Note: This text is an only slightly revised version of the NOMIS Lecture, which I gave at eikones Forum on 11/3/2022. I thank the eikones committee for the support of my research. I would also like to thank Sarine Waltenspül, for comments on an earlier draft, Hella Wiedmer-Newman, for proofreading the text before it was published on the blog and Giovanni Casagrande from the Archive of the Swiss TPH, for supporting me to find the right pictures.

I would like to start my talk with a short anecdote: During the first days of my fellowship, as I was wandering down the hallways of this beautiful building where I currently have the exceptional honor of calling one of the offices mine, I found the magazine Horizonte. It is the magazine of the Swiss National Science Foundation (fig. 1). Since this issue was about “Film, Fakt und Fiktion” and I devote most of my research time to scientific films, I reckoned it would be of interest.

However, when I started to read the editorial, it felt like somebody was giving me a reality check. The editor recounts some scenes from a blockbuster and a BBC series that are unrealistic from a scientific perspective (like a sandstorm on mars) and he reasons, and I quote: “Science and film are situated at opposite ends of the spectrum. In science, everything has to be as true and detailed as it can be, though only a few people might actually understand it. In the movies, everything is about achieving maximum entertainment value.” Now, everything you are going to hear from me points in the opposite direction. I will claim that science and the medium of film have had a close connection throughout the last 130 years, that they not only share a spectrum but are sometimes quite close to one another on that spectrum (for science, for instance, film has been a medium of choice when it comes to finding out the truth of movement processes of all kinds in the most detailed way), and finally, that there exist a great number of films that are downright boring (at least for most people – sometimes even for me or the scientists who have made them).

Of course, it is too easy to make fun of the SNF magazine (which is not my aim). But I believe that this editorial offers an example of the very commonly held beliefs that stand in the way when we do research about science and film. Beginning with the fact that we often do not clearly distinguish among film, moving images or cinema, among the medium, the technique or the place where movies are shown. But also, more basic assumptions of western thought stand in our way: in this editorial we can detect the belief that the ‘holy’ endeavor of truth-seeking must be clearly separated from Sinnlichkeit, from the very earthly work related to the production of pictures.

My starting point is different and rooted in the observation that the last fifteen years have seen a surge of the use of moving images in the sciences. Examples are video conferencing, science channels on YouTube, and maybe most important, although much less often acknowledged, the increasing use of videos as a way of publishing research. Online publishing makes it a lot easier to put moving images alongside texts, whether as PDFs or in other formats. The journal Nature, for example, even has its one section called “Nature Video”.

What I want to show with this overview is that moving images are a standard tool for presenting evidence, communicating knowledge and justifying a given research approach. And more than that, they are not only deployed when the research has been done already. They are important for scientific conceptualization, and for locating possibilities for intervention. Over the course of the twentieth century, the sciences expanded from the book page to the screen, from reading to viewing. Nonetheless, the epistemic status of moving images stays highly controversial to this day. Central categories of scientific work are discussed on the basis of the moving image: are they precise, are they objective, are they reliable, are they installing curiosity, are they a wonder even? Therefore, I would argue it is time to provide a historical basis for a more nuanced discussion.

My aim today is to discuss some aspects of how closely intertwined knowledge, truth-seeking and image production at times have been, not in order to question truth, but to allow a more nuanced understanding of research films and, ultimately, perhaps enable a better kind of ‘truth-seeking’ with moving images. I would like to do this in three steps.

First, I am going to present the perspective on research film that has prevailed in science studies over the last thirty years, namely the focus on visualization. Second, I would like to introduce an approach that focuses instead on the reuses of research film – this is something I have been developing, together with my colleague Sarine Waltenspül, for the last four years. Third, I would like to present some rather preliminary thoughts about a way of making sense of the mobilities and localities involved in producing and screening research films (which is also my project here at eikones).

In my research, I aim to unearth stories from the still largely unknown history of producing, publishing and archiving scientific research films, that means mainly from the period after early film, and its famous inventors, Muybridge, Marey or Comandon, who all used film in their scientific experiments. With this I hope to develop new theoretical approaches for a burgeoning scientific field known as Visual Science and Technology Studies – a convergence of Bildwissenschaften, visual studies, science studies and media studies.

