousliving movement rather than a set of histological stills, was a new form of


32. Abel, “Before the Canon,” French Film Theory and Criticism, 1:9.33. Dulac, “Visual and Anti-Visual Films,” trans. Lamberton, in The Avant-Garde Film, p. 31.34. SeeW. N. Kazeef, “Moving Photomicrography,” inAnnual Report [1937] of the Board of

Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington,D.C., 1938), pp. 323–38.

narrative as well as a new set of aesthetic forms for both scientist and lay-man. From the beginning, Comandon’s films, in particular their combi-nations of magnification and acceleration, raised questions about narrativeand meaning not just for film critics but for the scientific investigation ofthe relationship of structural elements and functional events in the micro-scopic world.The technical achievement of these films should not be underrated; it was

not simply a matter of “annexing the microscope to the film camera.”32

Both the content and the demonstration of the technical ability to go “dig-ging through the visual planes” made Comandon’s work provocative forthinking about the possibilities of film more broadly.33 At the heart of thiswork was the actual building of a singlemachine—integratingmicroscope,chronometers, motors, and film camera—that would simultaneously acton the dimensions of both space and time. With the help of Pathe, Com-andon built a specialized instrument for the simultaneous magnificationand acceleration of small living subjects. The microscope itself was buriedin the center of the machine and surrounded by an incubator so that theliving sample could be kept at the correct temperature—in the case of cul-tured cells, at body temperature. There were two chronometers: the firstcontrolled the electric motor that ran the shutter and the camera and couldbe set automatically so that the machine ran without an operator; the sec-ond was itself being photographed, recorded in the upper corner of eachframe of the film. Thus the specimen and a clock were photographed at thesame instant so that even if the specimen were photographed once everythirty seconds and then the film were shown at sixteen frames per second,resulting in an acceleration of 480 times, at everymoment one couldmain-tain a grasp on the relation of the viewing time being experienced to the“real time” that had passed in the making of the film.34

Although many of his earliest films were “real time” depictions of bac-teria or pathogens in the blood, Comandonbecamemore interested inphe-nomena too slow to perceive. In his published explantions of scientificcinematography, he used as his example the movement of the hands of awatch:

We can accelerate or retard a movement by acting on the factor ofspace, or the factor of time.Look at the big hand of a clock: you do not see it move. But examine

the extremity of that hand under the microscope; you thus easily estab-


35. Comandon, “La Cinematographie, son role dans les etudes biologiques,”La PresseMedicale,23 Apr. 1913, p. 472.

36. Comandon, “Le Cinematographie et les sciences de la nature,” Le Cinema des origines a nosjours, ed. Fescourt (Paris, 1932), p. 320.

lish that it travels, with a jerkymotion, the field of the ocular. Throughthe microscope, you have multiplied the space traveled and, by conse-quence, multiplied the speed by enlarging the optical system: you haveobtained thus a speed perceptible to the eye.35

By gradually diminishing the magnification, Comandon determinedwhat he called “the visual acuity for a slow movement,” the lower limit ofvitesse perceptible. Beyond this limit, movement had to be accelerated to beperceptible to the film’s viewer. The choice of the handof a clockas example,as well as its constant presence in the film frame, implied a close-up of timeitself. Enlargement and time lapse could make any kind of time visible; thecinematograph was an instrument of research in this very access to time:

Microcinematography alone is capable of conserving the traces of phe-nomena occurring in the preparation. Like the retina of an eye whichnever tires, the film follows, over a prolonged period, all the changeswhich occur; even better, the cinematograph is, like the microscope it-self, an instrument of research, while the one concerns visual space, theother concerns time, in condensing or spreading outmovements by ac-celerating or slowing them; it reduces their speed to a scale that is moreeasily perceptible, which, indeed, reveals to us that which we had neversuspected.36

In the films themselves, this idea of magnification and acceleration areincluded in the film’s script, particularly in slightly later versions with in-tertitles. Magnification is not simply making something larger, and accel-eration is not simply speeding something up. In Comandon’sMovement ofLeukocytes, the viewer gets the distinct impression of what it is like to flipbetween objective lenses on the microscope, from lesser to greater magni-fication.Dependingon the choice of lens, one could focuson theundulatingmembrane—the physiognomy of a single cell’s surface—or one could pullback and focus on a teeming mass of white blood cells attacking a clumpof bacteria (fig. 1).Even in the earliest films, di!erent scenes were tried out at di!erent ac-

celerations because the filmmaker had to decide in each instance at whattime interval to set the camera to photograph the specimen.Certainlymostmagnification yielded a view into the microscopically small, but the pointhere is that this was not just one view; the number of possible views was asnumerous as the little beings swarming over the screen. Even the surface of

figure1.

StillsfromJean

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andon,Globulesdusang

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37. See Hannah Landecker, “New Times for Biology: Nerve Cultures and the Advent of CellularLife in Vitro,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 33 (Dec.2002): 667–94.

the very small could itself be shown to contain within it or beneath it an-other view of life, which could be accessed just by operating on the dimen-sions of space or time or, as was most often the case, both at once. ForComandon, microcinematography was simultaneously an instrument ofresearch and an instrument of demonstration; themanipulationof timewasmade explicit to the audience alongwith the di!erent spatialmanipulationsof life—the extraction of cells from the inner space of the body to the trans-parent space of the microscope slide, the magnification of di!erent aspectsof the field of view.

2In 1913, the development of microcinematography intersected with an-

other new technology for observing the apparently autonomous livesof cells:tissue culture, the culture of live somatic cells from complex organisms out-side of the body in glass vessels. First developed by embryologist Ross Har-rison and taken up, modified, and highly publicized by Franco-AmericansurgeonAlexisCarrel from 1910onward,37 the technique in theseearlystagesconsisted of growing a fragment of excised tissue in a drop of serum sus-pended from a cover slip over a hollowed-out glass slide. In contrast to theusual fixed, stained, dead entities of histological slides, cells grown inculturewere quite evidently bodies in motion; hours after explanation into a dropof serum, cells would begin tomove out from the fragment, forming a char-acteristic halo of wandering cells around the central clump of tissue.That the cells were moving, changing shape, and interacting with each

other was indisputable. However, the actual ability to represent, capture, oreven discern exactly what live cells were doing in culture was more chal-lenging. A culture observed periodically would be di!erent at every junc-ture, but the change itself occurred too slowly to be perceptible. Theephemerally slow movements of hyaline substance through colorless me-diummade themovements of live cells in culture extremely hard to see andeven more di"cult to capture in a form communicable to others. In 1913,Comandon, in collaborationwith two other biologists, used theCarrel pro-tocol to grow embryonic chicken spleen and heart cells in culture, whichthey then filmed. Their aim was to access these very slow movements andbring them to the scale of human perception:

What is the nature of the leucocytic exodus that one observes with thespleen, what are the diverse phases of the appearance of fusiform cells


38. Comandon,C. Levatidi, and S. Mutermilch, “Etude de la vie et de la croissance des cellulesin vitro a l’aide de l’enregistrement cinematographique,”Comptes rendus hebdomadaires desseances et memoires de la societe de biologie 74 (1913): 465; hereafter abbreviated “E.”

