© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
Wonders of cinematic abstraction: J. C. Mol and the aesthetic experience of science film
In this article, the example of the Dutch science filmmaker Jan Cornelis Mol (1891-1954) offers the point of departure for a general reflection on the history of experimental cinema and the meanings of aesthetic experience and imagination in documentary representation, film theories, and the avant-garde manifestos of the 1920s. Mol's films illuminate the fascination with space-time abstraction and visualised rhythm that unifies the practice of science film and avant-garde cinema in that era. Mol's work in the 1920s—films classified as amateur, science, educational, industrial, and avant-garde—is a remarkably broad representation of the multiple facets of experimental cinema. In the context of considering Mol's work, this essay also provides a brief reassessment of classical film theory, including the predominant ideas of aesthetic experience and cinema as a time-based medium. Mol's films express a passion for science and nature, which in turn coincides with his strong interest in camera optics and cinematic perception. His focus on the possibilities and limitations of filmic representation corresponds with related conceptions and experiments of visualised rhythm and manipulated views. Rather than suggesting all-embracing notions of ‘perceptual modes in the modern era,’ the discussion here will centre on some highlights within a shifting landscape of visual technology and cinematic practice.
Nature au naturel, full of flies, mosquitoes, mud, rats, and cockroaches, is incompatible with refined pleasures such as bodily hygiene and elegance of dress.1The principal character of Mario Vargas Llosa's novel, Don Rigoberto, is a proud homo urbanis who frowns in disdain at the mere idea of nature ‘in the raw’. Mediated through the artist's temperament, however, nature is transformed, and he comes to worship the sunflowers and wheatfields that ‘distil their golden honey into the canvases of van Gogh’.2 Similarly, a microscopic view of a chemical substance or the cinematic rendering of a growing plant may transform unassuming entities in nature into spectacular objects. In classical film theory, the genre of science film has been almost entirely omitted, and few scholars have associated the aesthetic pleasure of moving images or the imaginary realm of cinema with science film and related documentary fields of filmmaking. Science film is marked by the epistemological drive of educational cinema, a film culture considered incompatible with the production and reception of film as art. However, science film represents a context in which film experiments challenge the limits of natural perception and whose amateur innovations have contributed greatly to the history of experimental cinema.
Don Rigoberto's celebration of nature mediated and transformed into visual art may indeed apply to the experiments of science film, although they were rarely intended as imaginative abstractions of the real. The work by Dutch photo amateur and public lecturer Jan Cornelis Mol (1891–1954) exemplifies the important presence of both science film and amateur film in the history of experimental cinema – a historiography traditionally dedicated to the formal achievements of films canonized within the designation ‘avant-garde’. In the beginning of the 1920s, Mol started to experiment with cinematography as a tool for scientific inquiry. While Don Rigoberto's loathing of nature appears to be the opposite of the scientist's obsession with natural phenomena, aesthetic experience does apply to Mol's cinema, although the creative transformations found in his work also result from the technological achievements of camera perception and editing.
Mol's numerous contributions to journals of amateur photography and film testify to his fascination with visual technologies and camera perception. He was thrilled by techniques with which to screen processes invisible to the human eye.3 Films such as Ontlukeinele bloemen/Opening Flower (1928) and Van bol tot bloem/From Bulb to Flower (1931) illuminate the fact that, in educational, industrial and science films, we may indeed have an aesthetic experience. Moreover, manipulated views of flowers sprouting and dying offer a filmic counterpart to today's digital morphing, where a natural process has been temporally compressed into a screen event at once comprehensive and uncanny. Mol's films explore the space–time relationship of moving images beyond notions of realism and narration, and the magic of these screen events resides in the play with documentation and abstraction of a pro-filmic realm.
Uit het rijk der kristallen/From the Domain of Crystals (1928) shows chemical substances abstracted by microcinematography into a metamorphosis of sparkling crystals (figure 1). In 1929, at the invitation of Abel Gance, this film was shown at an avant-garde theatre in Paris, where it was referred to as the latest craze of ‘cinéma pur’. This screening also established Mol as a celebrated member of the Dutch Filmliga – the avant-garde association of Joris Ivens and other Dutch filmmakers initiated in Amsterdam two years earlier. The unlikely event of an amateur filmmaker and science lecturer entering the highbrow context of avant-garde art reminds us that the usual distinction between art cinema and science film did not apply to the film experiments of the 1920s.
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In this article, the example of J. C. Mol offers the point of departure for a general reflection on the history of experimental cinema and the meanings of aesthetic experience and imagination in documentary representation, film theories and the avant-garde manifestos of the 1920s. Mol's films illuminate the fascination with space–time abstraction and visualized rhythm that unifies the practice of science film and avant-garde cinema in that era.4
Mol's work in the 1920s – films classified as amateur, science, educational, industrial and avant-garde – is a remarkably broad representation of the multiple facets of experimental cinema. In the context of considering Mol's work, this essay also provides a brief reassessment of classical film theory, including the predominant ideas of aesthetic experience and cinema as a time-based medium. Mol's films express a passion for science and nature, which in turn coincides with his strong interest in camera optics and cinematic perception. His focus on the possibilities and limitations of filmic representation corresponds with related conceptions and experiments of visualized rhythm and manipulated views. Rather than suggesting all-embracing notions of ‘perceptual modes in the modern era’, the discussion here will centre on some highlights within a shifting landscape of visual technology and cinematic practice.
