Introduction: Reusing Research Film and the Institute for Scientific Film
Abstract
This introduction outlines the threefold contribution that this Focus section on research film offers. First, it introduces the vast collection of films from the former Institute for Scientific Film (Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film [IWF]), arguably the most ambitious endeavor ever undertaken to manage the distribution, production, and archiving of research films. At the same time, the institute’s questionable roots in the National Socialist education system and in war research are addressed. Second, the introduction points out that the Focus section enters largely uncharted terrain in the history of research films. Third, it argues that a focus on the multiple reuses of research films, as this section attempts, not only suits the medium specificity of film but helps us to map the aesthetic, intermedial, and cultural-political practices of disseminating knowledge. In this vein, the organizers asked established scholars working on film and science to share with us a short story of a reused research film. Scott Curtis, Vinzenz Hediger, Anja Laukötter, and Hanna Rose Shell responded. Their contributions can be found in the supplementary materials to the online edition.
In 2012, the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) inherited a large collection of over 11,500 research films from the former Institute for Scientific Film (Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film [IWF]). The IWF was the largest institution ever to produce, distribute, and archive research films. It was officially founded in 1956 and existed for more than fifty years. Based in Göttingen, Germany, it had archives all over the world. Its roots date back to National Socialism. During its existence, the IWF received broad acknowledgment from researchers and science educators worldwide. Indeed, when its existence was threatened in the 1990s, there was protest in Nature.1 The institute was finally closed in 2010, after the German government ceased financial support.
While the IWF had started to digitize its films in the last years before its closure, this process was only recently taken up again by the TIB, where its holdings are nowadays to be found as a special collection within the audiovisual online catalogue called the AV-Portal. The collection covers a broad range of time and themes. The earliest films date from around 1900, the most recent to about 2008. Thematically, the films range across the disciplines of biology, ethnology, history, medicine, and technical sciences. There are research films showing—among many other things—a snake sloughing its skin, the behavior of fighting fish, the plaiting of a basket, festivities among the Indigenous people of the Highlands of Guatemala, cineradiographic investigations, and metal cutting steel, along with edited speeches of high-ranking German National Socialists and film documents recording the accounts of contemporary witnesses. Among the filmmakers—at that time mostly men—were renowned scientists and academics such as Konrad Lorenz, Otto Koenig, Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Karl von Frisch, Ludwig Prandtl, Gerhard Jeschke, and Hans Cürlis.
This Focus section reevaluates the vast collection of films from the IWF as source material for the history of science and offers a threefold contribution to the study of research films. First, it recasts the history of research films in terms of their institutionalization by focusing on the IWF. Second, it draws attention in particular to research films from a time not yet much attended to in scholarly work: from the 1920s and 1930s onwards. And third, it offers a new methodological approach to research film by looking for reuses of film and footage. The leading hypothesis for this Focus section is that research films cannot be understood at just one point in their existence; rather, we need to examine their making and their ongoing analogue as well as digital (re)cycles and reuses.
Scrutinizing the History of the Institute for Scientific Film
The IWF made a significant contribution to the institutionalization of scientific or, more precisely, research film in Germany and beyond. The origins of the IWF lay in the National Socialist Reich Office for Teaching Films (Reichsstelle für den Unterrichtsfilm [RfdU]), founded in 1934, later renamed the Reich Institute for Film and Images in Science and the Classroom (Reichsanstalt für Film und Bild in Wissenschaft und Unterricht [RWU]). While it was commonly asserted by chroniclers with a personal stake in the institution and former staff members of the RfdU/RWU that it did not collaborate with the National Socialists, both Dietrich Kuhlbrodt and the medical historian Ulf Schmidt criticized their texts for reproducing the “myth” of the institution as a “political oasis” in Nazi Germany.2 After 1945, the RWU was transformed, via complex institutional detours, into the Institute for Film and Image in Science and Education (Institut für Film und Bild in Wissenschaft und Unterricht [FWU]). The University Department of the trizonal FWU, headed by Gotthard Wolf, moved to Göttingen in 1949. From 1956 onward, the IWF finally acted as an independent institution.3
This act of institutionalization also involved the conceptualization and theorization of research film by the IWF: as early as 1952, Gotthard Wolf had founded the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC). It was set up as a world-spanning project to compile the “scientifically significant movement processes and behaviors of animals, plants, materials, and ultimately also of human beings.”4 The EC was subdivided into three sections: Biology (zoology, botany, microbiology), Technical Sciences, and Ethnology (ethnology and folklore studies). Movements that corresponded to the following categories were considered suitable subjects for EC films: processes too fast or slow for the human eye to perceive (e.g., plant growth); processes that should be compared with others (e.g., animal behavior); and processes “that will soon no longer be recordable”—including “ethnological movement sequences”—which should be filmed and made accessible before they disappeared entirely. Movements belonging to one or more of these categories (visibility, comparability, or “fixability”) were filmed, and the films were cut up into so-called smallest thematic units, representing the “inventory of movements” of—for example—an animal species. Thus, the question of how to do research with film was central for the IWF: the phenomena to be filmed were selected in accordance with the potential of film for scientific work—whether they were intended for an immediate or a future research purpose.
