THE FUTURE OF CINEMA IS IN INTERSECTION WITH THE

FUTURE OF SCIENCE

Andrijana Krmar

Universidade Lusfona de Humanidades e Tecnologias

Film and Media Arts Department

December 24, 2016.

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ABSTRACT

Science may seem inaccessible and complex to non-scientists and art can seem unachievable and
daunting to scientists. Even today, art and science are often defined in opposition to each other:
one involves the creation of individual aesthetic objects, and the other the discovery of general
laws of nature. One thing is for sure, artists and scientists have always been linked, on a
fundamental level, by their confidence on creative thinking. Although science and art each
embrace diverse and wide-ranging interests, I believe that the two disciplines share fundamental
will to enhance human understanding and to extend our experience of the world. A motivating
factor of both art and science is a desire for the pleasure of understanding something new and of
communicating this to others. This papers aim is to go through some of the earliest film theories
that underline the unbreakable connection between film as a form of art and scientific research.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract..2

Table of contents....3

Position statement......4

Theories of linkage throughout history......5

Conclusion.8

References.9

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 POSITION STATEMENT

Quests in both film and sciences are strongly influenced by the emotions of the individuals who
undertake them, as well as by numerous social and aesthetic influences. Creativity is one of the
common drives of all human beings, and its importance in scientific work, art work and in the
evolution of modern society in general must never be forgotten. In order to discover new things
science and film must work together, hand in hand. In todays world, the merging has become
more obvious, some filmmakers have begun to study and employ the concepts, tools, and
contexts of scientific and technological research, and advances in technology increasingly allow
the filmmakers to operate outside the conventions of traditional practice. I strongly believe that,
during the 21st century, this trend will continue to evolve and become more widespread, leading
to new techniques and materials and new aesthetic perspectives that will be used to channel
filmmakers unique conceptual experiences of the world.

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 THEORIES OF LINKAGE THROUGHOUT HISTORY

Cellular tissue is more native to the camera than the atmospheric landscape of the soulful
portrait.

-Benjamin Walter-

The writings of Sergei Eisenstein theorize the single shot as a montage cell, which is
nothing more than a static element. Just as cells divide to promote growth of a structure so do
shots form montage in order to create art. According to Emile Vuillermoz, living cell and the film
cell seem to merge: Hundreds of little fragments of exposed film are there in front of the
authorThe artist will work patiently at juxtaposing, overlapping, paralleling, and opposing all
these living cells. Jean Epstein stated what seems as unrealistic metaphorical connection
between seeing life at a microscopic level and seeing through a camera: We skim over the
teeming substance of life. The camera has uncovered that cell-life of the vital issues in which all
great events are ultimately conceived; for the greatest landslide is only the aggregate of the
movements of single particles. Therefore, the shot is a cell, montage is an organism formed by
cell division and filmmaking is a form of embryogenesis. In Theory of Film: The Redemption of
Physical Reality, Siegfried Kracauer suggests that in its preoccupation with the small the cinema
is comparable to science because like science, it breaks down material phenomena in tiny
particles, by that sensitizing us to the huge energies accumulated in the microscopic
configurations of matter. For Kracauer, the camera affords access not to any physical reality but
also to the reality of another dimension, a phrase Kracauer takes from Epstein. Kracauers
analogy between cinematic and scientific indicates that this metaphors are not based on
comparing film and scientific objects (artistic film and molecule) but on the comparing which
comes within the same mediumof artistic film and scientific film. As Jean Painleve
recognized, It would never have occurred to the pioneers of cinema to dissociate research on
film from research by means of film. Experiments in perceiving life with technical

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manipulations of space, time, light, and framing generated new ideas of what film was or could
be (from film cell to living cell).

What Kracauer thought through is the critical mobilization of scientific film in the early
twentieth century as a mode of understanding the characteristics and possibilities of film in
general. Writers thinking through the relations of parts and wholes in terms of shots and frames,
montages and narratives, looked to scientific techniques of decomposition and synthesis as
demonstrated in scientific films as a mode of articulating and theorizing the specificity of the
film medium. In particular, they looked at these techniques in relation to the visualization of life
over time, and this was a way of articulating the specificity of the power of the film medium to
depict life as such. Kracauer stated that the medium showed characteristics inherent in the
scientific approach, particularly characteristics of analytic decomposition of wholes, did not by
any means then restrict the sense of what nonscientists could do with the medium. Epstein,
himself originally trained in medicine, stated that cinema was a hermaphrodite whose sex had
turned out to be art, not science. But this did not stop him from using bacteriological and
molecular metaphors to theorize photogenie (Photogenie in short, according to Epstein, refers to
any subject (things, beings, souls) whose moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduction.)
and the character of the close-up or from using these techniques in his own filmmaking. Having
reestablished the sense that these diverse metaphors in the writings of diverse authors are
generated not by comparisons between avant-garde or artistic film and abstract scientific
concepts of the cell or molecule but by comparisons between films of the macroscopic world and
films of the microscopic one, what then should be done with this knowledge? Dulac, Kracauer,
and Bazin thought that scientists, who were simply engaged in finding things out or making
things, by accident left in the wake of their rational and real an inexhaustible remainder of the
irrational and surreal. Such a conclusion now seems untenable. The most absolute proscription
of aesthetic intentions noted by Bazin and others is itself a historically specific aesthetic of
objectivity. Comandon and Carrels films were built with strong aesthetic and philosophical
intent, were carefully edited, and had quite distinct narrative shape, either implicit in the films
form, or explicit in accompanying lectures and texts. These films were stories of scientific
investigation and dramas of infection, survival, and life. In his book Ideas: General Introduction
to Pure Phenomenology (1931) Edmund Husserl defines phenomenology as a descriptive
analysis of the essence of pure consciousness. Husserl defines pure or transcendental

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phenomenology as an a priori science (a science of essential being). He distinguishes between
pure phenomenology and empirical psychology (and between transcendental and psychological
subjectivity), saying that phenomenology is a science of essences, while psychology is a science
of the facts of experience. Yuri Tsivian sees science as part of the cinematic text, of early film.
Furthermore, Tsivian argues, these early microscopic and X-ray films were incorporated into
criticism and film making. Their representation of the normally unseen, the very small and the
interior of the body, generated a concept of penetrating vision that was reappropriated
metaphorically into techniques such as the dissolve by writers and directors biased toward
artistic experiment.

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 CONCLUSION

The relationship between science and art is clearly inseparable from its broader context
and is dependent on changing individual and collective social and cultural values. Although it
may be true that, of necessity, science tends more towards the objective and analytical and art
tends more towards the subjective, both artists and scientists must actually move between
concept and experience, and therefore between the subjective and the objective. This
correspondence between the two disciplines is illustrated by the fact that artists can sometimes
reach the same conclusions as scientists, even though these conclusions may be arrived at by
different means and for a different purpose. For example, at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, Goethe noticed that the nature of colour is influenced by the viewer - an observation
that, one hundred and fifty years later, was also made by scientists. Therefore, the linkage
between the art and film must not be so easily overlooked.

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 REFFERENCES:

1. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W.

Adorno (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism) Paperback October 4, 2011.
by Miriam Bratu Hansen (Author), Edward Dimendberg (Editor)

2. Cellular Features: Microcinematography and Film Theory Article in Critical Inquiry

June 2005, Hannah Landecker

3. Ideas : general introduction to pure phenomenology by Edmund Husserl, 1931, First

published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

4. Film Form: Essays in Film TheoryMar 19, 1969,by Sergei Eisenstein and Jay Leyda