To begin, it is important to emphasize how and why the cinematographic achievement of photo amateur and science lecturer J. C. Mol fits into the scholarly debate on film aesthetics and experimental cinema, which traditionally has a narrow conception of art cinema and the related canon of avant-garde films. The history of experimental film has often been subsumed under or equated with the history of avant-garde cinema, that is, ‘the artists in each period have been reified as knights of film art, fighting heroically, individually, only loosely bound together in a movement at the level of distribution, exhibition, and reception’.5 The present account of Mol's work – representing a single corpus of films achieved outside a commercial film industry – would seem to support this way of thinking, but for Mol, cinema was primarily a scientific and pedagogical means of research and education. His film experiments grew out of an amateur's will to master technology and control production and screening.6
Reviewing Mol's films, it is nevertheless striking how his elaborate experiments parallel avant-garde projects of that era. Both science film and art cinema provided conceptual inquiries into camera optics and the space–time malleability of moving images. Despite obvious differences, a comparison of Mol's rhythmic rendering of micro-cinematographic views with, for example, Walter Ruttman's work on absolute film and the city symphony reveals a shared fascination with cinematic perception. As described by Walter Benjamin, the mimetic impulse of filmic representation thus gives way to ‘a new tactility’, that is, the desire to reproduce movement is conflated with the desire to document the cinematic movement itself.7 The appreciation of nature represented and transformed by cinematic perception is typical of experimental cinema in the early twentieth century, as well as of amateur practices inquiring into the moving image as photographic representation and filmic form. The experimental approach to cinematic vision points to the paradoxical coexistence of a perception that presents itself as becoming perception, or a vision beyond the parameters of binocular vision. As Rosalind E. Krauss suggests, the modernist enthusiasm with the photograph consisted in the belief in its vision as ‘an extraordinary extension of normal vision, one that supplements the deficiencies of the naked eye’.8
Mol did not call himself an avant-garde artist, and his affiliation with science and film, rather than film and art, underscores the necessity of considering the historical context in which he worked. Debunking the role of the experimental filmmaker as a heroic knight of film art does not imply that one should focus exclusively on the production context. It is therefore important to acknowledge the interrelated contexts of science cinema and avant-garde filmmaking while also looking at the style and reception of individual films. In Jan-Christopher Horak's outline of the history of experimental cinema, Mol is paired with the French surrealist filmmaker and marine biologist Jean Painlevé.9 Aside from their shared interest in science and cinematography, an affinity of film style is also apparent. As discussed later in this article, some of Mol's films reveal a playful reflexivity reminiscent of Painlevé's humorous narratives, although the surrealist's celebration of marine animals or bloodsucking bats surpasses the educational intent of Mol's films and public lectures. Mol's science cinema was foremost a pedagogical tool for the lecture hall and a means of carefully documenting and measuring events and objects in nature.
In the Netherlands in the 1920s, unlike in other European countries and the USA, science film was not an established practice. Scientists were familiar with filmic tools, though, and in 1912 the physics department at Groningen University invested in an expensive camera device to improve the practice of microcinematography. According to Bert Hogenkamp, no films or other materials exist to indicate whether the Groningen team was successful or if their results were acknowledged abroad.10 Lisa Cartwright refers to later experiments of microcinematography in the USA, such as a 1928 project in New York at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, in which researchers attempted to record and project the flow of blood in the capillaries of a living frog.11 In comparison with this professional context of scientific research, it is striking that, in 1920, Mol had already achieved a microscopic depiction of a worm in his film Ancylostoma. He further studied circulation in living beings in Bloedsomloop (1925). For obvious reasons, microcinematography offered an important instrument for Mol's scientific research and was also a useful device in the lecture hall, where he could project images that otherwise would be restricted to an observer with a microscope.
In 1924, Mol founded the Bureau voor Wetenschappelijke Kinematografie (Bureau for Scientific Cinematography) in Bloemendaal, outside Haarlem. Unfortunately, he left no notes or diary accounts about this organization, but the films he made were apparently scientific experiments and pedagogical material to support his scholarly endeavours. Mol gave hundreds of lectures in adult education classes. His only affiliation with a university was via Dr W. H. van Seters at Leiden University. Their collaboration resulted in two films in 1924, Antony van Leeuwenhoek (on the life and work of this naturalist, who specialized in microscopic representations) and Malariafilm (depicting a mosquito and the spread of malaria). Despite the fact that Mol was a self-taught scientist and filmmaker, his experiments in microcinematography made him a pioneer in the development and refinement of this technique.12
Although Mol did not explicitly refer to the avant-garde writings and manifestos of his time, it is striking how the notions of visualized rhythm and the transformation of the real in moving images represent common denominators between avant-garde cinema and science film. In film theories and experiments in the 1910s and 1920s, cinema was celebrated as a new art form more akin to music than literature or theatre. The fascination with the moving image as rhythm and sensory pulse-beat is apparent in the large number of manifestos, essays and film reviews. The musical analogy appears early in the history of French film criticism, but a more noteworthy theoretical application occurred during the second half of the 1920s. As one example, the composer and film critic Émile Vuillermoz was interested in the achievement and perception of ‘cinematographic music’. He wrote that cinema resembles music in that it is an art form in which a line of thought is mediated through the use of leading motifs, changes in tempo and rhythmic highlights. Similarly, a filmmaker must find a suitable phrasing, a significant rhythm: ‘He [the filmmaker] must calculate the length of his sequences and know what length he may give to his arabesque without risking what might be called the viewers’ tonal sensation of his composition'.13 The cinematic possibilities of visualized rhythm were related to the fact that film and music offer a unity in time and space in addition to containing temporal extension.14 Vuillermoz also stressed that the experiences of film and of music depend on similar physiological reactions and that, ‘after all, the optical nerve and the auditory nerve have the same faculties of vibration’.15
Similar ideas reverberate in the theory and cinema of Germaine Dulac, who stands out as one of the most passionate advocates of a ‘symphonic cinema’. In her texts from 1925 and onward, she often stressed cinema's rhythmic structuring of durational units. These ideas were formalized in her attempts in 1927–9 to cinematographically interpret music by Debussy and Chopin: Disque 927, Arabesque and Thèmes et variation. In an article from 1927, she emphasized the cinematic counterpart to the affective sensation of musical rhythm:
Visual rhythm in correspondence with musical rhythm makes the cinematographic movement to stage the signification and force of movement in general. This is a qualitative fact of harmonic duration that has to be transformed into, if I dare to describe it as such, sonorities constituted from the emotions contained within the image itself. In cinematographic measurement, visual rhythms correspond to musical rhythms (which lend weight and meaning to general movement). These visual acts, as valuable as the lengthy harmonic passages, transform themselves, I dare say, from the sounds derived from the emotions found within the image itself.16Not only was film claimed to resemble the transcendent and affective impact of musical sound, but it also offered the composed structure of a symphony. A recurrent theme in Vuillermoz's commentary is the acknowledgment of an abstract logic according to which the movements of the frame, and between the frames, are measured. He wrote that the filmmaker, like the musician, has to find convenient places of punctuation and acceleration, to obtain a nuanced pulse.