39. Jean Epstein, “Magnification,” trans. Stuart Liebman, French Film Theory and Criticism,1:239.

around the fragments of heart? These questions are di"cult to resolveby the simple examination of the preparations in the microscope, be-cause of the slowness of the processes mentioned. On the contrary, cin-ematic recording permits the reproduction in condensed form of thesediverse phases, exaggerates the speed of slow processes, and thus caneasily inform us on this subject.38

While much of chronophotography was aimed at the dissection of veryquick movements, taking apart moments into even smaller slivers of time,cinematic recording was here a tool for the condensation of time. Accel-eration and magnification opened the account of the experiment’s results:“Enlargement 62 x 1. The phenomenon is reproduced at three hundred timesgreater than the real speed (one image every nineteen seconds for the re-cording; 16 images a second for the reproduction)” (“E,” p. 465). Almostimmediately, the description of techniquewas overwhelmedby the viewer’sperception of what was seen via acceleration. “The fragment is composedand surrounded by round or oval cells, endowed with very quick move-ments.” Although it was carefully noted that the movements were repro-duced at three hundred times greater than the “real” speed, the vocabularyof their description was thick with the terms “quick,” “lively,” “gliding,”“abrupt,” and “rapid.” The authors calculated that the actual speed of cellsmoving through the culture preparationwas tenmicrometers in threemin-utes. Amicrometer being one thousandth of amillimeter, and tenmicrom-eters being the average diameter of one cell, this was a very small scale interms of unaugmented human perception. However, projected on a screenthree meters high, the diameter of the cell was magnified greatly, undertypical microscope magnifications, to fifty to eighty thousand diameters.Epstein notes, “the close-up is an intensifying agent because of its size

alone,”39 and indeed the cells’ screen presence was imposing; even in thistechnical report to the Academy of Biological Sciences, the description ofthe film is a narrative ofmovement andbehavior, of exodusandreturn:“Cells. . . move in all directions; they leave the spleen fragment, creeping with thehelp of their pseudopodia, going away some distance into the plasma, andsometimes they return by another route, to rejoin the spleen fragment . . . .The amebic cells seem to go out to search for their nourishment and returnlater to their point of departure.” Even with the careful calculation of “real”


40. Comandon and Justin Jolly, “DemonstrationCinematographiquedes PhenomenesNucleaires de la Division Cellulaire,”Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des seances et memoires de lasociete de biologie 75 (1913): 457.

speeds, sizes, and times, Comandon and his coauthors quickly slipped intoa depiction of the intensity and rapidity ofwhat they sawon the screen. “Else-where, all around the periphery of the organ fragment, onenotices a veritableswarming of cells that constitute the fragment, and one has the impressionof a beehive where all is in movement” (“E,” p. 465).While the viewer may know that the phenomenon observed on film is a

record of an experiment done in the past—over the course of two hours—and is only moving at two hundred micrometers an hour, the impressionis of very intense activity of the living thing right there on the screen, likewatching a “beehive where all is in movement.” It is hard to think of theseas very slow bees. Thus, the exact knowledge of “real” speeds and times didnothing to counteract the experience of cellular life as frenetic.Whatmadefilms of cells in culture so interesting was not their quantifiable or graphicalrepresentation but their ability to show phenomena that were simply notvisible in any other way. A variety of segments of filmweremade at di!erentrates (300x and 92x) and di!erent enlargements (125x1, 62x1), and di!erentpreparations were filmed over di!erent periods of time (two, four and one-fourth, and eight hours). There was not just one kind of magnification oracceleration; these were in themselves elastic qualities to be manipulated,sometimes in relation to one another, in experimental and editorial deci-sions about visualizing the living subject. These early films of cellsmark theemergence of the notion of acceleration through projection as being in itselfa mode of analysis, a research tool particular to biological movement thatwas too slow to see.This film and others showed the existence of a microscopic world whose

occupants’ small size prevented normal perception of their life; for his pre-sentations, Comandon frequently used the titleLaVie des infinimentspetits—The Life of the Infinitely Small. However, the films also showed that therewasanother temporal world subtending that of normal human perception, evenperception aided by magnification. They demonstrated that what was ap-parently still to normal observation with the eye was saturated with move-ment once viewed at a di!erent temporal scale. Even well-known biologicalevents turned out to be not as they had appeared. For example, the staticdiagrams of stages of cell divisionwere shownup in all their arbitrary stillnessby Comandon’s films, as the chromosomes in the living cells moved inces-santly throughout the process: “in each phase the chromosomes are mobileand animated with a vermiformmovement. At the stages of spirem and etoilede mere, it is a veritable swarming of the nuclear figure.”40


41. This history belongs properly to that of microscopymore generally. See CatherineWilson,The InvisibleWorld: EarlyModern Philosophy and the Invention of theMicroscope (Princeton, N.J.,1995).

42. Epstein, “Magnification,” 1:238.43. JonathanCrary, “Gericault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth

Century,”Grey Room 9 (Fall 2002): 7.

After somany years of seeing static drawings, photographs, andfixedandstained slides of cells, scientists voiced surprise and wonder at these scenesof continual movement. “The realism and vitality of these kinematographpictures can scarcely be imagined by anyone who has not seen them thrownon the screen” (“M,” p. 213). This is not obvious: why should biologists,who presumably looked at living things all the time, exhibit such surpriseat the “realism and vitality” of these images? Living cells had of course beenseen through the microscope before, and a range of their activities (such asphagocytosis) had been described and argued over. Not all cellular move-ments were too slow to perceive. The description of a microscopic “world”was not by anymeans a new phenomenon, andmicrophotography andmi-crochronophotography had preceded microcinematography.41

These and other microcinematographic films showed how all livingcells—not just blood cells, or unicellular animals—but all cells constitutingall multicellular beings moved, all the time. They did not just move aroundfrom one place to another, but they changed shape and their insidesmovedtoo—incessantly. The impression of frenetic activity was only accentuatedby the apparently crazed timepiece figuring in all time-lapse films; the chro-nometer, filmed at the same time as the specimen in order tomark the “realtime” of the passage of the experiment, appeared in the upper right-handcorner of the screenwith its hands rapidly twirling throughthehours.WhenEpstein writes of “gestures of LillianGish who runs like the hands of a chro-nometer!” he evokes exactly this sensation of frenetic life.42