The EC was also a political project: having grown out of an institution close to the National Socialist ideology, the IWF wanted to show with its flagship project that Germany had learned from its painful past and could now be considered a reliable partner for science and research within the international scientific community. The knowledge formats of encyclopedias—seemingly ideology-free—and of research films—seemingly objective—served that purpose perfectly.
It is noteworthy that, despite this political dimension, the IWF has to date not been the subject of any comprehensive studies that go beyond the institute’s own publications or the writings of former employees.5 Nonetheless, the IWF has garnered some attention in some less comprehensive texts and in the art world in recent decades.6 The first and most persistent criticisms, expressed by folklore studies scholars, date back to the 1980s. Torsten Näser has shown in his power-analytical reflections on the IWF and the EC how those critical remarks described the institute’s approach to film as “reductionist,” “naïve,” or “rigid.”7 This criticism must be seen in the context of the discipline’s self-examination at that time. Another research approach that should be mentioned is Oliver Gaycken’s consideration of the EC as a filmic encyclopedia.8
Meanwhile, the ongoing processes of digitization and making the film collection available also raise demands for a critical reappraisal of the institute’s history, an effort to which this Focus section seeks to contribute.
Research Film
There is a very simple reason why we have chosen to use the term “research film” instead of “science film”: the language difference between German and English. While in the German language “science” comprises all academic disciplines, including the humanities, in English the differentiation between “science” and “humanities” is called out. However, the films discussed in this Focus section touch the sciences as well as the humanities. Not so simple is the question of what makes a film a research film.
Research film was often defined ahistorically, as in the case of Gotthard Wolf. Film was credited for its power to render visible things to which the human sensual apparatus has no access (mainly because they happen too fast or too slowly), to make comparison possible, and to preserve processes or phenomena that will likely soon cease to exist. In particular, fleeting phenomena that only film can capture in their quality of movement are mentioned in this context. In this and other comparable conceptions, the film equipment—whether analogue or digital—is an analytical instrument, and the darkroom or computer is the laboratory; the epistemic function of film remains essentially timeless.
In the recent history of science, research films have become objects of study in the context of their actual historical uses. Lisa Cartwright, Hannah Landecker, Jimena Canales, Janina Wellmann, Hanna Rose Shell, and Scott Curtis, among others, have drawn attention to film as a tool for doing research.9 They have excavated some examples of what are no doubt numerous uses of film in different sciences and discussed the extent to which a compatibility between film and scientific research exists. Instead of just collecting examples of the epistemological functions of film in a rather ahistorical way, however, they focused on the epistemological changes that the invention of film triggered in a given discipline. Landecker, for example, described the microcinematographic apparatus as “a kind of materialized epistemology” that constituted a distinct kind of cell biology focusing on behavior rather than structure.10 Cartwright, in turn, traced the production of a medical body that could be controlled and mastered by the cinematographic apparatus and the temporal and spatial decomposition thus made possible. Their studies and those of other scholars in the field are especially devoted to the period before World War I—and therefore to a time when film as a technical medium was being developed.11 That even led to a discussion as to whether there was a “cinematographic turn” around 1900.12 The interest in film as a scientific instrument followed in the footsteps of the practical turn of the 1970s and 1980s, when visualization became one of the central themes in the history of science. Numerous interdependencies between imaging processes and epistemology have since been discussed.13 At first, however, other forms of representation like maps, models, photographs, and diagrams came into view. Cartwright and her colleagues pointed out that scientists also made movies for conferences and lectures or worked with cinematography. Furthermore, they foregrounded the medium specificity of film and the question of what time-based media allow the scientist to do that other visualizations cannot.