In 1919, filmmaker and critic Albert Guyot had offered some suggestions for the elaboration of a cinematic measure. Mathematics was, according to him, the common trait of music and cinema, both of which depend on elaborated methods of measurement. 17 Consequently, the composer or the filmmaker is ‘a man who counts. When he does not count, he measures. Just as in music, mathematical precision is at the core of cinema’.18
The emphasis on rhythm as measured interval and sensory pulse-beat corresponds closely with contemporaneous ideas in the early twentieth century about phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Attempted visualizations of sensory perception and the subconscious arose at the same time as the appropriation of musical terms in film criticism of this era. However, filmmakers and theorists acknowledged the technology and experience of the cinematic perception (which differs from phenomenology and Edmund Husserl's analysis of the subject's perception of a material world, the ‘sensa’ of the thing-in-itself). The interest in cinematic perception coincides with the fascination with a modern technology, which, similar to photography, complicated and transformed the relationship between natural perception and representation in visual art.
The space–time malleability of experimental cinema could be referred to in terms of ‘time measurement’. I believe that this notion accurately describes the conceptual approach to the time-image of cinema in avant-garde theory and practice.19 The theme of time measurement is also relevant for science cinema, whose purpose is to measure and depict the process of natural events. It stresses temporalization as a figural process realized between the time of the image and the time of the film experience.
How do rhythm and time measurement materialize in Mol's science films? Visual analyses of science cinema lead beyond clear-cut distinctions between representation and abstraction. Regarding the scientific context of production and the educational aim of these representations, the ambivalent status of visual documentation recalls the analytic images of Etienne-Jules Marey's machines such as the myograph (which graphically depicts the phases and speed of muscle contractions), the odograph (which records the number, frequency and simultaneity of footsteps) and the photographic gun (which shoots a series of images at 1/720 second to capture, for example, the flight of a gull).20 In Marey's work, analogical representation and graphic abstraction fuse in a way similar to the ambivalence of the film image between the static imprint of the frame and the projected sequence of movement and change.
In Mol's work, the educational study of, for example, a mosquito and the spread of malaria in Malariafilm (1924) meets with a contemplation of plants and crystals in cinematic transformation. This ‘aesthetics of abstraction’ partly coincides with the ‘flatness, segmentation, and planar division of space’ that, according to Lisa Cartwright, characterizes experiments with both cubism and microcinematography in the early decades of the twentieth century.21 Cartwright considers this stylistic similarity between art and science beyond any ‘personal influence or historical coincidence’: rather, it mirrors an overall ‘cultural response to the epistemological instability of human observation and to the sight of the human body’, because representations in the modern era are marked by ‘the notion of the body-in-process and its streamlined physiological time-image’.22 However, Mol's approach to cinematic abstraction involves more than the transverse section of a magnified specimen or the depiction of microbes invading the system of a living being. Another distinguishing mark is his preference for flowers and their life span of sprouting and fading. Aside from the cinematic depiction of natural processes invisible to the eye, this preference for space–time abstraction or the cinematic measurement of movement and gestures also characterizes some of his later films.
Altijd Welkom/Rhapsody in Brown (1935) is a feature-length film produced by Droste, the Dutch chocolate factory in Haarlem. The film offers a peculiar mix of industrial publicity and absolute film, in which a typical documentary ‘voice of God’ remarks on the splendid manufacture of cocoa powder and boxes of assorted chocolates. With its explanatory voiceover and narrative structure marked by the beginning and end of the assembly line, Rhapsody in Brown contains a clearly educational ambition. At the end of the line and in the final shots of the film, a series of close-ups show happy children devouring chocolate creams. In this film the pedagogical depiction and enthusiastic promotion of the chocolate production is realized in a style that seems closely aligned with Soviet montage films such as Zemlja/Earth (Alexander Dovzhenko, 1930): the abstract framings of chocolates in endless rows (figure 2) and a robotic spade turning the glossy melted chocolate also remain faithful to the principles of absolute film. The enduring framing of melted chocolate relates also to the poetic contemplation of objects and movement in Joris Ivens's work, such as Regen/Rain (1927) or De Brug/The Bridge (1928).
