From the origins of cinema to today's television, there has been an enduring
relationship between science and the screen. It is widely accepted that cinema
owed its birth to the experiments of scientists and the tinkering of
technologists, just as the tastes of fin de siècle audiences for spectacular
entertainments were a necessary midwife. Late 19th century scientists,
especially in medicine, had become deeply interested in visualisation, and had
invented new techniques, for example to visualise the pulse, or to analyse
animal motion. After the invention of cinema, scientists continued to a limited
extent to use the cine camera as an instrument in their research, but the
screen's greatest significance for science has been as a medium of communication
with the public. And yet science films and television programmes have never been
a genre in their own right: the first science films were cinematographic
novelty acts; scientific documentaries are types of documentary; and television
science programmes are a sub-genre of non-fiction programming.
The first British science films for a public audience were shown at the
Alhambra Music Hall in Leicester Square, London, in August 1903. Their claim to
be scientific rested on the technical feat of filming through a microscope. This
revealed an 'Unseen World', as its protagonists, Charles Urban and Francis
Martin Duncan, described its subjects, which included Cheese Mites and
protoplasm moving in a sample of Canadian Pondweed. These microscopic studies
were complemented by brief observational films of animals, including toads,
tortoises and bees. Public reaction was enthusiastic, and by 1930 nature films
had become an established genre. Filmmakers soon developed from the single shots
- or series of shots artlessly combined - that comprised the first films to
carefully structured life-cycle narratives, often with a decided anthropomorphic
cast. The British Instructional Films series Secrets of Nature (1922-33)
produced as many as 30 nine-minute films per year. These were not, however,
popularisations of academic science, but the products of enthusiastic amateur
scientists, such as Duncan and Percy Smith, who displayed great ingenuity in
making devices to achieve dazzling close-up and time-lapse photography.
The makers of 'interest' films also featured the human world, most often in
the form of technological marvels to match the natural wonders of the nature
films. One example is Urban's Bird's Eye View of Paris (1910)¸ a series of
aerial shots taken from an airship. This kind of film also saw development in
its narrative structure, for example the 'day in the life' approach taken in
Britain's Imperial Airway (1924). In Britain, it was the documentarists at the
GPO Film Unit who brought a new intensity and passion to the representation of
technology, by the application of Russian montage techniques, creating a kind of
technological sublime in films including The Coming of the Dial (1933). Favoured
subjects included modern forms of transport, especially air travel; electricity,
especially hydro-electricity; and telecommunications. In these films, technology
is shown in true Modernistic style as transforming human experience. A fine late
example is The Peaceful Revolution, made for Associated Electrical Industries in
1961.
Professional scientists were slow to turn to the cinema to promote their
worldview. In 1934, Gaumont British Instructional made a series of record films
in which Eminent Scientists read brief reminiscences to the camera. A more
concerted partnership between scientists and filmmakers came after 1935, when
the documentarist Paul Rotha set up an organisation, Associated Realist Film
Producers, which counted the biologists J.B.S. Haldane, Lancelot Hogben and
Julian Huxley among its advisors. These were some of the most prominent members
of the 'social relations of science movement', who were committed to
demonstrating the social value of science. The social concerns about the impact
of the Depression that they shared with the documentarists were at the root of
their engagement with documentary. The first fruit of this collaboration was
Edgar Anstey's scientific lecture film Enough to Eat? (1936), on the
highly-charged subject of malnutrition, which featured Huxley, seen on screen,
as commentator. Nutrition and food supply were favoured subjects for films of
this kind, which promoted science's moral role. Later examples were The World is
Rich (1947) and Stuart Legg's Food or Famine (1961). These films were of a kind
that promoted 'scientific' rationality, for example in architecture and planning
more generally.
Scientific films aimed at a general adult public that explained scientific
and technical principles for their own sake were comparatively rare before the
Second World War. The outstanding example, the Shell Film Unit's Transfer of
Power (1939), explains the evolution of gear wheels, using
lucid animated diagrams combined with carefully-shot sequences of levers and
gearing systems ancient and modern.
After the Second World War, nature films continued to be a staple of
scientific filmmaking, especially with the work of Oxford Scientific Films.
Technology documentaries continued to feature in the output of major industrial
concerns, especially the oil companies. Films demonstrating the social role of
science were somewhat eclipsed as the Cold War got underway, although films on
environmental issues showed a similar combination of highly-wrought technique
and moral concern about the role and impact of science and technology. All these
genres also featured in different strengths as television began to become the
dominant medium of science on screen from the mid-1950s. But it was in this new
medium, especially after 1957, that science news and the live exposition of
scientific principles became dominant concerns.
Timothy Boon
Bibliography
Boon, T. (2008) Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and
Television, London, Wallflower Press.
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