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9/1/2005 12:07:00 AM

Landecker to examine history of microcinematography

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff

There was a time when motion pictures were such a novelty that even footage of floating blood cells filmed through a microscope was shown in French theaters as entertainment.

Rice Assistant Professor of Anthropology Hannah Landecker is capturing that era in a book she’s writing about the history of microcinematography — the process of making a film by putting a camera on top of a microscope.

Photo courtesy of photos.com

Microcinematography — the process of making a film by putting a camera on top of a microscope — is the topic of a new book that Hannah Landecker, assistant professor of anthropology at Rice, is writing.

Landecker received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowship to write about the development of microscopic moving images in science and culture. “We don’t know much about microcinematography because people have concentrated on the history of entertainment rather than scientific cinema,” she said.

The French biologist Jean Comandon is often cited as a pioneer of microcinematography. Working in Paris at the start of the 20th century, Comandon observed that the bacterium that causes syphilis — Treponema pallidum — has a unique pattern of movement. He foresaw the potential of recording this movement on film to teach physicians how to diagnose syphilis under a microscope. Collaborating with Pathe Freres, who owned the first French cinema company, Comandon produced the first film of these pathogenic bacteria in 1909. He went on to produce many other biological and medical films of cells and other microorganisms.

“These were one of the new marvels that came along with film and cinema, which began in France,” Landecker said. “These films of cells in the bloodstream served as a way to teach people to think about themselves as being made of cells and molecules.”

According to some theater programs of films shown in Paris during the early 1900s, a film called “Blood Cells” ran between newsreels and entertainment movies.

“One of the interesting things is that people didn’t draw the line between science and entertainment,” Landecker said. “It was all seen as film — something new. People were really excited that they could see something they’d never seen before — films of far-away places and of small things inside the body.”

Newspaper clippings from the early 20th century conveyed how audiences reacted to biological education via microcinematography. “People were amazed, sometimes frightened, because it seemed like these microorganisms had a life of their own even though they were supposed to be inside their bodies,” Landecker said.

Her introduction to microcinematography occurred while she was doing research for her first book on the history of tissue culture and the development of cells in biotechnology. “I came across boxes and boxes of film in the archives that no one had known about,” she said. “Most of the film had disintegrated because it’s fragile and hadn’t been properly preserved.”

The films aroused Landecker’s curiosity, so she started researching their origin. “The more I looked into it, the more I realized that no one had written anything about it,” she said. “I wanted to know more about why these scientists became interested in film as a scientific technique.”

The NEH fellowship allowed Landecker up to one year to research and write about microcinematography. The working title of her book is “Cellular Features: A History of Biological Film in Science and Culture.” She hopes the book will appeal to anyone with an interest in film studies or the history of science as well as to people who think about the popular perception of science today.

Landecker was one of the three Rice faculty members who received a 2005 NEH fellowship. Eva Haverkamp, the Anna Smith Fine Assistant Professor of History, won a fellowship to study Christians and Jews at the time of the First Crusade; Hamid Naficy, the Nina J. Cullinan Professor of Art History, won a fellowship to study a social history of the Iranian cinema in the 20th century.

The NEH is an independent grant-making agency of the U.S. government that supports research, education, preservation and public programs in the humanities. The agency awards fellowships to individuals pursuing advanced research in the humanities that contributes to scholarly knowledge or to the general public’s understanding of the humanities.