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Hence, Rhapsody in Brown comments on movement and form, and, not least, tempo and rhythm. The movement of machines, or the endless passing of chocolates in rows, meets up with the duration and change inflicted by editing. With the scientist's interest in measuring and analyzing the world, the process is represented with a strong effect of shape and movement. Before considering Mol's earlier film experiments, let us return to the film criticism and avant-garde experiments of the 1920s.
As already suggested, film has been recognized primarily as a time-based medium, dependent on the artistic elaboration of rhythm and tempo. The emphasis on the constructed metre of film involves the recognition of pulse, duration and change, and of film as an expression closely affiliated with the human nervous system – heartbeats as well as the quick change of mental life in dreams and hallucinations. Aside from futurist visions of man and machine, and surrealist projects to map the subconscious, these assumptions and experiments posit film in terms of measure and interval – a kinetic event that requires the viewer's sensory reception. Put differently, cinema was the great promise of a visual poetry, directly appealing to a viewer's imagination and desire. Like music, the ultimate cinematic expression would interact directly with a viewer's emotions.
The suggested kinship between music and film was rooted in the idea of pure visual rhythm. As artists and theorists celebrated the expressive potentiality of film, strategies were outlined to translate auditory rhythm into a cinematic choreography. The discourse of rhythm includes various ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ such as Parade (1917), a ballet by, among others, Erik Satie and Guillaume Apollinaire. Also, in the debut of Paris Dada, led by Tristan Tzara, performances such as Vaseline symphonique (1920) offered theatrical shock effects through conceptual explorations of the spatiality of vocal rhythms.23
Subsequently within French and German experimental cinema between 1921 and 1925, some films were explicitly aimed at a visualization of musical rhythm, such as Ballet mécanique (Férdinand Léger, Man Ray and Dudley Murphy, 1924), Entr'acte (Réné Clair, 1923) and Cinq minutes de cinéma pur/Five Minutes of Pure Cinema (Henri Chomette, 1925). Hans Richter, Walter Ruttman and Viking Eggeling also offered graphic approaches to rhythm in Rhythmus 21,22,21,25 (Hans Richter, 1921–5), Opus I–IV (Richter, 1921–4), Horisontell-vertikal orkester (Viking Eggeling, 1919), Diagonalsymfonin/Diagonal Symphony (Eggeling, 1924) and Opus II–IV (Walter Ruttman, 1926).
In addition, the emphasis on rhythm and tempo is of course pivotal in the work of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. One of the crucial notions of Eisenstein's montage theory, the ‘monistic ensemble’, references the samisen music of Japanese Kabuki theatre. This music is characterized by its organization of multiple auditory elements to match the dynamic coexistence of auditory and visual levels in cinema. Hence, rhythm is a tool to control the creation of meaning as well as the affective response of the audience, and the ideal realization of tempo will transfer the images in discrete units of an overall discourse. The successful interaction of the pulse-beat of the film with that of the viewer – the experience of rhythm and the becoming of a significant whole – is an experiential dimension that Eisenstein elaborated in theory and in practice.24
Opposing Eisenstein's ideal of discrete units of rhythm is Vertov's concept of ‘interval’, which refers to the intersection between film shots, a differentiated zone of becoming through which the film's images in constant change provide a significant metre: ‘The school of kino-eye calls for construction of the film-object upon "intervals", that is, upon the movement between shots, upon the visual correlation of shots with one another, upon transitions from one visual stimulus to another’.25 In Chelovek skinoapparatom/Man with the Movie Camera (1929), dissolves, split-screen devices and distorted perspectives orchestrate the cinematic components, and rhythm becomes conceptual: the rhythm of montage, the inscription of rhythms before the camera, the rhythm within the fragmented structure of the frame and the rhythm within the relation between the fictionalized camera-eye and the viewer's experience. Vertov's contribution to the discourse on visualized rhythm can be found in this reflexive concern for the cinematic, which is accomplished innovatively through a playful conceptualization of filmmaking and film experience.26
Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, as well as René Clair, Walter Ruttman and Viking Eggeling, offered aesthetic models for the new cinema cherished by the Dutch Film League. An eventful screening of Vsevolod Pudovkin's Mat/The Mother (1926) prompted the initial manifesto of 25 June 1927, Manifest Filmliga Amsterdam, which in September of the same year led to the organization of Der Nederlandsche Filmliga (the Dutch Film League). For political reasons, some mayors had prohibited their Dutch cities from participating in the national opening of The Mother. In response to this censorship, which was violently opposed by a number of filmmakers, journalists and students, an underground screening of Pudovkin's film took place on the night of 12 May. Some politicians were present at the screening, and their influence and the audience's appreciation of the film caused the prohibition against showing The Mother in Dutch movie houses to be lifted later the same year.27
The Amsterdam Filmliga manifesto called for a cinema in opposition to commercial film culture, arguing that only on one of a hundred occasions ‘do we see film. Usually we see nothing but cinema, crowds, the commercial regime, America, kitsch.’28 To counter the threat to ‘real film’, the manifesto promised a series of public screenings, and, hence, the possibility of a new culture dedicated to film: ‘Saturdays during the coming season of 1927–8, about 12 matinees will be shown in Amsterdam, among which we will show one important new film every week to a genuinely artistic-minded audience’.29
Aside from the expected avant-garde rejection of mainstream cinema, the manifesto also advocated for international support of experimental film. The first issue of the Orgaan der Nederlandsche Filmliga, published in September 1927, presented two ‘foreign correspondents’: Mannus Franken in Paris and Simon Koster in Berlin, who were to report all screenings and other film events of interest to the Filmliga. This issue, edited by Menno Ter Braak, Joris Ivens, L. J. Jordan, Henrik Scholte and Constant van Wessem, promoted a fresh approach to film critique, film and audience and film technique. For example, regarding accepted ideas about ‘film realism’, El. D. De Roos emphasized that the film experience should go beyond notions of realism, reality or unreality and instead acknowledge a new, formal conceptualization of ‘filmic reality’ (film realiteit.30 This materialist celebration of the moving image is further expressed in Ivens's essay, ‘Film technique. Notes on the succession of film images.’31 This short piece on the constructed entity of tempo and the use of rhythm and duration stresses the metric and ‘composed’ texture of absolute film. Ivens praises the experiments of absolute film for conceptualizing the organization of the moving image into ‘an almost mathematical movement’ (‘bijna mathematische gang’) and for extending the formal possibilities of filmic inscription and projection.32 Thus rather than differentiating art from science, the Filmliga actively questioned this dichotomy. With their emphasis on measurement and cinematographic experiments to challenge and transgress the limits of perception, the scientific context and aims of Mol's work fit into the Filmliga's constructs and aesthetic ideals.
