The Origins of Scientific Cinematography: Technical Developments Around the Turn of the Century

"Technical Developments Around the Turn of the Century" is the second part of Virgilio Tosi's three-part educational series on the origins of scientific films, which accompanies his book "Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography". In the first part, "The Pioneers", he covered the first chronophotographers Jules Janssen, Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. Here, he gives a brief overview of those who followed in their footsteps. There's French medical researcher Albert Londe, French General Hippolyte Sébert, German photographer Ottomar Anschütz, German gymnastics professor Ernst Kohlrausch, Marey's former assistants Georges Demeny, Lucien Bull and Pierre Nogues, and Austrian zoologist Robert J. Lendlmayer von Lendenfeld.

I'd never heard of most of these men before, and at least some of them surely aren't of much interest to those not studying chronophotography or the origins of scientific filmmaking. Anschütz and Demeny, however, are especially intriguing figures in the development of cinema as a commercial medium, as well as a scientific one. And, besides, the demonstrations of the camera and projection inventions of these men, as well as animations of their sequential photographs makes whatever distinctions some make between chronophotography and cinematography seem pointlessly arbitrary for most purposes. (By the way, "chronophotography" was coined by Marey before the Lumières invention popularized terms stemming from "cinema".) They also support Tosi's thesis that cinematography was not born as spectacle, but rather out of the needs of scientific research. Even those like Muybridge, Anschütz and Demeny who turned it into spectacle or explored commercial avenues, began with more purely scientific aims funded by either rich patrons (in Muybridge's case) or government institutions (for most others).

Londe photographed the abnormal movements of disabled medical patients (often nude) for a hospital. As Tosi says in his book, Londe was "in some senses a true disciple of Marey". The most common photograph of Londe at work, as shown in this documentary and in the book, also shows Marey sitting nearby. Although they shared a devotion to scientific rigor, Londe's cameras with multiple lenses were quite different from the single-lens cameras of Marey--but similar to the designs by others. One animation shown here from Londe is of more entertainment interest, of a female tightrope walker.

Sébert is barely mentioned here or in Tosi's book. All of his images shown here are of the launching of torpedoes. He also used a multi-lens apparatus.

Likewise, Anschütz worked as a military photographer, where he recorded horses and riders to aid in training (see "Pferd und Reiter Springen über ein Hindernis"). He was more of an artistic photographer, however, like Muybridge. He also tried to industrially commercialize his chronophotography and invented various machines for home and public use that reproduced the illusion of motion from either disks or strips, in the tradition of the optical toys the Phenakistiscope and the Zoetrope. Tosi covers a bit of this, but it's largely outside of his topic. The authority on Anschütz's career is Deac Rossell, such as with his monograph "Ottomar Anschütz and His Electrical Wonder", as well as his book "Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies" and various essays.

Tosi says that Kohlrausch was an academic and what today would be termed a sports physiologist. His odd wheel camera is an interesting sight. Because the wheel brought each glass plate before the same optical axis, it allowed him to record from a single point of view without the parallax effect that'd occur from multiple cameras or lens setups. One of the animations of his work is a double exposure showing two positions of the legs of an athlete as he balances on bars. Rossell has also written on the work of Kohlrausch ("Ernst Kohlrausch: A Forgotten Pioneer of Chronophotography") and about his success in projection, which Tosi doesn't mention. Thus, although you wouldn't know it from reading most film history books, four of these chronophotographers (Marey, Demeny, Kohlrausch and Anschütz) beat the Lumière brothers and others to first reproducing the illusion of photographic motion on the screen--and at least Demeny and Anschütz did so in front of the public. Muybridge and others did, as well, but usually with drawn animation.

Like Kohlrausch, Demeny was also a pioneer in physical education, and like Anschütz, he tried his hand at business. From 1881 to 1894, he was Marey's assistant at the Physiological Station near Paris. A project for the education of the deaf and mute led him to try to sell his peephole and projection devices. Later, he improved Marey's camera with a beater mechanism for intermittent movement and worked for Gaumont, which with Demeny's patents, became one of the biggest movie studios in the world (see "Je vous aime" (1891)).

Former assistants to Marey, Bull and Nogues, and the zoologist von Lendenfeld all worked in high-speed cinematography. Bull and von Lendenfeld both filmed microscopic images of the flight of insects and could record at rates up to 2000 frames per second. (Stephen Herbert of the Victorian Cinema website says that by 1924 Bull could reach even 100,000 images per second!) Animations from Bull of soap bubbles exploded by small projectiles are especially interesting. Nogues filmed from 240 to 300 frames per second with his cameras. The films of his shown are of the flight of birds and of gymnastics acts, which seems an appropriate conclusion to this entry given that those were favorite topics of Marey, too, whose work--although discussed in the first part of this series and not here--was evidently of pervasive influence in chronophotography and early scientific filmmaking.