Experimentations 8: Beautiful Science

Studies in Diagnostic Cinefluorography

By Dr. James Sibley Watson

1947-1955, B&w transferred to digital, silent, 6 min.

World premiere of newly preserved and scanned copy, from the George Eastman Museum

Sanctus

Sanctus

By Barbara Hammer

1990, color/b&w, sound, 19 min.

Sound composition by Neil B. Rolnick.

"In her most recent films, ENDANGERED and SANCTUS, Barbara has addressed the co-fragility of both human existence and the film emulsion, the artist's raw material onto which she creates images. I have just recently screened the completed print of SANCTUS, and I was overwhelmed by it. The film is visually exquisite, and replete with symbolic meaning. She has transformed 'found footage' - scientific x-ray films from the 1950s - into a lyrical journey, transforming this raw material into a celebration of the body as temple."

Magic Myxies

Magic Myxies

By F. Percy Smith and Mary Field

1931, 16mm transferred to digital, B&w, sound, 8 min., 6 sec.

Made by British Instructional Films for the series The Secrets of Nature, the film uses time-lapse and micro-cinematography to present the life cycle of slime molds with a factually dubious narration. 

“The Monthly Film Bulletin's Science Committee was outraged by this film - not for its photography, which it admits is beautiful, but for its commentary. Its review, although very seriously lacking a sense of humour, has a point. The film, released in 1931 (thus the early days of sound), is perhaps inappropriately jolly, and it certainly lacks that sober scientific tone that we expect of British wildlife film. It is much more reminiscent of the gung-ho voice of the newsreel. Worse still, it is inaccurate. As the reviewer fumes "'Myxie' is not too objectionable a shortening of the ugly term myxomycete [did the editor know they already had a non-Latin name, 'slime fungi'?] but the suggestion that a myxie is an animal at one point and a vegetable at another is absurd... Further we should like to know how a myxie can be said to be bad tempered, and why accelerated photography should confer on it the power to 'quiver with delight'."

Anthropomorphising the natural world has always been frowned on by British wildlife filmmakers (not least Sir David Attenborough) and while we may enjoy the ebullient commentary - which certainly helps to sell a difficult subject - in the end, we probably have to agree with the verdict of the Science Committee.” – Bryony Dixon, British Film Institute

Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith

Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith

Directed by Stuart A. Staples 

Co-producer and editor Dave Reeve

2016, digital b&w, sound, 55 min.

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/275657775

This meditative, immersive film by tindersticks' Stuart A. Staples is a tribute to the astonishing work and achievements of naturalist, inventor and pioneering British filmmaker F. Percy Smith (1880-1945).

Based in a studio in north London in the early years of the 20th century, Percy Smith developed the use of time-lapse, animation and micro-photographic techniques to capture nature's secrets in action. He worked in a number of public roles, including the Royal Navy and British Instructional Films, Smith was prolific and driven, often directing several films simultaneously, apparently on a mission to explore and capture nature's hidden terrains.

Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith is an interpretative work that combines Smith's original film footage - preserved within the BFI National Archive - with a new contemporary score by tindersticks with Thomas Belhom and Christine Ott. It creates a hypnotic, alien yet familiar dreamscape that connects us to the sense of wonder Smith must have felt as he peered through his own lenses and saw these micro-worlds for the first time.

"The reaction of his contemporary audience can’t have been a million miles from ours now: the dawning realisation that our mental maps of the world are just provisional sketches of a far vaster and weirder territory, the familiar world as we imagine it just one wafer-thin slice of something ultimately unknowable. Watching infinitesimal, perfectly spherical fungi all bloom at exactly the same time, I kept imagining the Dutchmen who invented lenses at the birth of science in the 1600s, looking through early microscopes at fleas and ticks for the very first time, and imagining they had just opened a window onto the world of demons and occult dimensions of reality, so vast was the shift in perspective, so fundamentally alien and unfamiliar these new layers of existence seemed.

"The humanising of this utterly unfamiliar world is the film’s subtle masterstroke: the retro-fitted score by tindersticks and Christine Ott is a joy, and gives the unapproachable strangeness of what we’re watching a human, emotional dimension. In one section, eerie antique organ sounds and ponderous vibraphones evoke the brave new world of mid-20th century sci-fi, an association that seems apt – after all, these were alien worlds being discovered by the technology of the atomic age too – wondrous, not a little monstrous, weirdly fantastical. In another section, the grainy, fuzzy analogue bass notes of an early synth somehow perfectly describe the completely alien throb of a pulsating, liquid mould that branches out and flows along vein-like paths looking for new food. Later, a multitude of tiny tadpole-like forms riggle round exuberantly to a jazzy score, evoking the energy of the will-to-life at its most abstract; it made me imagine Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” for some reason, and my toddler pointed at them excitedly and shouted “fish!”" - Michael Smith caught By the River, https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2017/07/natural-history-bfi-tindersticks-stuart-a-staples-the-intimate-world-of-f-percy-smith/