Mol wrote a number of articles for amateur journals on photography and film, which provide some insight into his thoughts about filmmaking and science. During the 1920s, he published articles in De Camera, Focus, De Hollandsche Steden, Het Lichtbeeld and Lux-De Camera. These journals deal primarily with technical details such as the use of different lenses, colouring devices, objectives and techniques such as how to use soft-focus photography or photograph ice crystals.33 During 1926 and 1927, the articles reflected his increased interest in lighting devices and exposure time for photography and film, as well as for trick film techniques such as slow motion (‘De vertraagde film’).34
In this context it is striking how the notion of time measurement both interrelates and differentiates the film experiments of science film and avant-garde cinema. I have already referred to avant-garde theories and experiments wherein the cinematic rendering of space and time was associated with the transcendental performance of music: the metre of film invokes subconscious movements of dreams and hallucinations as well as the viewer's physiological, embodied response to moving images. Although the play with fast forward, reverse motion and slow motion in avant-garde cinema reverberates in some of Mol's films, time measurement takes on a literal meaning in his experiments. The possibility of extending, reversing and compressing a preordained movement in time and space on the screen becomes a pedagogical device, producing a vivid demonstration which supports the analysis and explanation of natural processes. Nevertheless, the results of these scientific inquiries are cinematic abstractions that stress the moving image as plastic form.
By 1923, Mol referred to the ‘crucial position’ of cinematography in modern society and, more specifically, to the possibilities of its application in science: ‘cinematography has already, and with promising results, served in the fields of technology and science’.35 In his article entitled ‘A Filmic Practice’, Mol described the new Ernemann camera. This German invention by Hans Lehmann – a camera capable of shooting 500 frames per second – is better known as ‘Zeitlupe’ (in Dutch, tijdloupe). In his successive attempts to refine the cinematic depiction of plants growing in real-time, Mol used and experimented with this technique. Describing the tijdloupe for the readers of Focus, Mol had great hopes for its scientific use and also expressed his fascination with the screening of processes invisible to the human eye: ‘It is hard to foresee what scientific services are to be expected from the tijdloupe’.36 Although the principle of this space–time abstraction is simple, he remarked, its fascination lies in how cinematography makes it possible to visualize this altered form.
Mol's combined passion for nature, camera technology and the optics of cinema resembles that of surrealist and marine biologist Jean Painlevé. Mol found inspiration in Painlevé's films, which he praised for their level of abstraction. Yet, he disliked the irony and playful personification in Painlevé's documentation of marine life.37 In 1930, Painlevé founded the Association for Photographic and Cinematic Documentation in Science and developed techniques to shoot footage underwater, but he considered himself a popular filmmaker too, and films such as L'Hippocampe/The Seahorse (1934) were celebrated as surrealist film art.38 Different from the ironic tone of Painlevé's films (which are at once science films and mock-documentaries), Mol's projects of documentation and measurement are more closely affiliated with traditional educational film. Where Painlevé demonstrated an ironic distance from the truth-claim of science cinema, Mol remained obsessed with the microcosms of plants and minerals.39
Despite this suspicion of a reframing and allegorization of the natural world, many of Mol's films express a desiring gaze and a poetic contemplation that lead beyond the putative transparency of educational cinema. These, together with a dose of humour, are apparent in De tijd en de film/Time and the Film (1928) – one of Mol's more conceptual approaches to the time of the film image. The first part of the film offers a veritable screen lecture on cinematic time.40 ‘Natural movement’ in the film is illustrated by a military parade shot in normal speed. An intertitle explains:
A film consists of a series of thousands of little pictures. If when projected the same number of pictures is shown on the screen each second, as the number of pictures which was taken in a second, we see the natural movement on the screen ... . If we take the pictures more quickly, however, the movements on the screen are retarded; it looks as if time is going more slowly.41An orchestra parades in slow motion, followed by a sprint and a horse and carriage in equally slowed tempo. ‘In the same way, time can also be accelerated’, the text proceeds, leading to a sequence where we can see the comic gestures of bricklayers and construction workers in speeded-up action. The most spectacular illustration is shown after the intertitle: ‘One can even make time go back: then the movements are reversed’. Amsterdam bikers go backwards, cars and people are screened in reversed street views, the sport of hurdles gains in drama through the uncanny perception of remote action, and, finally, a little boy ‘builds’ a banana by pulling small bites from his mouth until the fruit is rewrapped in its peel.