State of Research: Visualization or Making Visible Through the Moving Image

In the following, I will offer a very preliminary sketch of the way research film was generally treated in science studies, in order to distinguish the other approaches that I will present later. In the existing studies on scientific film, film was often conceptualized as an instrument of making movement processes visible to the human eye, of rendering the invisible visible; for example, processes that are too slow (like the locomotion of a snail in film 1) or too fast for the human eye (as in ballistics, see film 2). Film was also employed for more complex kinds of visualization (like microcinematography combined with time dilation or time lapse, see film 3). With these examples I also want to illucidate what I call a “research film”. Most people, when they hear “scientific film,” think about films that represent science (like a biopic about Marie Curie) or films that serve the communication of science. I use the term “research film” to emphasize that I mean films that were made for research, film recordings to do research with – although clear demarcation lines are often not possible to draw.

Coming back to the term visualization: There is a lot to say about this concept of visualization, or in German Sichtbarmachung. Hans Jörg Rheinberger claimed “that making visible something that does not manifest itself directly and therefore is not immediately evident – that is, does not lie before our eyes – is [nothing less than] the foundation and at the same time the foundational gesture of the modern sciences.”[1] Given Rheinbergers influence in science studies and beyond, it is no wonder that the very few scholars who have treated film in the sciences, have followed this path. Here, it is important to note that Rheinberger himself, as well as others stressed that we should not misunderstand scientific work on visibilities as a way of passively registering what was there all along. Instead, any work with cameras should be seen as an active practice of fabrication, manipulation and intervention in its own right. The visibility of the invisible needs to be fabricated. In order to emphasize this practice of fabrication, Sigrid Weigel has suggested the term Bildgebung [imaging]. She pointed out that the term visualization is misleading since it implies that something invisible “exists in concealment and only has to be made visible.”[2] With Bildgebung she stresses the act of forming an image: “…etwas ein Bild geben und nicht nur sichtbar machen.”

Hannah Landecker applied Rheinberger’s ideas to the cinematographic apparatus. According to her, the film camera becomes – when installed in an experimental setting – “a kind of materialized epistemology,” an ontological tool that produces the research material that can then be the basis of research.[3] The camera does not record what was there all along but is instrumental in constituting new phenomena, like cellular time. As such, the film camera can be seen as a tool that was able to change the path of quite a few disciplines by giving them new research material -- for example, a cell biology that focused on behavior rather than structure, or an anthropology that focused on ephemeralities like dance instead of languages. In a similar way the camera changed fluid dynamics, ethology etc. To my mind the most important insight that can be derived from a focus on Bildgebung is that it can help us to better understand how film played its part to fulfill central desires of western modernism: to optimize, to normalize, to colonize and to control.

Let’s look at an example in order to find out how this approach on Bildgebung can be applied. Entitled Entstehung von Wirbeln bei Wasserströmungen/ Production of Vortices of Bodies Travelling in Water, it was made in 1927 by Ludwig Prandtl, who is often credited as the founding figure of modern aerodynamics, and his assistant Oskar Tietjens (film 4). The film shows basic phenomena of flow around objects like cylinders or airfoils, made visible by particles on the surface of a water channel. Production of Vortices delivers a visual treatment of the main theories of Prandtl – mainly the boundary layer theory and the airfoil theory – theories which have been immensely important for the technological development of any human-made object that moves through wind and water in the last 100 years.

The film does not fit easily into the visualization paradigm: while according to Rheinberger the major mode of scientific experimentation consists of generating contractions and expansions in time or space, like slowdowns or speed-ups, the flow film does not use the specificity of the film medium in such a way. Rather, the movement of the water is neither too slow nor too fast, neither too small nor too big. It falls, instead, into the category of what Rheinberger calls enhancement: the visibility of the flow is enhanced “by the super-elevation of existing forms”.[4] The visible flow of the water is made better visible, enhanced by marker particles. With the help of a sophisticated experimental setting with a water channel and a little wagon that carries the object through the water, as well as the camera overhead, the flow is given a picture (fig. 2). The recordings reduce the highly complex phenomenon of the formation of vortices to the movement of white dots around simple shapes. The experimental setting materializes, then – to use Landecker’s terms – the thinking about flow as a movement of particles that accumulate at the surfaces of objects. This is what we could call a materialized epistemology. A few tricks during the development of the film material added further black and white contrast.