This Focus section, in turn, carries forward these praxeological approaches to film but tries to go beyond them with regard to time span and epistemological interest. It extends the historical realm of the analysis and underlines the ongoing intertwinements of research and film after the early experimental phase of cinematography. After all, the invention of safety film and the increased accessibility (“democratization”) of cinematographic equipment for semi-professionals and amateurs since the 1920s and 1930s led to multiple uses and reuses of film in research. Moreover, the focus on the uses of film in the generation of scientific knowledge is expanded to include the ongoing reuses of research film and the question of why a particular film was not reused. Thus, in this Focus section research film is not necessarily predefined by its epistemological function, nor are its areas of application limited to the field or laboratory. Films can also become tools for research. Therefore, the contributions concentrate on films that were at some point part of a research process; they also avoid an antecedent demarcation between research and education, because even those research films that were produced to bring to light epistemic insights about the topic in question often had didactic purposes.14 In addition to its epistemological functions, there can be political, cultural, and other functions that make a film a research film.
Reuse and Recycling
Work in two fields of research has helped to develop the concept of reuse: found footage practices, as discussed in art and film history; and the interest in the circulation of knowledge and objects within science studies. Thus, it is a central aim of this Focus section to emphasize that procedures of montage, found footage appropriation, and format transfers were common not only in art films and contemporary video art but also with regard to research films. Or, as Oliver Gaycken puts it: film must be seen as a special and mobile form of scientific knowledge, moving through contexts.15
Recycling and reuse are well-known topoi in film studies and art history. We have seen an abundance of examples of repurposing film material in new works, usually categorized as found footage films. Avant-garde film, especially, has been analyzed since the 1930s for its reuses of all kinds of footage, crafting an entirely different visual experience through editing.16 Meanwhile, the concept of recycling has not been applied to research film, largely owing to a general lack of interest in research film within film studies. Until twenty years ago, “film” was more or less synonymous with “cinema.” Although the nontheatrical film and in particular the so-called useful film (Gebrauchsfilm) have increasingly come into focus since the 2000s, research films were—with some exceptions—left out of consideration.17 More attention was paid to films at the periphery of science, to films that were used in teaching or sex education or for popularizing science.18 Nonetheless, the centering of the utility value of film has generated new film historiographical methods that also guide this section’s approach: canon formation, work or reception studies, and author idolatry were no longer part of the program, replaced by a focus on locally situated performance contexts, uses made by and interpretations of those who handle and rehandle the film, and the technologies of circulation, distribution, and archiving.19
Lately, historians of science have become more interested in circulation, application, infrastructure, and public reception. These approaches diverge from concerns about the origin stories of a scientific instrument or epistemic tool and enrich our narratives of how scientific practices make a difference in society. This focus is not to be confused with the representation of science to the public. Instead, it is about the ways traces from research contexts find their way into other academic disciplines, into education and other realms of society. In particular, the comprehensive literature about the circulation of material objects used in research has emphasized that a focus on object mobilities often leads to questions about politics, economics, and global power differences, all of which are at work in the processes of disseminating knowledge.20 It appears that a focus on mobilities brings into view aspects that often remain obscured when we look merely at the production of knowledge: desires, hierarchies, and unconscious biases. This Focus section also aspires to uncover these aspects. By proposing “reuse” and “recycling” to describe knowledge circulations, we draw on existing concepts that have been established for other mediums and materials, such as object or image biographies, and that maintain the focus on individual objects.21 At the same time, reuse emphasizes the discontinuities and fractures in the history of research film, rather than focusing on linearity and continuities.22 Furthermore, the medium specificity of films is decisive. Film reels and filmstrips are material objects, but film is realized as a visual appearance only when screened. In addition, film is also tied to editing and narrativization. Looking at the ways in which research films (materially and visually) were reused (which is not the same as mobilized) allows us to determine where and when research eventually manifests itself in society. By pointing out the range of variations the same material can pass through over the course of its history, we aim to map the aesthetic, intermedial, and cultural-political transformations associated with the constant reuse and recycling practices of film more effectively. Therefore, the contributors to this Focus section ask how, why, and when the films left the laboratory and—if they did—how they were distributed, instrumentalized, handled, and reused outside the laboratory or how they eventually became part of teaching films, science communication films, experimental art films, feature films, and so forth.