This illustration of the manipulated space–time of cinema is followed by a study of plants and opening flowers (figures 3 and 4). ‘Everything in nature accelerates’, Mol suggests, pondering on the beauty of flowers ‘accelerated tens of thousands of times’. There then follows the metamorphosis of the chrysanthemum, the star of Bethlehem, a campanula, a carnation and a passion flower. The organic and, to our eye, static life forms of the flowers are here animated and visualized in captivating sequences of manipulated space–time.
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In the early 1930s, Mol elaborated his technique of filming the growing and fading of plants. These attempts to visualize natural processes in approximate real-time reflect the science filmmaker's experimentation with time measurement and the visualization of rhythm. In order not to disturb their natural rhythm, the plants were set up in a room flooded with daylight. A clock controlled the coordination of curtains and camera flashes, and one frame was exposed every quarter-hour. Hence, during 24 hours, only 4–6 seconds of film were shot.42
The endless variation of flowering and fading plants, which during the 1930s more or less dominated the production of Mol's film company Multifilm, testifies to a peculiar obsession with cinematic techniques to measure the life of plants. Van bol tot bloem/From Bulb to Flower (1931) was ordered by the Haarlem tulip cultivators' organization, Het Centraal Bloembollencomité. An idyllic tulip-postcard counterpart to the Droste film mentioned earlier, this tinted documentary represents the spectacular mass cultivation and harvest of tulips and hyacinths. Variations of the tijdloupe motif are combined with more typical industry film shots of men and women in the fields sorting and packing bulbs and flowers.
Some of the trick-filmed sequences of From Bulb to Flower are recycled in Het Wonder der Bloemen/The Miracle of Flowers (1935). These two films approach cinema as a measuring device of natural processes (the flowers) and of artificial processes (industrial production and film production, respectively). In contrast to the tourist views and commercial publicity of From Bulb to Flower, The Miracle of Flowers offers a celebration of the flowering plant as screen attraction. Sequences of opening and closing flowers are interrupted by images of Mol himself as he (in true Vertov style) manipulates the exposure time or looks at film rushes. A 1935 version of Time and the Film, this film reveals the secrets of temporal manipulation and the accomplishment of film production.
With these examples in mind, we see how the pedagogical purpose of educational film makes room for a pure fascination with enchanted close-ups of flowers opening in approximate real-time. The scientist's gaze, marked by analytical distance and clinical scrutiny, seems replaced by a delight in buds, petals, stalks and pistils in vital motion. Moreover, these screen attractions seem loaded with erotic overtures, welcoming a Freudian interpretation and reminding us that the symbolic power of ‘the figural’ operates even in the screen cultures most differentiated from art film.
This is not to suggest that Mol's representation of flowers makes irrelevant or contradicts the educational purpose of explaining and visualizing botanic life. Rather, the close view of ‘climbers seeking support’, or the flowers of Eremurus which ‘appear each at the right time and in the right place’, appeal equally to the desire for knowledge and the aesthetic pleasure of the moving images as plastic form. Watching a flower of Eremurus sprout in a manipulated tempo is a fascinating study of metaphysical order and uncanny regularity that has nothing in common with the static presence of the flower in the field. Hence, in this sense, the experimental imagery offers a critique of the film image as mimetic representation and documentation of the real. We may learn something about the world, but the attraction of Mol's films consists of a world rendered unfamiliar and transformed into a screen event.
The tijdloupe and other devices inspired Mol to carry out abstractions of natural processes and to develop an educational use for the space–time malleability of moving images. In turn, his microscopic views of crystals resulted in a structural minimalism, which, even compared with the work of Walter Ruttman and Hans Richter, was extraordinarily radical in its questioning of the mimetic impulse of cinematic representation. In 1928, with the microcinematographic study Uit het rijk der kristallen/From the Domain of Crystals, Mol became a celebrated representative of absolute film. When this film was offered at the special screening organized by Abel Gance at the avant-garde theatre Studio 28 in Paris, the film was shown on an unusually large screen by three projectors running in synch.43 This was cinéma pur, the avant-garde circle concluded, and, consequently, the film was also a great success later that year at the seventh Filmliga program in Amsterdam, where it was presented as ‘absolute film’. The following comment testifies to the enthusiastic reception of microcinematography as art:
We are convinced that his [Mol's] experiments are very important in this transitional stage of the Filmliga, for all change that will liberate the cinema from the tyranny of the stars will have to start by studying the simple principles of what is seen, the movements registered by the camera-eye. The difference between ‘art film’ and ‘science film’, however useful otherwise, is not relevant in this case, as we are as yet unclear about where ‘art’ begins and ‘science’ ends.44The film offers a twelve-minute study on crystals, combining a work on abstract rhythm with the transformation of crystals into microcosmic landscapes (see figures 1 and 5). Different from the screening of organic life in abstracted real-time, this microcinematographic framing of chemicals seems to express the moving image as pulse-beat and transformation of a plastic shape. A version of this film with an elaboration of form and colour, Kristallen in kleur/Crystals in Colour (1928), testifies to an even closer bond with the experiments of Ruttman and other avant-garde filmmakers.45
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Full attention is given to the cinematic exploration of texture and surface, and intertitles indicate merely the name of the represented substance. Hence, the visual attraction of this film goes beyond documentation in the sense of scientific gaze or epistemological desire. Through microcinematography, the magnified crystals become moving, organic patterns. Intertitles introduce ‘methylal’, ‘boric acid’, ‘calcium chlorate’, ‘sal-ammoniac’, ‘calium citrate’, ‘soda’, ‘asparagine’, ‘uranium nitrate’, ‘silver nitrate’ and ‘caffeine’, but the depicted substances seem provocatively alien to their names. The material referent suggested by, for example, ‘sal-ammoniac’ is subordinate to the purely visual pleasure of abstract form in constant change.
