Beautifully Disturbing

developed motion pictures in the 1870s as a means to study animal movement and the technology soon became a staple of scientific research (Tosi 39, 46).For biologists and medical researchers, motion pictures represented an opportunity to study "life" as opposed to learning from death (Curtis).For most of the nineteenth century the study of microscopic structures and microbes relied on fixed histological slides.With advances in tissue culturing and growing evidence for the germ theory of disease at the end of the century, biologists began asking questions about cellular functions, processes and behaviours (Landecker "Creeping").These new questions required techniques for observing movement rather than static representations, so biologists began attaching movie cameras to microscopes.Temporality was central to rapid development of microcinematography at the beginning of the twentieth century.Scientists often combined the use of microscopes with cinematic techniques for manipulating time such as slow motion and time-lapse photography (Landecker "Microcinematography" 121-122).The same elements that rendered microcinematography scientifically usefulextreme magnification, temporal manipulation, and the ability to reveal movementare also what provided these films with entertainment value for lay audiences.Gunning describes early cinema's fascination with images as the "cinema of attractions."According to Gunning, the earliest filmmakers were still discovering cinema's capabilities.The technology's novelty was more important than narrative to audiences, so filmmakers focused on what they could show instead of what they could tell (382).Microcinematography, in particular, was a major source of scientific spectacle for early entertainment films (Gaycken 5).For movie audiences, scientific research films showing x-rays of a frog's leg or a virus attacking red corpuscles were no less magical than the trick cinematographic work of George Mlis.In addition, Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch and other scientists had provided convincing evidence for the germ theory of disease in the later parts of the nineteenth century.One upshot of the public acceptance of germ theory was the frightening realization that microbes were everywhere.Microcinematography allowed audiences to see this hidden microbial world, by making the invisible visible (Ostherr 2-3).Gaycken shows that films featuring microorganisms, such as documentary film pioneer Charles Urban 's Typhoid Fever Germs (1905), were popular because they invoked simultaneous reactions of attraction and repulsion.Audiences could marvel at the previously invisible wriggling, writhing aliens that lived around them, on them and in them.Yet, these films were also frightening because of the role these microscopic monsters played in disease.Although this story may be apocryphal, one of the first acts of film censorship involved Urban's The Cheese Mites (1903) where the normally invisible mites from a piece of Stilton cheese were made to look like alien invaders

Art · Literature · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

• Cinematic Prophylaxis

  Kirsten Ostherr•Cinematic Prophylaxis•2005

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• Creeping, Drinking, Dying

  Open Access•H Landecker•Science in Context•2011

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• Microcinematography and the History of Science and Film

  H Landecker•Isis•2006

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