The different case studies presented in this Focus section show how research films circulate through space and time—in their changing materiality (from 35-mm nitro-film to 16-mm safety film) and visuality (from a rough cut to reedited found footage) as well as their shifting epistemic functions (between measurement, research, teaching, and popularization). By linking the disciplines of media, film, and science history, as well as material culture studies, the contributions seek a better understanding of the multiple and subtle intertwinements between science, politics, economy, and the public sphere. We hope that developing a historical understanding of the many possible functions of films within research might help to clarify basic misunderstandings on the part of researchers working with film and on the part of audiences confronted with film as instruction, evidence, or truth.
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The first three contributions pay tribute to work with film in the laboratory and emphasize that a film never stands alone but is embedded in a range of intermedial translations as well as economic circumstances. Christian Reiß’s and Jesse Olszynko-Gryn’s essays focus on films of embryo development. One film was made in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, the other in Scotland in the 1950s. Both contributions start in the laboratory but point to the diverse financial prerequisites necessary for putting together material to produce a film that can be (re)used and distributed by institutions like the IWF or the film unit in Edinburgh. Sigrid Leyssen explores the history of reuse and remaking for stimulus demonstration practices and replication experiments in perception research in the 1970s and 1980s. With the example of an IWF remake of film materials from the Belgian experimental psychologist Albert Michotte, she shows that the concept of reusing film can be complemented by the concept of remaking, which differs from reuse in the way it incorporates the repetition of an activity or a process—whether in the same media or in others.
The next two contributions follow film production into the field and show how policies were negotiated through research films. Juliane Scholz addresses the animal–human relations in the famous ethological film work of Konrad Lorenz and therefore tells an institutional history of the IWF by means of one of the core figures in its early history. Torsten Näser presents the microhistory of a folkloristic film on finchers in rural Germany and uses it to negotiate the disciplinary politics of visual anthropology, the IWF’s institutional policies, and the intensifying critique of the IWF since the 1980s.
The following pieces, by Sarine Waltenspül and Anja Sattelmacher, look even more closely at the institutional history of the IWF and focus on those reuses that laid its foundation: film material produced or distributed during National Socialism. Waltenspül concentrates on the technical films Gotthard Wolf oversaw during World War II and presents the untold institutional prehistory of the IWF and especially of the EC. Sattelmacher pays close attention to the IWF’s reeditings of historical film documents from the Nazi era, in particular films about the zeppelin Hindenburg. She points out what was done to recontextualize these films and asks what would be needed to contextualize them properly in their latest reuse on the aforementioned TIB AV-Portal.
The last two contributions address different boundary crossings of laboratory films. Mario Schulze shows how a German laboratory film from the 1920s that served as a founding document of the IWF’s predecessor was reused in U.S. science education during the Cold War. He reflects on how and why films of experiments seemed particularly suitable for recruiting scientists in the race for military and technological superiority. Oliver Gaycken takes Gustav Deutsch’s compilation Film ist. as a point of departure to reflect on reuses of research films from the EC within art films. He points out that, thanks to its setup in a modular form, the EC was well positioned to supply examples for artistic film formats, such as the compilation film Deutsch dedicated his work to. Gaycken clarifies, in particular, that there was an aesthetic dimension inherent to the research films of the IWF that was ripe for appropriation by artists.