Because Comandon worked at Pathe, these films were also seen by thegeneral public, scholarly societies, and students. We can get some idea ofthe context of their demonstration from texts of lectures written to accom-pany the films, as well as from the reactions of journalists in both themedi-cal and general press. Jonathan Crary has remarked that it is not simply thedevelopment of new technologies of film or photography that constitutesthe history of themodernizationof the perceptualworld; theaccompanyingset of “imperatives for consumption, attention, and perceptual compe-tence” exercised on the spectator must also be taken into account.43 In thecase ofmicrocinematography, the audience received very explicitdirectionseither just before or during the film on how to view the films’ depiction of“the life of the infinitely small,” particularly in relation to the self. Specta-


44. Jules Guiart, “La Vie revelee par le cinematographie,”Revue Scientifique 52, no. 1 (1914): 743.45. Ibid, p. 744.46. Salagnac, “Le Cinematographie de l’infiniment petit,” Le Journal, 31 July 1910, p. 1. This

headline appears on the front page of the newspaper directly next to the headline “Encore un

tors, both scientific and nonscientific, were directed to see this the film notjust as another novel world of phenomena but specifically as a worldwithin—under the surface, in the interior of living things.In a lecture to “Friends of the University of Lyon,” in March 1914, the

pathologist Jules Guiart presented several of Comandon’s films to a lay au-dience which seems to have been composed mainly of women. Titled “LaVie revelee par le cinematographe,” the event began with his promise thatthe lecture would present “Life via its principal manifestations.” One ofthese was protoplasm, that “marvelous substance” that “constitutes thehardly visiblemicrobes or the glittering insects, aswell as the gracious formswhich make you, Mesdames, the queens of creation.”44 After telling themof their constitutionby cells,whichwere smallmassesofprotoplasm,Guiartproceeded to show them Comandon’s films of protoplasmic streaming inplant cells, cell division, the movement of leukocytes, and protozoa. Theaudience was thus explicitly directed to see their constitutive elements onscreen and to understand themselves as continuouswith other beingsmadeof cells and protoplasm. With particular cruelty, Guiart asked his audiencemembers to henceforth see the world with appropriate sympathy, now thatthey had seen the life inside these other beings: “You certainly comprehendnow the life in these plants that you trample underfoot, that you believe tobe insensible. You believe that, Mesdames, because they have noway of cry-ing out, but in reality, what do you know?”45

Even newspaper articles carefully recounted the scientific form of theexperiment on film, comparing the scene of action of the battle of whiteblood cells and Nagana trypanosomes (the pathogenic agent of sleepingsickness) in three settings: without blood serum, with normal serum, andwith “specific” serum, that is, blood serum of an animal previously exposedto the pathogen.

Successively, one saw the trypanosomes snaking in liberty and with in-credible liveliness in the region of the leukocytes, touching themwithimpunity, crossing over themwithout trouble. Then, when the appro-priate serum acts, the scene changes.When these ever agile trypano-somes touch a white blood cell, straight away they find themselvesattached, and despite all the e!orts made to separate themselves, theyadhere more andmore, like an underwater animal trapped by an octo-pus. Soon, the movements of the trypanosome ceases and it dies, en-compassed by the leukocyte, in which it is from then on incorporated.46


aviateur qui tombe et se tue.” See Jean Comandon papers, box com.8 presse, Pasteur InstituteArchives.

47. Auguste Barille, “Ultramicroscopie et cinematographie,”Le Petit Marseillais, 1 Sept. 1910, p.1. See Jean Comandon papers, box com.8 presse, Pasteur Institute Archives.

This front-page newspaper piece, subtitled “How OurWhite Blood CellsDevour Microbes,” sensationalized this “great combat carried out in the or-ganism,” this “intestinal battle” with “one of the most dreadful microbes”whose drama is for physicians “far more interesting than the most poignantevents of everyday cinematography.” However, it also carefully incorporatedthe experimental narrative of medical research; it compared di!erent bloodsera and explained that the viewer should not “forget that the scenes showntous happened in laboratorypreparations.”The concluding lineof thearticleemphasized that what happened on the screen was an experimental re-crea-tion of the process: “We hope that the attack, engulfment and death of try-panosomes is as well realized when it happens in the human body.”Others reported that the films gave the spectator a “perfect illusion of

reality” in showing the “agitation” and “rapid changes” that constitutedthe“intimate existence of these infinitely small things.” Again, the directionsto the reader were explicit. These sights became available not only to theprivileged few who work in the laboratory but to “the whole world.”47Thisimplies that the spectators are to see as scientists do, making the cinema awindow not just onto the life of the small but onto the previouslyprivilegedsights of science. Thanks to Comandon’s films, the authorwrites, thewholeworld will be able know the microbes that cause contagious and epidemicillnesses and will be able to know them en pleine vie. In full life.

3In a much-quoted passage from “TheWork of Art in the Age of Its Tech-

nological Reproducibility,” Benjamin builds a comparative analogy con-sisting of four figures: magician and painter, surgeon and camera operator.The painter is like the magician in that he “maintains in his work a naturaldistance from reality,” while, like the surgeon, “the cinematographer pen-etrates deeply into its tissue.”As a result, “the images obtainedbyeachdi!erenormously. The painter’s is a total image, whereas that of the cinematog-rapher is piecemeal, its manifold parts being assembled according to a newlaw” (“WA,” 4:263–64).Sometimes, as it happened, the camera operator was a surgeon. This is

an excellent description of Alexis Carrel, whomoved fromdoing transplantsurgery on whole bodies and organs to tissue culture, seeking the basicmechanisms behind wound healing, regeneration, and aging in living pop-ulations of cells. The picture of reality obtained by this cinematographer/


48. Alexis Carrel andMontrose Burrows, “Human SarcomaCultivatedOutside of the Body,”Journal of the AmericanMedical Association, 12 Nov. 1910, p. 1732.

49. Carrel invited Comandon to New York, but it does not seem that Comandon ever went;instead, Carrel visited Comandon’s laboratories on his yearly returns to France. See DoO’Gomes,“L’Oeuvre de Jean Comandon.” The correspondence between Comandon and Carrel, such as aletter dated 19 August 1912, deals only with scheduling a visit by Carrel to Comandon in Paris, afterCarrel had secured permission in 1912 from the head of the Rockefeller Institute forMedicalResearch, Simon Flexner, to acquire equipment for microcinematography.See Louis Schmidt,letter to Carrel, 27 July 1912, “Correspondence 1912,” Alexis Carrel Papers, Lauinger Library SpecialCollections, GeorgetownUniversity.