Now, why does this approach help us to understand the desires of control often connected with science? The depicted phenomenon was, at least back then, not mathematically solvable, and also not simulatable as it is by some computers today. However, through film the phenomenon of how flow detaches from a surface (which is important for most flow processes that are technologically interesting) became tangible and intuitively treatable. By giving an image to the process the film also rendered the flow as controllable – changing the way a generation of engineers approached the design of airplanes, trains, cars etc. – making it possible to colonize air and water, making a life and a war possible that lost its connection to the earth. In 2022, the Aeronautical Journal brought out a heraldic cover, which stages the old Prandtl as somebody overlooking his technological impact and watching Elon Musk’s space-bound Falcon 9 rocket (fig. 3). With Rheinberger and others we can claim that the usage of film in an experimental setting was catering to the promise that we have an instrumental access to the phenomenon filmed, in other words, that science can be translated into technology: film can be rewound, film can be slowed down, you can zoom in, you can control the direction, you can scale the flow, you can repeat, you can do umpteen things, but can you really?

Current Research: Reuses of a Research Film (book project with Sarine Waltenspül)

In the first part of my presentation, I wanted to show you that a focus on Bildgebung can tell us how the film camera created new relays between knowing and seeing, how it created new worlds through new visualities, and also that it can help us understand how desires of control entered the laboratory. In the rest of my talk I will argue, though, that as important as Bildgebung is, it cannot be all that needs our attention when it comes to epistemology and the moving image. There are other ways to understand how moving images from the sciences had an impact on our societies.

Let’s turn to the flow film again. This time, let us consider its further history beyond its production in the laboratory. At first, Prandtl and some of his students used it in their lectures to support his theories. Prandtl took the film on a world tour, showing it in dozens of lecture halls. Later, it was reused for teaching under National Socialism and even became a model for other university teaching films in an attempt to unify the educational system in Nazi Germany. It was used as such a teaching film, for example, by the Luftkriegsakademie, the central German academy for training air force officers or by the aircraft manufacturing company Heinkel, which produced the aircrafts for the German Luftwaffe. After the war this teaching film was reused unmodified by the IWF (Institut für den wissenschaftlichen Film), one the most ambitious institutes distributing scientific films ever established. In the 1960s, some scenes of the film were reused for recruiting scientists within the framework of the massive efforts to reform US Science Education after the Sputnik shock. These educational movies were then distributed worldwide, in an attempt to present western science as favorable and superior to the state-controlled science of the Eastern Bloc. In the 2000s, the film was reanalyzed by current algorithm-based visualization tools in Fluid Dynamics. Further, in the 2000s it was even curated in the art context by the Dutch experimental filmmaker Joost Rekveld, who also experimented with redeveloping its aesthetics through algorithm-derived images. So already, by only scratching the surface of the history of this film it should become obvious that this research film has had numerous epistemological and political effects well beyond the laboratory in which it was produced (fig. 4).

This flow film has completely escaped the attention of science studies and media studies thus far. It is not listed in any major film lexicon either. Nonetheless, Sarine and I would argue that it can be considered one of the most important research films ever made – but not because it makes something visible. Rather, we would argue that the history of the film shows that moving images in the sciences are not only a way of giving a picture (Bildgebung), but a material trace that leads to and is accompanied by, numerous practices of engagement. A central aspect specific to the medium of film (besides its ability to scale space and time) comes into play here: film is realized as a visual appearance only when screened. The film material needs to be handled, distributed and archived in a special way before it can be screened with special apparatuses. All of these screenings and processes related to using film material from the laboratory outside of the laboratory have powerful effects; they produce differences, they produce new connections between seeing and knowing, they produce or reproduce power relations, they are tools of inclusion or exclusion. Therefore, not only what we see is important, but who sees it, who sends it and where to, who travels with it, who can afford to screen it and where, who can make sense of it and, often even more important, who cannot.

