The Origins of Scientific Cinematography: Early Applications

"Early Applications" is the conclusion to historian Virgilio Tosi's three-part educational series that accompanies his book "Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography". The series chronologically covers, first, the chronophotography of Jules Janssen, Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey in "The Pioneers" and, second, those who followed up on that work in much the same vein during the evolution of cinematography in "Technical Developments Around the Turn of the Century". "Early Applications" shows the films produced by what everyone would recognize as "cinecameras" and by aid of special recording techniques.

The first films shown are pleasant enough: time-lapse photography of the growth of plants. These studies of plant movement were made from 1898-1900 by Wilhelm Pfeffer and are similar to the probably better-known films (at least among early cinema buffs who've seen them on home video collections or on the web) of F. Percy Smith ("The Birth of a Flower" (1910)) or the hand-colored films from the Pathé studio in the 1910s. Then, there's some microbial photography and high-speed photography of biological and physiological interest. After that, some of the films may be potentially unsettling for some viewers. They include locomotion studies of sometimes ill and otherwise disabled people and dogs; early 20th-Century surgery procedures on a lung cyst, the separation of conjoined twins and a leg amputation; and films of people being X-rayed, which is only disturbing if you think about the fact that the X-rays are medically unnecessary, and the subjects are unprotected from the radiation. (Although today's fee-for-service healthcare doesn't help any in this regard, either, but I digress.) Ballistic studies, animated geometry lessons and ethnological records round out the program, including finishing with a 1908 talkie of "Bushman Speaks into the Phonograph".