From the Domain of Crystals is ‘absolute’ because natural objects are perceived in a different manner from that which could be achieved by our eyes alone. Crystals become virtual landscapes that appeal to the imagination and desire of the viewer and there is also the pleasure of recognizing familiar shapes in abstract forms. Ice crystals in spectacular bloom turn out to be boric acid, whereas wobbling rounds – a school of jellyfish perhaps – are really asparagine, and uranium nitrate approximates a desert sculpted by a storm. The radical imaging within this film consists of its rhythmic unfolding of abstract patterns, whereas the pedagogical ambition of this science film is reduced to a mere listing of names. Hence, exploring and exposing the border of the visible world, Mol accomplished a structural minimalism strongly aligned with avant-garde ideals of an embodied, visualized rhythm.
Throughout the history of cinema, attempts have been made to frame the frame of the camera eye, to measure a body's movement in space, or to reinvent the temporal extension of a natural event into abstract patterns. However, such projects of experimental filmmaking have been accomplished outside the field of avant-garde cinema. Experimental cinema has been defined by the modern observation that ‘a different nature opens itself to the camera than to the naked eye’.46 This is then informed by the aesthetic experience of nature in art, as it may be gracefully transformed by the artist ‘and distilled into the canvas’.47
We commonly associate experimental cinema with the innovative achievements of individual film artists, whose images represent a programmatic alternative to mainstream cinema and the formal standards set by a commercial film industry. In experimental films, the craft of filmmaking takes on new meanings and provides conceptual tools (at times, even a theoretical framework) to explore the medium specificity of the moving image and related techniques of photographic representation. J. C. Mol's films offer illuminating examples of the practices and conceptions at the core of experimental cinema. His films from the 1920s and early 1930s respond directly to the historical framework outlined in this essay: the shared concern for visualized rhythm and space–time abstraction in the science film and in avant-garde cinema of this era. Mol celebrated the beauty of the natural world, but it would be more correct to say that his films transform the world into spectacular screen events. Similar to the experimental work of Henri Chomette or Walter Ruttman, Mol's films posit the aesthetic experience of cinema as a time-based medium. His educational ambition and experiments to extend camera techniques represent a film culture different from the predominant narrow equation of experimental cinema with avant-garde film. Anonymous illustrations for public lectures, microcinematographic experiments for the laboratory, publicity for chocolate and tulips, industrial films, whimsical examples of slow motion, obsessive views of opening flowers, and microscopic representations of crystals screened in avant-garde theatres – these form the radically different culture of Mol's film production.
The example of J. C. Mol reminds us that science filmmaking is part of the history of experimental cinema. These films result from inquiries into the technology and perception of moving images, and their experimental imagery pushes the limits of visual representation. Although the aesthetic of the films is usually subordinate to their depicted phenomena and the claims of the intertitles or voiceover, the educational aims of science film often meet with cinematic abstractions that appeal to the desire and imagination of the viewer. Mol's obsession with the natural world in cinematic transformation, rather than the natural world transcended, highlights an interesting aspect of experimental cinema. Space–time abstraction as avant-garde experiment and scientific project is an important addition to the film theories and manifestos from the 1920s. Within this varied context, amateur filmmakers, science lecturers, critics and artists recognize and celebrate the possibilities of an alternative optics through which the world is transformed, expanded and multiplied to the joy of the eye.
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Acknowledgements |
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This article results from two months of research in Amsterdam and Utrecht during the spring of 2004. I am very grateful to the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education for a stipend and to Professor Frank Kessler who kindly invited me to Utrecht University and the Instituut Media en Representatie, Film- en Televisiewetenschap. I would also like to thank the very helpful and encouraging staff at the Amsterdam Film Museum.
This article was selected to win the 2004/5 Screen Award jointly with Helen Piper's ‘Reality TV, Wife Swap and the drama of banality’, published in Screen, vol. 45, no. 4.
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Notes |
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 TOP Notes |
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1 Mario Vargas Llosa, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 30.
3 During 1925–9, Mol published eighty-seven articles in various Dutch photo and film journals. Bert Hogenkamp, J. C. Mol: Een fimografisch en bibliografisch overzicht van zijn Nederlandse werk (Hilversum: Nederlands Audiovisueel Archief, 2000).
4 In this essay, I consider J. C. Mol's career only through the 1920s and the 1930s. For a complete biography and account of Mol's contribution to Dutch cinema, see Bert Hogenkamp, ‘De Witte jas of "oneindige variaties op hetzelfde thema": J. C. Mol als mentor van wetenschappelijke, amateur en avant-garde film in Nederland 1924–32’, GBG-Nieuws, vol. 32 (Spring 1995), pp. 4–11 and De Nederlandse documentaire film 1920–1940 (Amsterdam and Utrecht: Van Gennep/Stichling Film en Wetenschap, 1988).
5 Jan-Christopher Horak, ‘The first American film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945’, in Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: the First American Film Avant-garde, 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 3.
6 The essays in Horak's anthology Lovers of Cinema address social, cultural and economic aspects of experimental cinema beyond a mere history of film auteurs, thus assisting in understanding the variety of experimental film beyond the canonized field of avant-garde cinema.
7 Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Walter Benjamin Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1988), p. 238.
8 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), p. 116.