There are manifold connections among knowledge, politics and aesthetics that can be traced to the reuses of these recordings after their use in the laboratory. In order to track these connections Sarine and I developed the idea of following the film material, or better the recordings, through their multiple reuses. This very particular film history has shown us that research films cannot be understood at just one point in their existence; rather, we need to examine their processes and ongoing analog as well as digital (re)cycles and reuses: how, why, and when did the 35mm reels leave the laboratory and how were they distributed, reformatted (as 16 mm, 8 mm or mpeg file), instrumentalized and handled as teaching films, science communication films or art films.

I would like to point out three insights that this approach adds to our understanding of scientific films.

First and to my mind the most important point is that such a film history allows for new narratives. Following the sometimes untrodden path of the film recordings took us on a surprising ride – trespassing the usual boundaries between science and art, between politics and science, between laboratory and cinema we learned more and more about the history of this film and of how fluid dynamics actually made a difference in society. We got to tell a global-local history, a macro-micro history that reveals how developments in science and society were interlinked on both a macro and a micro scale: the mesmerizing flow images are connected with the space race and with the national socialist war of annihilation, as well as with the history of experimental filmmaking. Following the visuals and the materials of the film allowed for a broader and at the same time deeper and more detailed history of fluid dynamics, a livelier history of science and technology.

Secondly, a comprehensive description of the reuses also gave us a hint about which criteria Prandtl and later viewers of the film may have used to evaluate the research images -- latent criteria that were perhaps already present in the laboratory although not explicit; criteria that go beyond visibility, such as, for example, aesthetic experiences that the film allows, aesthetics that are evident in its reuses, but that a German engineer like Ludwig Prandtl could never have expressed. Indeed he would have had to reject these aesthetic experiences – given the common idea of objectivity in the 1920s. In other words, such a history allows us to learn backwards and judge the relevance of certain types of laboratory traces. In this case, it shows how scientific practice was embedded in visual production. Thirdly, with this approach we can move away from an understanding of scientific film that might unintendedly recirculate ideas of the scientific hero or the progressive imaging techniques of the camera, and other origin stories. It can also enable us to tease out connections and entanglements among scientific visuals, technology, politics, the public sphere, and the economy, and help us lay bare the obstacles and barriers to the circulation of knowledge, as well as the bottlenecks and detours knowledge faces. For example, while the flow film did not play a clearly determinable role in the theoretical argumentation within Prandtl's journal papers, the film’s history shows that the film can nonetheless be regarded as his most consulted scientific publication (if regarded as a publication in itself). With this in mind, we might be able to break down some of the rigid periodizations of the discipline’s history. In the case of this film in particular we can debunk the story of a one-paper-revolution, with which Prandtl founded modern aerodynamics in 1904.[5]

To sum up these three points: When we want to study the historical dynamics that led to the current planetary condition (in which the control of basic flow phenomena is absolutely instrumental) we need new models of writing and doing history, models that are both multi-temporal and multi-scalar yet anchored in material histories.

This approach of focusing on reuses (which is inspired by the established ethnographic approach of an object biography), has to this date only very seldomly been applied to film, although there are some similar approaches (that we came across only later in our research process, most famously perhaps Sylvie Lindeperg’s film biography of Alain Resnais “Nuit et Brouillard”).[6] In any case it has not been applied to research films, probably because there are some methodological challenges connected with it. Laboratory recordings are often not one film, they are “more than one but less than many” (to use a phrase by Annemarie Mol and John Law). The Prandtl film, for example, is an unstable object with changing characteristics and liquid borders resembling the liquidity that it portrays. And there are other limitations of this approach: it can only be applied to very few research films, those recordings that were reused, so only to the ‘blockbusters’ in the field. Furthermore, it is directed at one individual example, allowing for case studies, but not for the analysis of a corpus of research films.

In light of these facts, I am currently thinking about approaches that facilitate research about collections of research films; less often reused research films, but rather those films that in the majority of cases await us in the archive. But nonetheless, I am interested in using an approach that supports the idea that not only the scientists or the theories can claim epistemological ownership of the film material. There are many other relations that make a film effective and knowledgeable. In the third and last part of the presentation I would like to make a very preliminary suggestion in this direction and ask whether this approach can be applied to a collection of research films from Basel – I am not looking back at four years of research, then, but rather advancing a research hypothesis.