50. Carrel, “The New Cytology,” Science, 20Mar. 1931, p. 298; hereafter abbreviated “NC.”51. Carrel, “Physiological Time,” Science, 18 Dec. 1931, p. 620; hereafter abbreviated “PT.”

surgeon was of the physiology of the body as lived out by its constituentelements, the cells. These cells were not viewed in the body, but were ex-tracted and, as fragmentary populations, kept alive in glass vessels. Themeaning of their multitudinous, individual, in vitro existences was reas-sembled by Carrel into a theory of life.Carrel’s emphasis was onmaking cells live, not just outside the body, but

in full visibility, such that, “all the details of the living cells can be observedat every instant of their evolution.”48 Carrel (like Epstein some years later)went to medical school in Lyons and (again like Epstein) was acquaintedwith cinema from its earliest days, having worked in the biological labo-ratories of Auguste Lumiere. After immigrating to the United States Carrelturned to Comandon to help himbuild his ownmicrocinematographicset-up, and in the 1920s he began to produce films of cells living in culture.49

Carrel had begun experimenting with tissue culture in 1910; by 1912 he hadclaimed “permanent life” for tissues grown outside the body in this way.Carrel, an admirer of Henri Bergson, interpreted his own time-lapse filmsof cells to be a demonstration of duration of cells. He said that cytologymust be based on “close observation of the concrete event which a tissueis.” The cornerstone of the new cytology was cinematography; what othermethod could capture an event unfolding over time? “A tissue is evidentlyan enduring thing. Its functional and structural conditions become mod-ified frommoment tomoment. Time is really the fourthdimensionof livingorganisms. It enters as a part into the constitution of a tissue. Cell colonies,or organs, are events which progressively unfold themselves.”50 Because atissue was an event, withmicrocinematography one could see physiologicalduration, and Carrel used Bergson to define duration: “the present of aliving organism does not pass into nothingness. It never ceases to be, be-cause it remains in the memory and is entered in the tissues. Bergson hasclearly shown how the past persists in the present. The body is obviouslymade up of the past.”51

Carrel saw cells in vitro as a simplified animal, pared down to a closed


52. Carrel, foreword to Raymond Parker,Methods of Tissue Culture (New York, 1938), p. xi.53. Carrel, “The Relation of Cells to One Another,” inHuman Biology and RacialWelfare, ed. E.

V. Cowdry (New York, 1930), pp. 205–18. This concept was borrowed from the physicist P. W.Bridgman’sThe Logic of Modern Physics (1927).

54. EduardUhlenhuth, “Changes in Pigment EpitheliumCells and Iris Pigment Cells of RanaPipiens Induced by Changes in Environmental Conditions,” Journal of ExperimentalMedicine 24(1916): 690.

system of tissues bathed in blood and interstitial fluid. “Physiological du-ration . . . appears as soon as a portion of space containing metabolizingthings becomes relatively isolated from the surrounding world” (“PT,” p.621). For these cells, physiological durationwas composedofmetabolicpro-cesses that created products that changed the cellularmedium.Thebuildupof metabolic by-products equaled the buildup of duration. “Time is re-corded by a cell community only when the metabolic products are allowedto remain around the tissue.” From this assertion it was a very short stepto the alleviationof time. “If thesemetabolites are removedat short intervalsand the composition of the medium is kept constant, the cell colonies re-main indefinitely in the same state of activity. They donot record timequal-itatively. In fact, they are immortal” (“PT,” p. 621). Thus immortality wasintroduced into biology as a technical termwithin “the new cytology,”withan attendant methodology. For Carrel, immortality was embodied in whathe called “the old strain,” a culture of embryonic chicken heart cells thatwent on dividing and growing, apparently endlessly. It became known asthe immortal chicken heart, and the press used to celebrate its “birthdays”annually.Immortality and duration were for Carrel scientific concepts, and sci-

entific concepts are, he wrote, “operational concepts; in other words, con-cepts equivalent to the set of operations by which they are acquired. Andthose operations dependnecessarily upon techniques.”52The scientificcon-cept was that which must “involve as much as, and nothing more than, theset of operations by which it is determined.”53 Following this definition, hesaw the scientific concept of immortality as equivalent to the set of tech-niques that made up tissue culture. Carrel, in approaching immortality asan “operational concept,” not only sought to interpret his results in termsof Bergson’s concepts of time and duration but developed a set of instru-ments and practices as an explicitmaterialized equivalent of these conceptsin the form of a “set of operations.”This “operationalized” philosophy demanded the reconfiguration of

the body, and the development of means for its technical maintenance,what one of Carrel’s coworkers called the building of “a new type of bodyin which to grow a cell.”54 Carrel introduced a new form of culture vesselof his own design (fig. 2). These were small, flat, round flasks five or eight


f igure 2. Handling tissues in Carrel flasks, c. 1923. Carrel designed both the glass flat-bottomed flasks and the long instruments for manipulating the tissues inside.

centimeters in diameter with narrow oblique necks. The shape of the neckprevented contaminants from the air falling directly into the flask when itwas open, and the neck could be flamed before and after placing tissue andmedium inside the flask, thus mimicking the protective skin of the body.The tissues were grown in a thin coagulated layer of plasma or fibrinogenon the bottom of the flask and bathed in a liquid medium. Life could thusbemaintained and regulated—themedium added or removed atwill—andconstantly observed, as “tissue and blood cells are always in the process ofbecoming” (“NC,” p. 300). The shape and materials constituting the flaskwere directed towardoptical transparency. Theflaskshad severalminorvar-iations; one had a bottom composed of a thin mica plate, and the wholething could be inverted and directly slotted into the microscope for highmagnification studies or cinematography of the living cells as they grew.Later the flasks were refined such that their flat glass surfaces were thinenough to be used with oil immersion lenses, replacing the mica windows.This is perhaps the most hands-on interpretation Bergson’s work has

ever received; it was a science of duration complete with its own glassware,instrumentation, choreography, outfits, and lighting (fig. 3). With cine-matography, Carrel thought he could see duration. What did it look like?Like Comandon, Carrel was using time-lapse imaging, but the actual slow-ness of “the concrete event that a tissue is” fell away immediately from theexperience of watching the films (“NC,” p. 297). Cells do not “show theirtrue physiognomywhen they are examined under themicroscope . . . . Fixedcells appear on the film as mobile as a flame. Their surface is never smooth.In some places, it bubbles like boiling water” (“NC,” p. 300). Again, Carrel


f igure 3. Carrel’s tissue culture laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research,undated photograph. The space was lit by skylights, the walls were dark grey, and all workers worelong black robes and hoods. All these measures were directed toward reducing reflection or glare,in order to improve the lighting conditions either for intricate surgical procedures ormanipulating tiny translucent pieces of tissue.