It needs to be stated that, unfortunately, the special case of colonial and ethnographic films is not examined in this Focus section, although it is addressed in current research.23
Finally, we want to note that this Focus section has been an experiment of sorts. We are attempting here to move scholarly engagement beyond the printed page. Readers will note that a still from the film under discussion appears at the beginning of each contribution. A link will provide access to either the TIB AV-Portal or the supplementary materials page on the University of Chicago Press website. In addition, we have included on the Press website a series of discussions by four scholars who work on film and science: Scott Curtis, Vinzenz Hediger, Anja Laukötter, and Hanna Rose Shell reflect on their personal experience with the reuse of film.24 We encourage readers to embrace the interwoven media and formats of this Focus section and visit the links as they read along.
Supplementary Essays
Beyond the IWF: Short Stories of Reused Research Films
In this section, we asked four experts and practitioners of scientific and experimental films to tell us a personal story about the reuse of a film of their choice. The contributors are Scott Curtis, Anja Laukötter, Vinzenz Hediger, and Hanna Rose Shell.
Notes
Anja Sattelmacher is a historian working on the border between the history of science and media. She currently holds a position as a research associate at the Humboldt University of Berlin in the Department of Media Studies. Her research and teaching interests include the history of scientific film, archival practices, media and disability studies, oral history, and the material culture of epistemic objects. She is working on a book project about the history of political education in (West) Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. Her recent book, Anschauen, Anfassen, Auffassen: Eine Wissensgeschichte Mathematischer Modelle (Springer, 2021), explores the history of knowledge and the practices of mathematical modeling in the long nineteenth century in Germany and France. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Musik- und Medienwissenschaften, Georgenstraße 47, 10117 Berlin, Germany; [email protected].
Mario Schulze is a postdoctoral researcher at the Zurich University of the Arts. His writings focus on the history of exhibitions in the twentieth century and on the visual history of science. He is the author of Wie die Dinge sprechen lernten: Eine Geschichte des Museumsobjektes, 1968–2000 (Transcript, 2017). Forschungsschwerpunkt Transdisziplinarität, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Pfingstweidstrasse 96, Postfach, 8031 Zurich, Switzerland; [email protected].
Sarine Waltenspül is a postdoctoral researcher at the Zurich University of the Arts and a lecturer in media studies at the University of Basel. She initiates and leads research projects dealing with the mediality of science and architecture, with a focus on film. She is writing the history of a scientific flow film, together with Mario Schulze, and works on the historical-critical reappraisal of the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica and on visual encyclopedias as knowledge formats. Forschungsschwerpunkt Transdisziplinarität, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Pfingstweidstrasse 96, Postfach, 8031 Zurich, Switzerland; [email protected].
1 Quirin Schiermeier, “Germany’s Institute for Scientific Film Could Face Final Curtain,” Nature, 1998, 391(6666):425.
2 For work that asserts the institution’s independence from National Socialism see Wolfgang Tolle, Reichsanstalt für Film und Bild in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (Berlin: Hoenemann, 1961); Malte Ewert, Die Reichsanstalt für Film und Bild in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 1934–1945 (Hamburg: Kovac, 1998); and Michael Kühn, Unterrichtsfilm im Nationalsozialismus: Die Arbeit der Reichsstelle für den Unterrichtsfilm/Reichsanstalt für Film und Bild in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (Mammendorf: Septem Artes, 1998). For criticism of the “political oasis” myth see Dietrich Kuhlbrodt, “Prima Klima: Dauerfaszinosum Nazi-Moderne: Zwei frisch gebackene Medienpädagogen schwärmen für Altbackenes,” Jungle.world, 1998, 21:16; and Ulf Schmidt, Medical Films, Ethics, and Euthanasia in Nazi Germany: The History of Medical Research and Teaching Films in the Reich Office for Educational Films/Reich Institute for Films in Science and Education, 1933–1945 (Husum: Matthiesen, 2002).