What I would like to do is research research films by relating the different situations and localities of recording to the situations and localities of screening and watching the films again and again. In other words, I propose to write critical geographies of scholarly production by following the mobilities of the film camera and film material. Echoing Warwick Anderson, I hope that in this way we can better “understand both the situatedness of knowledge practices and their movement through space”, the situated production of globality.[7]

Let me exemplify this here using a research film from the ETH’s collection:

-       Scientific Film is usually characterized by the phenomenon that is inscribed in the film strip: the recorded event. Often this relates to the research object, visualized by the camera. Film five shows a solar eclipse recorded by the influential Swiss astronomer Max Waldmeier, who is known for his sun spot classification (film 5).

-       But there is also the event of the recording – how, when and where has the film camera been set up to record the phenomenon in question: The film of the solar eclipse was taken during an expedition to Khartoum in the Sudan. Fig. 5 shows the unnamed personnel that helped to set up the 8m camera.

-       And then there were the numerous events of screening of the material. Max Waldmeier presented his research, for example, on a TV show about the moon landing in 1969.

Again, instead of focusing only on visualization through the technological means of the camera (the possibilities to film an eclipse), I want to shift my focus to another aspect specific to film. My basic hypothesis is that scientific films become epistemologically powerful in the relationships that the events of recording and the repeated events of screening them constitute. It is this sometimes huge divide between where and how scientific films are produced and how and where they are shown that allows a reflection on the role of images in the scientific process. It might help to write the geographies of scholarly work and question the boundaries and hierarchies among research subjects, objects and the other agents constituted by the dynamic process of making and showing film.

I am aware of the fact that some of the proposed terms resonate with established terms in film theory: like the profilmic event with the recorded event. The model also takes up a differentiation suggested by Ariella Azoulay for the study of photographs. I take what she calls a “political ontology of photography” and adapt it to scientific moving images. Coming from the history of knowledge I am very interested in the ways these ideas are expressed in other traditions of thought.

Future Research: Critical Geographies of Research Film (NOMIS project)

In the last part of my presentation, I would like to briefly demonstrate how I plan to apply this framework to a Swiss film collection. The holdings of Swiss archives are not overwhelming, but there are a few considerable examples that might enrich our understanding of scientific films. Of special interest to me is the collection of the Schweizerische Gemeinschaft für den Lehr- und Forschungsfilm (SGLF)/Swiss Association for Educational and Research Film, held by the Staatsarchiv Basel. Since the 1950s, the SGLF oversaw the production and distribution of films from various sciences, such as ethology, primatology or general biology; but also from cultural anthropology and folklore studies. The SGLF collection. Furthermore, contained the Basel-based sub-archive of the Institute for Scientific Film (IWF), which I mentioned earlier. Interestingly, these films were for a long time maintained and distributed by the Swiss Tropical Institute. The Tropical Institute itself had an extensive archive of film and sound recordings that were produced to document the work of the Tropical Institute at its various locations, as well as for further research in the Basel laboratories (e.g. a film about the tsetse fly, which also documents rites of the local population in Tanzania). The mediating figure and central player in this case was Rudolf Geigy, who served as the director of the Tropical Institute for many years. Geigy was the son of JR Geigy-Schlumberger, heir and director of the pharmaceutical company JR Geigy AG, a predecessor of Novartis and Syngenta (among the biggest pharmaceutical and agricultural companies in the world – and immensely important for Basel). Rudolf Geigy was a committed proponent of research films as research tools.[8]

This Basel collection is particularly interesting from the theoretical perspective I outlined. I would like to exemplify this here with a film from the aforementioned Rudolf Geigy, about research on the parasitic and sometimes deadly disease of African sleeping sickness, or trypanosomiasis: Trypanosomiasen Forschung in Tanganyika (1949, CH). At the time the film was made, Tanganyika was a British mandate; it was renamed Tanzania after it became independent and was united with Zanzibar in 1964 (the following is based on some preliminary readings and research I did last month).

