This issue of Science in Context is dedicated to the question of whether there was a “cinematographic turn” in the sciences around the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1895, the Lumière brothers presented their projection apparatus to the Parisian public for the first time. In 1897, the Scottish medical doctor John McIntyre filmed the movement of a frog's leg; in Vienna, in 1898, Ludwig Braun made film recordings of the contractions of a living dog's heart (cf. Cartwright 1992); in 1904, Lucien Bull filmed in slow motion a bullet entering a soap bubble. In 1907 and 1908, respectively, Max Seddig and Victor Henri recorded Brownian motion with the help of a cinematograph (Curtis 2005). In 1909, the Swiss Julius Ries was one of the first to film fertilization and cell division in sea urchins (Ries 1909). In that same year in Paris, Louise Chevroton and Frédéric Vlès used a film camera to observe cell division in the same object (Chevroton and Vlès 1909). As early as 1898, the Parisian surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen began filming several of his operations, among them the spectacular separation of the Siamese twins Doodica and Radica (Bonah and Laukötter 2009). And in England, the scientist and zoologist Francis Martin Duncan produced an array of popular-scientific films for Charles Urban: “The unseen world: A series of microscopic studies” was presented to the public in the Alhambra Theatre in London for the first time in 1903 (see Gaycken in this issue).

In 1895 when the Lumière brothers unveiled their cinematographic camera, many scientists were elated. Scientists hoped that the machine would fulfill a desire that had driven research for nearly half a century: that of capturing the world in its own image. But their elation was surprisingly short-lived, and many researchers quickly distanced themselves from the new medium. The cinematographic camera was soon split into two machines, one for recording and one for projecting, enabling it to further escape from the laboratory. The philosopher Henri Bergson joined scientists, such as Etienne-Jules Marey, who found problems with the new cinematographic order. Those who had worked to make the dream come true found that their efforts had been subverted. This essay focuses on the desire to build a cinematographic camera, with the purpose of elucidating how dreams and reality mix in the development of science and technology. It is about desired machines and their often unexpected results. The interplay between what “is” (the technical), what “ought” (the ethical), and what “could” be (the fantastical) drives scientific research.

Discussions of the scientific uses of moving-image technologies have emphasized applications that culminated in static images, such as the chronophotographic decomposition of movement into discrete and measurable instants. The projection of movement, however, was also an important capability of moving-image technologies that scientists employed in a variety of ways. Views through the microscope provide a particularly sustained and prominent instance of the scientific uses of the moving image. The category of “education” subsumes theses various scientific uses, providing a means by which to bridge the cultures of scientific and popular scientific moving images.

Film scholars have long posed the question of the specificity of the film medium and the apparatus of cinema, asking what is unique to cinema, how it constrains and enables filmmakers and audiences in particular ways that other media do not. This question has rarely been considered in relation to scientific film, and here it is posed within the specific context of cell biology: What does the use of time-based media such as film coupled with the microscope allow scientists to experience that other visualization practices do not? Examining three episodes in the twentieth-century study of the cell, this article argues that the apparatus of microcinematography constitutes what might be thought of as a technical portal to another world, a door that determines the experience of the world that lies on the other side of it. In this case, the design of apparatuses to capture time-lapsed images enabled the acceleration of cellular time, bringing it into the realm of human perception and experience. Further, the experience of the cellular temporal world was part of a distinct kind of cell biology, one that was focused on behavior rather than structure, focused on the relation between cells, and between the cell and its milieu rather than on cell-intrinsic features such as chromosomes or organelles. As such, the instruments and technical design of the microcinematographic apparatus may be understood as a kind of materialized epistemology, the history of which can elucidate how cinema was and is used to produce scientific knowledge.

From 1924 to 1948, developmental psychologist Arnold Gesell regularly used photographic and motion picture technologies to collect data on infant behavior. The film camera, he said, records behavior “in such coherent, authentic and measurable detail that . . . the reaction patterns of infant and child become almost as tangible as tissue.” This essay places his faith in the fidelity and tangibility of film, as well as his use of film as evidence, in the context of developmental psychology's professed need for legitimately scientific observational techniques. It also examines his use of these same films as educational material to promote his brand of scientific child rearing. But his analytic techniques – his methods of extracting data from the film frames – are the key to understanding the complex relationship between his theories of development and his chosen research technology.

This essay considers the work of projection and the hand of the projectionist as important components of the social space of the cinema as it comes into being in the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. I bring the concept of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the place of the body as an entity that applies itself to the world “like a hand to an instrument” into a discussion of the pre-cinematic projector as an instrument that we can interpret as evidence of the experience of the work of the projectionist in the spirit of film theory and media archaeology, moving work on instrumentation in a different direction from the analysis of the work of the black box in laboratory studies. Projection is described as a psychological as well as a mechanical process. It is suggested that we interpret the projector not simply in its activity as it projects films, but in its movement from site to site and in the workings of the hand of its operator behind the scenes. This account suggests a different perspective on the cinematic turn of the nineteenth century, a concept typically approached through the study of the image, the look, the camera, and the screen.