9 Horak, ‘The First American Film’, p. 35.
10 Hogenkamp, ‘De Witte jas’, p. 7.
11 Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 90–1.
12 Hogenkamp, ‘De Witte jas’, p. 7.
13 Émile Vuillermoz, ‘La musique des images’, in L'art cinématographique III (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1927), p. 60.
14 This was equally the principle of music as a ‘temporal object’ (Zeitobjekt), according to Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991), p. 24.
15 Vuillermoz, ‘La musique des images’ p. 59.
16 Germaine Dulac, ‘Les esthétiques, les entraves la cinégraphie intégrale’, in L'art cinématographique II (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1927), p. 44.
17 From 1919 on, Louis Delluc also stressed mathematical precision as a common trait of film and music. See Noureddine Ghali, L'avant-garde cinématographique en France dans les années vingt: idées, conceptions, theories (Paris: Éditions Paris Expérimental, 1995), p.146.
19 For an extended account of time measurement in classical film theory, see Malin Wahlberg, Documentary Time: a Critique of Film and Phenomenology, in the Visible Evidence series (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming).
20 Marta Braun, Picturing Time: the work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 24, 27, 61.
21 Cartwright, Screening the Body, p. 91.
23 ‘In Tzara's Vaseline symphonique ... twenty people sing ascending scales first on the syllable cra, followed by ascending scales one third higher on the syllable cri ... etcetera, ad infinitum’. Christopher Schiff, ‘Banging on the Windowpane’, in Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (eds), Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 151.
24 For example, see Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The fourth dimension in cinema’, in Richard Taylor (ed.), Eisenstein Writings 1922–1934 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 186–7.
25 Dziga Vertov, ‘From kino-eye to radio-eye’, in Annette Michelson (ed.), Kino-Eye: the Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), p. 90.
26 To this it should be added that Vertov's approach to rhythm and the sensory pulse-beat of film also involves important experiments with sound, silence and music, such as in Entuziazm: Simfoniia Donbassa (USSR, 1930). For a thorough analysis on the auditory aspects of Vertov's theory and practice, see John MacKay, ‘Disorganized noise: Enthusiasm and the ear of the collective’, Kinoculture vol. 7 (January 2005).
27 Gerdin Linthorst, ‘Het geloof in de zuivere, autonome film’, Filmkrant, vol. 128 (November 1992), pp. 6–7.
28 The Manifest Filmliga Amsterdam was written in 1927 by Henrik Scholte, Menno Ter Braak, Cees Laseur, L. J. Jordaan, Joris Ivens, Charley Toorop, H. J. G. Ivens and Ed. Pelster. The manifesto, together with the first issue of the Orgaan der Nederlansche Filmliga is reprinted in Skrien, vol. 100 (October 1980), pp. 1–14 and 28. Quoted at p. 1.
30 El. D. De Roos, ‘Film en Publiek’, in Manifest Filmliga Amsterdam, p. 4.
31 Joris Ivens, ‘Filmtechniek: eenige notities over de opvolging van de beeldenin de film’, in Manifest Filmliga Amsterdam, p. 5.
33 In 1923, J. C. Mol wrote a series of eight articles on soft-focus photography published in Focus. In relation to ice crystals see, J. C. Mol, ‘Het fotografeeren van ijsbloemen’, De Camera vol. 18, no. 7 (February 1, 1926), pp. 90–2.
34 For example, J. C. Mol, ‘Een nieuwe Fotometer’, De Camera, vol. 19, no. 8 (October 9, 1926), pp. 129–30; ‘Filmknipsels IX. Filmtrucs’, De Camera vol. 19, no. 11 (November 20, 1926), pp. 129, 175–7; ‘Filmknipsels XI. Filmtrucs II (De vertraagde film)’, De Camera vol. 19, no. 14 (January 1, 1927), pp. 224–5.
35 J. C. Mol, ‘Een Filmpraatje’, Focus vol. 10, no. 6 (22 March 1923), p. 115.
38 The filmography of Jean Painlevé consists of thirty-eight films, of which, according to their context of screening, eleven have been dubbed ‘popular films’ and twenty-seven ‘research films’. Brigitte Berg, ‘Contradictory forces: Jean Painlevé, 1902–1989’, in Andy Masaki Bellows and Marina Mcdougall (eds), Science is Fiction: the Films of Jean Painlevé (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 25.
39 In 1947, Mol contributed to the making of Metamorphose, a poetic contemplation on the short life of butterflies by Herman van der Horst. This film, which was also produced by Mol's company, ‘Multifilm’ in Haarlem, comes very close to the work by Painlevé.
40 A written account of the filmic devices of De Tijd in de film/Time and the Film is offered in an article with the same title by J. C. Mol, ‘De tijd in de film’, Het Lichtbeel vol. 6, no. 1 (January 1928), pp. 5–9.
41 Intertitles from De tijd en de film/Time and the Film (1928), quoted from the English version at the Amsterdam Film Museum.
42 Hogenkamp, ‘De Witte jas’, p. 9.
43 Hogenkamp and Kusters, Een filmografisch en bibliografisch overzicht van zijn Nederlands Werk, pp. 8–9.
44 Quote from the Filmliga program at the Amsterdam Film Museum site: http://www.polderdocumentaries.nl/eng/text/kristallen-eng.htm. A tinted version of From the Domain of Crystals was probably used for the avant-garde screenings in Paris and Amsterdam.
45 Kristallen in kleur/Crystals in Colour was part of a Filmliga retrospective at the Cinemateket in Stockholm in 1999.
46 Benjamin, ‘The work of art’, p. 236.
47 Llosa, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, p. 30.
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