At first sight, the film looks rather unremarkable, as so many scientific films do: the film is not listed in Geigy’s publication list and it is, to my knowledge, not featured in any of his papers (although some of the images are reused in them). Even in an article about the niche genre of films on sleeping sickness, the film is not mentioned. And yes, there is a film studies article by Hans Wulff about sleeping sickness films, mainly because the inventor of microcinematography, Jean Comandon, had already made several 35mm films featuring trypanosomes as early as 1910, which were in turn reused by Jean Painlevé in some of his films. Furthermore, there is a Nazi propaganda film about a drug treating sleeping sickness called Germanin.[9]

(Before analyzing the film by Geigy I have to make a disclaimer: One of the biggest challenges of doing research on and with such material is the question of how to show it or even if I should show it in the first place. This film and films like it were produced in a broader context of colonial violence. They display cruelty towards animals and humans. I believe we need to develop a kind ethics of care when handling these archival traces, as Temi Odumosu has suggested. I have decided to show the film here, since you can find it on vimeo anyway, and since I believe we need to understand its narrative in order to begin thinking about possibilities to unlearn this narrative. For the same reasons, I decided not to replicate the film’s presence online by providing a link to it on the eikones blog. Only a very short excerpt of the microcinematographic recording, along with time stamps, is offered to support my arguments here.)

At the beginning, we follow some unnamed research assistants into the dry savannah looking for nests of the Tsetse flies, the main vector of the disease (2:00). They catch the flies (3:40) and mark them, they drive away with boxes of collected material (6:20), the car is disinfected, then the place changes (6:50). We are introduced to the so-called Tinde laboratory and Dr. Fairbairn’s experiments involving trypanosomes in animals and humans. We see a man, probably Dr Fairbarn (7:20), walking towards a group of captive primates, caged in small wooden boxes (8:00). we see further cages with deer, rabbits and rats, as well as other facilities of the research station, and then we follow the infection of the monkeys with trypanosomes (10:42): they are captured by, again, unnamed research assistants, and exposed to the Tsetse flies, which are trapped in little cages, to infect them with sleeping sickness. Then blood is taken and prepared on a microscope slide. In the following cut (13:00) we see microcinematographic recordings of the parasite moving through the blood (in a narrower sense I would claim that these are the research recordings within the film). The same procedure is shown with a gazelle, some rabbits and a sheep – without the cut to the blood I intimated earlier (Film 6). And finally, we watch the same procedure with a human subject, most probably from the local population (16:35); the man we saw at the beginning controls the blood draw. Again, this scene is followed by a cut to the blood and finally we see how several men receive an injection, probably with the drug Bayer 205, which, as I mentioned carried the propagandist name Germanin during the period of National Socialism (17:49).

Watching this film is a dive-deep into German, British and Swiss colonial history. Sleeping sickness or ugonjwa wa malale (as it was called in one of the local languages) was named “the disease of colonialism” by the historian of Africa, Marynez Lyons.[10] Sleeping sickness was known before the colonial conquest, but it only became endemic in many African regions around the turn to the twentieth century, once colonial rule had disturbed the delicate ecological relations between humans and vectors. This was mainly due to the extractive economies introduced by European colonial rule, namely the extensive cattle-based agriculture that gave the trypanosomes much more hosts to develop and the Tsetse flies much more blood. German and then British, colonial authorities imposed myriad measures to control the disease: forced depopulation, experimental medical treatments, deforestation, internment of the sick. In 1906, the “great” Robert Koch took German East Africa and the local population as his large sleeping sickness laboratory. Koch, among others, suggested concentration camps (KZ) to control the disease.[11] The experiments with humans by the Germans were adopted by the British after the end of German colonial rule in the area. Among these British researchers was Dr Fairbarn from the film, who also used himself as a research subject.

I cannot go deeper into the difficult and broad colonial history of disease control and medical experimentation on sleeping sickness in Tanzania (for example into the local experiences of the affected communities, or the historical dynamics of mortality, etc.).[12] My focus lies on the role of research film and the question of how Geigy’s film fits into the story?