55. “Doctor Kellogg is preparing an educational film, one purpose of which is to show thee!ects of poison upon the blood, especially on the white blood cells. He would like to show theleucocytesmoving about, and requests a few feet of film for this purpose” (Carrel, letter to SimonFlexner, 26 Oct. 1928, administrative correspondence, 1923–1929, 450c232 Faculty Box 2,Rockefeller Archive Center).

was struck not just by the unceasingly mobile physiognomy of undulatingmembranes but by the seemingly social and behavioral aspect of the cellsin relation to one another: “A colony of fibroblasts looks like a dense crowdwhich moves without order. Very rarely do individuals wander far from themain group, which is composed of cells sliding upon one another in everydirection” (“NC,” p. 300).As far as can be ascertained, none of these films survive, and they were

never publicly distributed, as Comandon’s films were. However, a similarset of accounts of their screenings appear in the newspapers, and they turnup in unexpected places, such as John Harvey Kellogg’s Battle Creek San-atorium, where the films were apparently shown to thousands of incomingpatients to demonstrate the intimately damaging e!ects of alcohol andother ingested toxins on the body’s cells.55 A newspaper report of a film


56. “Movie Reveals Living Cells of Tissue,”New York Evening Journal, 29 Aug. 1929.“Automobile” as an adjective does not necessarily refer to a vehicle, but describes something thatmoves by means of mechanism and power within itself.

57. “Living Tissue Cells Shown inMovie,”New York Times, 29 Aug. 1929, p. 20.58. As Cartwright observes, “What is extended, perhaps, is not the observer’s senses but the

living process of the body studied, and the epistemological domain of the apparatus in thegeneration of ‘life’” (Cartwright, Screening the Body, p. 27).

screening at the 1929 International Physiologists Congress indicates thatcontemporaries were impressed by not only the films themselves but whattheir form implied about the scientists’ work of observing:

By substituting an automaticmotion picture camera for a scientist’s eyeat the microscope, and gearing it to take an exposure a minute, Dr.Alexis Carrell . . . obtained a film which reproduced the unremitting ob-servation of the camera while the scientist was attending to other re-searches. Half an hour of his time, spent in watching the filmwhen itwas projected on the screen, showed what used to require days of pa-tient observation alone at the end of a microscope.The automobile observations of cell behaviormade by Dr. Carrel

through his motion picture camera, were shared directly yesterday withabout 500 scientists.56

The observation machine works while the scientist is doing other thingsand contracts the patient labor of days to half anhour. It then canbe“shareddirectly” and simultaneously with five hundred other scientists. Anotherjournalist commented that during this display it “was not even necessaryfor Dr. Carrel to be present.” The scientist and his work were separated, hisobservations reproducible—in fact, instantly repeatable:

Cells of microscopic size appeared on the screen in dimensions of feetinstead of microns. Their interior changes could be followed in detailfrom the rear of a fifty foot room as they grew and reproduced.The continuous record of their movements revealed dynamic

changes in the tempo of their “dance,” as it was called, which becameconvulsive as they split . . . .The visiting scientists applauded and examined the phenomena

again by having the films run through the projector once more.57

It is a kind of automatic seeing; the scientist knows there is somethinghappening in the cultures but can’t see it with the naked eye; turning sightover to the “mechanical retina” reveals what is there. That sight can thenbe shared, repeatedly.InCarrel’s studies, the camerawas not brought to the insideof theanimal

to visualize the life within it, but cells were extracted from the body and fitinto the apparatus.58 In transparent glass vessels, they embodied the events


59. Epstein, “The Senses I (b),” trans. TomMilne, in French Film Theory and Criticism, 1:243.60. “‘Immortality’ Is Achieved in ChickenHeart,”New York Herald Tribune, 22 Nov. 1925, p. 26.

that constitute all the essential aspects of life: ingestion,metabolism,move-ment, growth, interaction, reproduction, senescence, and death, and all ofthese could be interfered with at will by the watching observer. Life was nota property dependent upon a whole body, but a quantity that could be ex-tracted and abstracted from any single body, while remaining fundamentalto all bodies. Cells were not structural building blocks, as the static picturesof histology might suggest, but dynamic agents of physiological process. AsEpstein put it, “Life,” on film, “fragments itself into new individualities.”59

To look at them in time, using Comandon’s cinematic techniques, was tosee life.Carrel’s theorization of these cells as exhibiting the endless, incessant

movement and growth of life-as-duration was then incorporated intowhatthe spectator was urged to see when viewing such a film. To reiterate, theexperience was supposed to be not just one of seeing living cells but a feelingof unprecedented proximity to life as such, the powerful foundation of allmacroscopic phenomena.ADr.Green, professorof chemistry atLeedsUni-versity, interviewed in 1925 as he was about to sail out of New York, had thisto say about his experience of viewing Carrel’s films:

“It was one of the most amazing things I ever saw . . . . The film of thegrowth of the tissue was taken during twenty-four hours andmust haveinvolved a vast amount of reel. What takes place in the twenty-fourhours is reduced in it to a comparatively fewminutes . . . .Dr. Carrel introduces immortality in a physicall sense. It is there be-

fore your eyes, and so long as this tissue is nurtured and irrigated it willlive. It cannot die. Its growth is so enormous that it doubles itself everytwenty-four hours, and if it had not been pared down each day since theexperiment began it would now be a colossal monster overspreading allNew York.”60

There are two things that are vast and colossal here: the amount of reeland the potential size of the culture. Discussion of the cinematicmedium’scondensing action on time is linked to discussion of the actual object ofobservation by the statement: “Dr. Carrel introduces immortality in aphys-icall sense.” Films of living cells in culture induced a visceral feeling of lifeas endless and boundless growth and proliferation; in this case, the filmhadno necessary beginning or end; any twenty-four hour slice out of immor-tality is interchangeable with any other. Thus a very specific form of cine-


61. Benjamin, “On SomeMotifs in Baudelaire,” SelectedWritings, 4:336.62. P. LeComte du Nouy, Biological Time (New York, 1937), p. 103–4.63. Nye,Molecular Reality, p. 153.

matic life was produced out of the materialized philosophy of Bergson’sduration.Benjamin considered Bergson’s conception of duration as “estranged

from history.” Quoting Max Horkheimer, he says: “‘Bergson themetaphy-sician suppresses death.’ The fact that death has been eliminated fromBerg-son’s duree isolates it e!ectively from a historical . . . order.”61 Yet this mustbe themost appropriate philosophy toworkwith in creating a biologywith-out death, an artificial “immortal experimental animal” that one could ex-periment on indefinitely, eliminating “innumerable causes of error due tothe individual characteristics of animals of di!erent origins.”62 Evolutionand experience were conspicuously absent from Carrel’s work, as both thelife of the species and the life of the individual were left behind.Benjamin also observed of Bergson’s duree that with the suppression of

death comes, in his words, “the miserable endlessness of a scroll.” It thusseems appropriate to note that Carrel’s immortal chicken heart never ac-tually died, nor was it killed. Two years after Carrel’s own death in occupiedFrance in 1944, the culture was merely thrown away, as no one was willingto take on the continued labor of its maintenance.