3 See Ewert, Die Reichsanstalt für Film und Bild in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 1934–1945, pp. 233–234; Kühn, Unterrichtsfilm im Nationalsozialismus, pp. 235–238; and Schmidt, Medical Films, Ethics, and Euthanasia in Nazi Germany, pp. 275–284.
4 This and the following citations are taken from Gotthard Wolf, Der wissenschaftliche Dokumentationsfilm und die Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (Berlin: Springer, 1967), pp. 25–39. Here and throughout this essay, translations into English are our own unless otherwise indicated.
5 Werner Große, Filme für die Wissenschaft: Die Epoche des wissenschaftlichen Films in Göttingen (Göttingen: Göttinger Tageblatt, 2012).
6 Andreas Bunte, Suspended Duration (Berlin: Argobooks, 2016); Gustav Deutsch, Film ist. (1998), found footage film; Christoph Keller, Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (2001), found footage video installation; and Ramón Reichert, “Ein Archiv der Macht: Die Encyclopaedia Cinematographica,” Die Maske: Zeitschrift für Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie, 2009, 4:52–55.
7 Torsten Näser, “Das Filmarchiv (von IWF und EC): Eine macht-analytische Nachlese,” in Fotografie und Film im Archiv: Sammeln, Bewahren, Erforschen, ed. Irene Ziehe and Ulrich Hägele (Münster: Waxmann, 2013), pp. 115–128, esp. p. 116. This essay cites critical comments by Werner Petermann, “Geschichte des ethnographischen Films: Ein Überblick,” in Die Fremden sehen: Ethnologie und Film, ed. Margarete Friedrich, Almut Hagemann-Doumbia, Reinhard Kapfer, Petermann, Ralph Thoms, and Marie-José van de Loo (Munich: Trickster, 1984), pp. 17–53, on p. 17 (“reductionist”); Michael Böhl, Entwicklung des ethnographischen Films: Die filmische Dokumentation als ethnographisches Forschungs- und universitäres Unterrichtsmittel in Europa (Göttingen: Herodot, 1985), p. 90 (“naïve”); Edmund Ballhaus, “Rede und Antwort: Antwort oder Rede? Interviewformen im kulturwissenschaftlichen Film,” in Interview und Film: Volkskundliche und ethnologische Ansätze zu Methodik und Analyse, ed. Joachim Wossidlo and Ulrich Roters (Münster: Waxmann, 2003), pp. 11–49, on p. 14 (“rigid”); and Pierrine Saini and Thomas Schärer, Das Wissen der Hände: Die Filme der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde, 1960–1990 (Münster: Waxmann, 2019).
8 Oliver Gaycken, “A Cinema of Living Facts: The Encyclopaedia Cinematographica’s Archives of Movement,” lecture, MITH, 3 Mar. 2016, https://vimeo.com/160910997#t=1650s (accessed 23 Oct. 2020).
9 Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: Univ. Minneapolis Press, 1995); Hannah Landecker, “Microcinematography and the History of Science and Film,” Isis, 2006, 97:121–132; Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second: A History (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2009); Janina Wellmann, “Science and Cinema,” Science in Context, 2011, 24:311–328; Hanna Rose Shell, “Cinehistory and Experiments on Film,” Journal of Visual Culture, 2014, 11:288–306; and Scott Curtis, The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2015).
10 Hannah Landecker, “Creeping, Drinking, Dying: The Cinematic Portal and the Microscopic World of the Twentieth-Century Cell,” Sci. Context, 2011, 24:381–416, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889711000160, on p. 381.
11 See the sources cited in note 9, above. For biology see Tania Munz, “Die Ethologie des wissenschaftlichen Cineasten: Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz und das Verhalten der Tiere im Film,” montage AV, 2005, 14(2):52–68; and Munz, The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Honeybee Language (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2016). For medical sciences see Jesse Olszynko-Gryn and Patrick Ellis, “‘A Machine for Recreating Life’: An Introduction to Reproduction on Film,” British Journal for the History of Science, 2017, 50:383–409; Oliver Gaycken, Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015); and Anja Laukötter, Politik im Kino: Eine Emotions- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte des Sexualaufklärungsfilms im 20. Jahrhundert (Habilitation treatise, Humboldt Univ. Berlin, 2019). Exceptions are very rare. Munz also writes about Lorenz. See also Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa, “From Cage to Classroom: Animal Testing and Behaviorist Educational Film,” Film History, 2018, 30(4):127–154; Antoine Prévost-Balga, “Atomic Explosion Stopped at Millionths of a Second: Media Microtemporalities and Time Synchronisation,” Cinergie—Il Cinema e le Altre Arti, 2020, 9(17):173–182, https://doi.org/10.6092/ISSN.2280-9481/10328; and Alison Winter, “Screening Selves: Sciences of Memory and Identity on Film, 1930–1960,” History of Psychology, 2004, 7:367–401.