4Carrel’s claims about the permanent life of tissues removed from the

body were in prominent circulation in European and American scientificand public arenas from 1910 on, as were Comandon’s microcinemato-graphic films of everything from trypanosomes to cells grown in cultureaccording to Carrel’s protocol. In addition, physical chemist Jean Perrinused Comandon’s films of Brownian motion as visual confirmation of thephenomenon in arguments over the validity of “molecular reality,” as partof the establishment of the assumption we live with today—the fundamen-tal atomistic or molecular nature of all matter, known at the time as themolecular-kinetic theory.63 Both Carrel and Comandon attracted constantpronouncements of astonishment and dismay from commentators in thepopular press at the spectacle of life the two were respectively producing.This complex response included not just wonderment at the sight itself butshock at the amount of movement hidden in apparently still things, theamount of heterogenous structure hidden in apparently solid things, ap-preciation of the ability of audiences to see things as scientists do, com-


64. Bela Balazs,Der sichtbareMensch oder die Kultur des Films (1924; Frankfurt amMain, 2001),p. 49.

65. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” pp. 510, 512.

mentary on the automation of scientific seeing, and a sense of visceralproximity to life, disease, and immortality.When Bela Balazs writes, in Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des

Films, that “themagnifying glass of the cinematograph brings near to us theindividual cells of living tissue, lets us feel the matter and substance of con-crete lives,”64 the cell he is referring to is the “living” cell of film, not someabstract idea of a cell. The film cell is understood as the fundamental stu!of life, in all its glorious materiality. By this I do not mean to imply that hemust have been conceptualizing the cinematic close-up specifically in re-lation to the work of Comandon and Carrel; there were many biologicalfilms and many narratives of cellular life in circulation at this point. How-ever, the close examination of Comandon and Carrel’s work is a windowonto the original energy that theorized film by thinking through scientificfilm.As indicated above, cellular and microscopic metaphors and references

appear in texts by Balazs, Eisenstein, Epstein, and Benjamin, as well as vari-ous lesser-known critics and writers on film. The recontextualization ofthese seemingly abstract scientific metaphors in the contemporary scene oftheir production leads to a better understandingof both early scientificfilm,of which critics were acute observers, and early film theory.Benjamin’s con-cept of the “optical unconscious” will be familiar tomany readers, but eventhe highly scrutinized “Little History of Photography” may be seen anew,if read with one eye on the historical materiality of scientific film.

Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea whatis involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have noidea at all what happens during the fraction of a second when a personactually takes a step. Photography, with its devices of slowmotion andenlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we firstdiscover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discoverthe instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.Details of struc-ture, cellular tissue, with which technology andmedicine are normallyconcerned—all this is, in its origins, more native to the camera than theatmospheric landscape or the soulful portrait.65

What is cellular tissue doing in this passage? Is it an incidental illustrationof an analogy? Psychoanalysis and the unconscious on the one hand, pho-tography and microstructure of physical things on the other? Along with


66. RosalindKrauss,The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge,Mass., 1993), pp. 178–79.67. Judy Johns Schloegel andHenning Schmidgen, “General Physiology, Experimental

Psychology, and Evolutionism:UnicellularOrganisms as Objects of PsychophysiologicalResearch,1877–1918,” Isis 93, no. 4 (2002): 617.

68. Ibid., p. 616.69. See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (1920; New

York, 1961).

other mentions of cells and tissues in early film theory, this reference hasbeen read abstractly, as if it did not refer to anything in particular. For ex-ample, Rosalind Krauss asks, “can an optical field—theworld of visual phe-nomena . . . have anunconscious?” For Freud, she says,Benjamin’sapparentanalogy would “simply be incomprehensible” because the microstructureof the world is neither conscious nor unconscious nor can it be in conflictwith consciousness. “What,” she asks, “can we speak of in the visual fieldthat will be an analogue of the ‘unconscious’ itself ”?66

This apparent quandary seems to arise from a poor analogy, a loose in-terpretation of Freud. However, this quandary dissolves if we simply speakof what Benjamin himself spoke of in the visual field: cellular tissue. A shortexcursion through late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-centurypsy-chology is necessary to understand the specific presence of cells in this pas-sage. The question is not whether cellular tissue has an unconscious or isconscious but rather how cells were understood to be elemental particles ofpsychic phenomena whose investigation would elucidate the fundamentalcharacteristics of human psychology. And how, then, seeing cells via pho-tographyor cinematographywouldbeexperiencedas seeing the fundamentalelements of psychological phenomena.From the late nineteenth century on, “‘the psychic life of micro-organ-

isms’” was part of a wide range of experimental research with unicellularorganisms, particularly protozoa.67 Scientists did not think that each indi-vidual protozoan was a little conscious (or unconscious) being; they as-sumed instead that the protozoa’s actions were elementalmanifestationsofthe psychological phenomena inherent to all living matter. As part of ane!ort to establish properties common to all living beings, researchers fo-cused on the cell, or “‘elementary organism,’” as it was “deemed to be boththe only functional organic entity common to both plants and animals andthe natural starting point of physiological as well as psychological life.”68 Itwas not at all extraordinary to see the cell as simultaneously fundamentalto physiological processes such asmovement and topsychologicalprocessessuch as individuality, consciousness, and agency. And it was treated thiswaynot just within the life sciences but also in the writings of Nietzsche, Berg-son, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Freud.Certainly psychoanalysis proper had already considered the cellularity

of the “non-optical” unconscious in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).69


70. Ibid., p. 60.71. See Franz Doflein,Das Problem des Todes und der Unsterblichkeit bei den Pflanzen und Tieren

(Jena, 1919).

Freud, looking for evidence of phenomena more fundamental and primi-tive than the pleasure principle, pursued an understanding of instincts asforces originating in the interior of the body—in the cells—that are con-stantly transmitted to the mental apparatus. Note that Benjamin too re-ferred to the instinctual unconscious. Freud drew his own analogy betweenhis “dynamic” theories of life instincts and death instincts andAugustWeis-mann’s “morphological” opposition of germ cells, which continue throughthe generations, and somatic cells, which die with each individual body:

Accordingly, we might attempt to apply the libido theory which hasbeen arrived at in psycho-analysis to the mutual relationship of cells.Wemight suppose that the life instincts or sexual instincts which are ac-tive in each cell take the other cells as their object, that they partly neu-tralize the death instincts (that is, the processes set up by them) in thosecells and thus preserve their life; while still others sacrifice themselves inthe performance of this libidinal function. The germ-cells themselveswould behave in a completely ‘narcissistic’ fashion.70

In this work, “life” is seen as torn apart into particles and straining everto reunite, and thus all the fundamental forces leading to the conflict andstruggle in the mental apparatus begin in elemental form, innate to livingmatter. Freud drew extensively on such contemporary debates about thebiological basis of life and death in his discussion of the possible underlyingcellular basis of life and death instincts; following the citations from therelevant passages of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, one finds Freud referringto various works by contemporary authors such as Franz Doflein on thebiological nature of death.71 Doflein considers at length the implications ofthe work of Alexis Carrel and his deathless cells, and the book includes di-agrams of tissue cultures redrawn from Carrel’s papers.The point here is not to interrogate Freud’s theories of cell division as

evidence of the universal compulsion to repeat or to revisit the question ofFreud’s biologism. It is to gain access to amode of thought inwhich lookingat cells on screen was experienced not exclusively as a view of morphologyor physiology but simultaneously and indistinguishably as a viewof the fun-dament of psychological life. For Freud, particularly in Beyond the PleasurePrinciple, correlation between the physical form of living matter and thetheoretical form of psychoanalysis was an important mode of speculativeargument. In this framework, seeing cells move and behave correlatedwith


72. Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land ofTechnology,’”NewGerman Critique, no. 40 (Winter 1987): 209.

seeing instincts. A leap between psychoanalytic methods and cinematicones was not so dramatic when films of the behavior of protozoa or somaticcells were seen as scientific analyses of the foundations of life, broadly un-derstood. The line betweenpsychic phenomenaandphysiologicalphenom-ena was indistinct, particularly when scientists like Carrel were claimingthat the films showed cells as “made up of the past,” as “duration,” in itsfully Bergsonian sense. In short, cells in the visual fieldwere thevisual“mor-phological” counterparts to the theoretical “dynamic” structures revealedby techniques of psychoanalysis. They might even be literally the samething, just accessed by di!erent means, which is why psychoanalytic tech-niques and visually analytic techniques were compellingly analogous. ThusBenjamin’s text and those texts that formed the context of his writing im-puted power to the camera to see life as it has not been seen before.Theaters, lectures, and newspapers were themselves teeming with star-

tlement at what film was revealing of life, that all surfaces, even nonlivingones, had within them another whole realm of life—incessantly moving,pullulating cells and particles. The films were greeted as a view into the lifegoing on all the time beyond the range of normal (conscious) perception.Manipulation of space and time throughdevices ofmagnificationandtime-lapse was greeted as a means of revealing life beneath life, life inside life;even the surface of the cell could be further magnified to see the streamingcytoplasm or the paroxysms of internal division. Microcinematographygave access to what was interpreted as the microstructure not simply ofcellular tissue but of life and death, of duration and immortality. The ex-perience of watching the films—variously accompanied bynarratives of theessential protoplasm or the internal reality of the body—was to gain a vis-ceral sense of that life as something inside the individualbutalsocontinuousover all forms of nonhuman beings.These connections only ramify when considering Benjamin’s return to

the notion of the optical unconscious in the later essay, “The Work of Artin the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Miriam Hansen writes,“while the photography essay illustrated the ‘optical unconscious’ with ex-amples from biophysics and botany, the Artwork Essay draws on the im-agery of a social and mechanized world, the discourse of an alienatedexperience.”72 Hansen’s nuanced analyses of the notion of the optical un-conscious in these essays is only enriched by seeing this apparent di!erencenot as the replacement of one kind of example with something quite otherbut as two interlinked kinds of examples of the same thing—scientific im-


73. See Luc Durtain, “La Technique et l’homme,”Vendredi, 13 Mar. 1936, p. 9.74. Not that Durtain was necessarily aware of this, and Benjaminmost likely was not, but Carrel

and his wife, Anne Carrel, experimentedwith corneal surgery in the 1920s.75. Durtain, “La Technique et l’homme,” p. 9.76. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” p. 512.

agery as imagery of a social andmechanizedworld. Aswehave seen, viewersof these films were highly aware of the technology allowing them to see suchsights—not just with the film camera and the microscope but with theplacement of living pieces of the body in the technology of the laboratory—where they continued to live indefinitely. Even the scientific sight of thesepieces was itself mechanized by film. The perception of the body or naturevia the technological apparatus is as much a part of the modern conditionof human life as the factories and automobiles of work andmotion, a pointthat becomes explicit in oneofBenjamin’s sources, anarticlebyLucDurtaincalled “La Technique et l’homme.”73

Apparently very taken by Durtain’s discussion of corneal surgery, theextremely delicate operations of manipulating an object that is itself vir-tually fluid within a fluid medium, Benjamin quotes Durtain in a footnoteto his comparison of the cinematographer and the surgeon.74 Just above thesection that Benjamin quotes, Durtain discussesmicrocinematography.Helinks the transformation of the perception of speed introduced by the mo-torcycle, car, and airplane to the “universe” demonstrated by new opticalinstruments; part of the contemporary configuration of technology andman is that we are moved not just by the sight of machines but by the spec-tacles machines themselves provide. His first example is microcinematog-raphy. He speaks of the “grandiose architectures” and “physiologicallandscapes” filled with “unforgettable sights”: blood cells circulating in thecapillaries and the “swarming life of the microscopic world.” He writes of

Flagellates,moving at top speed across the field of the microscope, andcilia that quiver, and ru#es and pseudopods that undulate, or diatomsthat move their boxy skeletons, in a ceremonious and brusquemove-ment . . .the phenomena of cellular reproduction, sometimes by slowsimple division, sometimes by that extraordinary ballet in which the liv-ing strands of chromosomes divide and go to the radiating poles . . .parting two new lives.75

Durtain’s description could be quite accurately described as notes on the“image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things”76 that Benjamin hadsome years earlier said were revealed by the “devices” of photography,whether scientific or not.To analyze the bibliographic unconscious at work in Benjamin’s texts is


77. It is not possible to specify which film of sea urchin fertilization and development this mighthave been, since there were many, including one by Comandon,made between 1909 and 1924.They were all, however, made using time-lapsemicrocinematography.

78. Dulac, “Aesthetics, Obstacles, IntegralCinegraphie, ” trans. Liebman, French Film Theoryand Criticism, 1:396.

79. Dulac, “The Avant-Garde Cinema,” trans. Lamberton, in The Avant-Garde Film, p. 47.80. Dulac, “Visual and Anti-Visual Films,” p. 32.81. Dulac, “The Essence of Cinema,” p. 39.

not to suggest that he himself made these connections explicitly. It is morelikely that the references in these essays, and their various levels of connec-tion, come not from any single source but were filtered through manysources—newspapers, film programs, other critical writings on film andphotography. For example, the proponents of avant-garde cinema inFranceformulated various definitions of “pure cinema” in direct relation to sci-entific films such as Comandon’s. Inspired in particular by a program ofscience films screened in 1924 at the Vieux Columbier, writers such as Ger-maine Dulac used these films to elaborate theoretical concepts of “integralcinegraphie” or the “essence of cinema.”Writing of “the film about the birth of sea urchins,”77 Dulac says that