12 The term was coined in Jimena Canales, “Photogenic Venus: The ‘Cinematographic Turn’ and Its Alternatives in Nineteenth-Century France,” Isis, 2002, 93:585–613. See also the discussion in “Science and Cinema,” special issue, Sci. Context, 2016, 24(3).
13 For a comprehensive overview of the literature see Klaus Hentschel, Visual Cultures in Science and Technology (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014).
14 For further distinctions between the different kinds of scientific films see Christian Bonah, David Cantor, and Anja Laukötter, eds., Health Education Films in the Twentieth Century (Melton: Boydell & Brewer, 2018).
15 Gaycken, “Cinema of Living Facts” (cit. n. 8).
16 Christa Blümlinger, Kino aus zweiter Hand: Zur Ästhetik materieller Aneignung im Film und in der Medienkunst (Berlin: Vorwerk, 2009); Gabriele Jutz, Cinéma brut: Eine alternative Genealogie der Filmavantgarde (Vienna: Springer, 2010); and William Charles Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993).
17 Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, eds., Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press, 2009); Yvonne Zimmermann, ed., Schaufenster Schweiz: Dokumentarische Gebrauchsfilme 1896–1964 (Zurich: Limmat, 2011); and Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson, eds., Useful Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2011). Exceptions are Hediger, ed., “Gebrauchsfilm 1,” special issue, montage AV, 2005, 14(2); and Hannes Rickli, ed., Videograms: The Pictorial Worlds of Biological Experimentation as an Object of Art and Theory (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2011).
18 On films used in teaching see Geoff Alexander, Academic Films for the Classroom: A History (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010); Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible, eds., Learning with the Lights Off (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012); Timothy Boon, Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television (London: Wallflower, 2008); Gaycken, Devices of Curiosity (cit. n. 11); and Fernando Vidal, “Introduction: From ‘The Popularization of Science through Film’ to ‘The Public Understanding of Science,’” Sci. Context, 2018, 31(1):1–14, https://doi.org/10.1017/S026988971800008X.
19 Ziehe and Hägele, eds., Fotografie und Film im Archiv (cit. n. 7); and Gregg Mitman and Kelley Wilder, eds., Documenting the World (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2016). It has to be said that since there is still a reluctance to consider research films as cultural or scientific heritage, little has been done in the way of systematic research on the material provenance of films. See Anna Bohn, Denkmal Film, 3 vols. (Vienna: Böhlau, 2013).
20 For a literature review on mobilities of objects see Christian Vogel and Manuela Bauche, “Mobile Objekte: Einleitung,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2016, 39:299–310, https://doi.org/10.1002/bewi.201601813.
21 Lorraine Daston, ed., Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2000); and Michael Hagner, Claudio Pogliano, and Renato Mazzolini, eds., “Biographies of Scientific Images,” special issue, Nuncius, 2009, 24(2).
22 See Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül, “Follow the Films! Reuses of a Research Film,” in Trajectories of Images, ed. Olga Moskatova (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2021).
23 See, among many others, Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe, eds., Empire and Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Katherine Groo, Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early Archive (Minneapolis: Univ. Minnesota Press, 2018). Despite intensive efforts, we were not able to find ethnologists who were inclined to write about the non-European IWF films. This is particularly unfortunate in light of demands for the decolonization of history and the present.
24 Their contributions can be found as supplementary material: Scott Curtis, Vinzenz Hediger, Anja Laukötter, and Hanna Rose Shell.