“the rhythm and the magnitude of movement in the screen space becomethe only a!ective factors.” The film allows one to glimpse, unencumberedby “philosophical ideal or aesthetic concern,” the elements of a more purefilmmaking. “In its embryonic state, a purely visual emotion, physical andnot cerebral, is the equal of the emotion stimulated by an isolated sound.”The composition of such visual notes can thus be imagined as “an integralcinegraphie,” a “pure cinema, one liberated from every property alien toit.”78 Dulac, in a 1932 essay in Le Cinema des origines a nos jours, a volumethat also featured an essay by Comandon, dates the rise of avant-gardepro-duction to the science-film screening of 1924, when “pure cinema . . . wentin search of emotion beyond the limits of the human” and found it in “cer-tain scientific writings”: “Was not cinema potentially capable of graspingwith its lenses the infinitely large and the infinitely small? This school of theungraspable turned its attention to other dramas than those played by ac-tors.”79 In a passage from 1928, she writes that cinema, “by decomposingmovement, makes us see, analytically . . . and, if we look at the sproutinggrain, thanks to film we will no longer have only the synthesis of themove-ment of growth, but the psychology of this movement. . . . The cinemamakes us spectators of its bursts toward light and air, by capturing its un-conscious, instinctive andmechanicalmovements.”80Here, too, lifebeyondthe humanwas dissectable by “filmas a sort ofmicroscope”81whoseanalyticpowers were akin to those of psychoanalysis. As described above, suchfilmsoften came accompanied by their narration providing a window not just


82. Hansen, introduction, p. viii.

onto the sights of science (the world of the infinitely small) but onto sci-entific seeing itself, its processes of isolation and comparison, and so theinvocation here of “analytic” seeing should be read, as with Benjamin,with some specificity.

5

For this is themiracle of the science film, its inexhaustible paradox. At the far ex-treme of inquisitive, utilitarian research, in themost absolute proscription of aes-thetic intentions, cinematic beauty develops as an additional, supernatural gift.[“SF,” p. 146]

Andre Bazin, like Dulac decades earlier, was delighted by the “inex-haustible paradox” that those whowere apparently trying the least to createcinematic beauty, that is, scientists, were also those who were best able toproduce such beauty, “at the far extreme of inquisitive, utilitarianresearch,”thus generating cinema’s “purest aesthetic” (“SF,” p. 146). This in turnbearssome resemblance to the troubled conclusion of Kracauer’sTheory of Film,a chapter called “Film in Our Time,” in which cinema, with its visceral,intimate access to the concreteness of material reality, will redeem us froma world fractured and fragmented by aesthetically anemic scientific andtechnological ways of thinking and being. In short, film, althoughaproductof science and technology, will redeem the world from science and tech-nology because of the accident of cinematic beauty.Kracauer’s work is a “somewhat belated o!spring” of early film theory.82

He occupied an uncomfortable position in relation to classic film theory,trying to look forward and back at the same time, writing that “the prin-ciples and ideas instrumental in the rise of a new historical entity do notjust fade away once the period of inception is over; on the contrary, it is asif, in the process of growing and spreading, that entityweredestinedtobringout all their implications” (TF, p. 3). Kracauer’s engagement with sciencein Benjamin, Epstein, Dulac, and his own earlier writing on film, from theother side of the critiques of science such asDialectic of Enlightenment,hasits own specific dynamics. His attempt to characterize scientific principlesand ideas as instrumental tofilm, and the resulting implicationshesawfromthe specific viewpoint “film in our time,” that is, America in the late 1950s,deserves its own analysis. For now, however, I have used Kracauer’s partic-ular attention to science as an entry point into the liveliness of early filmtheory’s engagement with its contemporaneous biological experiments onfilm.


83. See LorraineDaston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,”Representations,no. 40(Fall 1992): 81–128.

What Kracauer thought through, but later readers have passed over, isthe critical mobilization of scientific film in the early twentieth century asa mode of understanding the characteristics and possibilities of film in gen-eral. Writers thinking through the relations of parts and wholes in terms ofshots and frames, montages and narratives, looked to scientific techniquesof decomposition and synthesis as demonstrated in scientific films as amode of articulating and theorizing the specificity of the film medium. Inparticular, they looked at these techniques in relation to the visualizationof life over time, and thiswas awayof articulating the specificityof thepowerof the film medium to depict life as such. Recognizing, as Kracauer put it,that the medium showed “characteristics inherent in the scientific ap-proach,” particularly characteristics of analytic decomposition of wholes,did not by any means then restrict the sense of what nonscientists could dowith the medium. Epstein, himself originally trained in medicine, an-nounced quite firmly that cinema was a hermaphrodite whose sex hadturned out to be art, not science. But this did not stop him from using bac-teriological and molecular metaphors to theorize photogenie and the char-acter of the close-up or from using these techniques in his ownfilmmaking.Having reestablished the sense that these diverse metaphors in the writingsof diverse authors are generated not by comparisons between avant-gardeor artistic film and abstract scientific concepts of the cell or molecule butby comparisons between films of the macroscopic world and films of themicroscopic one, what then should we do with this knowledge?Dulac, Kracauer, and Bazin thought that scientists, who were simply en-

gaged in finding things out or making things, by fortuitous accident left inthe wake of their rational and real an inexhaustible remainder of the irra-tional and surreal. Such a conclusion now seems untenable. “Themost ab-solute proscription of aesthetic intentions” noted by Bazin and others isitself a historically specific aesthetic of objectivity.83 As this essay has arguedin reconnecting scientificfilmmaking in early twentieth-centuryFranceandAmerica to a larger discourse of life, death, and immortality, Comandonand Carrel’s films were built with strong aesthetic and philosophical intent,were carefully edited, and had quite distinct narrative shape, either implicitin the film’s form, or explicit in accompanying lectures and texts. Thesefilms were stories of scientific investigation and dramas of infection, sur-vival, and life. Both the “experiments on film” and the critical responses tothem should be understood within this wider context.Ultimately, the aimof this argument is not a rediscoveryof early scientific


84. See Conly L. Rieder and Alexey Khodjakov, “Mitosis through theMicroscope: Advances inSeeing Inside Live Dividing Cells,” Science, 4 Apr. 2003, pp. 91–96.

film but a critical expansion on the insights it generated. It is my hope thatthis demonstration of film’s role in the “interpenetrationof art and science”in early twentieth-century visualizations and conceptualizations of lifewill both help renew interest in the history of scientific film and providesome critical tools with which to think about life’s imaging in other his-torical periods, including our own. Looking back to the cell in early filmtheory—and forward to next year’s biological imagingwith the samecriti-cal glance—requires first a recognition of early film theory’s insightsaboutthe incorporation of scientific ways of seeing into the film medium andthen the consideration of the question of whether contemporary life sci-ence is producing a cinema of life analogous to that made by Comandonand Carrel. Such a question may equip us better to think about the ubiq-uitous images of free-floating zygotes and micro-injection needles, iconsof our own version of the suppression of death; about the technically in-novative methods for filming the movements of organelles andmoleculesin living cells;84 or about the scenes of cellular interiority in recent Hol-lywood cinema (TheHulk,Magnolia, Fight Club). Indeed, an autonomousand authoritative cellular actor is very much alive in today’s cinema.

Cellular Features- Microcinematography and Film Theory

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