We could again focus on visibility. The recordings of the microcinematographic apparatus fabricate the visibility of the parasite. By showing us how the parasite can move around the blood cells, the disease is visually defined, it shows that the “enemy is in the blood”. By following the flagellum, I can feel the disease, I can feel a fear of the fly coming up. Furthermore, the film makes visible that the blood flows among vectors, animals and humans unless pesticides are used. The editing of the film recordings creates the narrative of how the disease is transmitted, the narrative unfolds how the blood flows. The underlying rationale is, whoever defines the disease visually and conceptually can define the measures to take, such as which pesticides to administer or what treatment to use as a cure. What we cannot see, of course, is the ecological balance that the local practices were able to maintain in order to at least contain the disease in the face of colonization; or the imbalance created by the extractive colonial agriculture; the scale of the concurrent public health programs or the existing therapeutic practices of the African healers.

But again, in this case I would like us to look beyond visibility in order to assess the entanglement of the epistemic with the medium of film. The case study I shared with you today shows the entanglements of the recorded event (the movement of the parasite in blood in film 6), with the event of recording (Geigy with his microcinematography apparatus in his Basel laboratory in fig. 6) and the events of screening (for example in the tropical institute in the Soccinstrasse in Basel in fig. 7, or later at the medical school in Ifakara, Tanzania, in fig. 8).Consequently, such case studies contribute to uncovering the imbrications of scientific visual production with the global flows of knowledge and money, and the hierarchies produced and reproduced by these flows. We should focus on the mobilities of scholars and their films among the laboratory, the distant or nearby fields of investigation, and the lecture hall or other venue.

Event of Recording

In the event of recording, the microcinematographic apparatus that couples a 16mm bolex camera with a microscope comes together with the specimen slides with the blood from animals infected with trypanosomes. The microcinematographic recordings were most probably produced by Geigy after he brought back Tsetse flies (paralyzed in a refrigerator) from his first longer expedition to Africa, more precisely the Congo, in 1945, and after he began to breed Tsetse flies at the Tropical Institute. During this time, he performed several experiments. Besides the microscopic analysis, he tested whether the insecticide DDT would be effective in killing the flies.[13] DDT (Dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane) might ring a bell, especially here in Basel where Novartis recently opened the Wonders of Medicine pavilion, featuring parts of the DDT story (fig. 9). Developed by the chemist Paul Müller in 1939 (who received the Nobel prize for it in 1948), DDT became one of the Geigy AG’s top sellers -- mainly branded as Neocid and Trix.[14] It was extensively used in agriculture and hygiene during the Second World War by the German, as well as the Allied forces. Later, the discovery that DDT was responsible for the deaths of millions of birds, led to a massive environmental scandal. When the influential environmentalist Rachel Carson featured DDT as a main example of the detrimental effects of pesticides on our environment in her 1962 book Silent Spring, DDT became a symbol of the ecological movement.

Back to the Geigy AG in the 1930s and 40s, and to Rudolf Geigy. It was Geigy, among others, who, in the late 1930s, pushed the Geigy AG to develop more pharmaceutical and pesticide products, instead of relying only on chemical products, after he took over his father’s seat on the company board. Interestingly, by the time Geigy tested DDT on the Tsetse flies the margins for DDT were already decreasing and more and more scientific journals were warning of its various side effects.[15] Therefore, the Geigy AG was looking for new markets and new application areas, among them the endemic diseases in Africa (as illustrated in fig. 10 by the map from a report of the Geigy AG’s pesticide division). Geigy’s journeys to Tanganyika, and his interest in Tsetse flies and in trypanosomes have to be seen in this context as well, and should be seen as part of the event of recording.

Events of Screening

The film was most probably screened at the Tropical Institute itself. The tropical institute was founded in 1942 as a reaction to rising fears of an impending economic crisis, specifically a job market crisis, in Switzerland after the end of the war. In order to open new fields of employment, the tropical institute aimed to train those willing to go abroad and administer medical treatment to those returning. As you can see in fig. 7, many of those willing to go abroad were missionaries, which reminds us of the long-held ties of the Basel mission with Africa. Later on, the film was probably screened at the medical school that Geigy and the Tropical Institute founded in Ifakara, Tanzania, with the help of missionaries.

If we re-watch the sequence I emphasized earlier, but this time with the knowledge of the relationships among recorded phenomenon, place of recording and event of screening in mind, we can discern how the microcinematographic material produced in Basel and the film material produced in Tanganiyka has been put together. I would claim that the editing bridges not only the huge gap between infected person and blood, but also between Basel and Tanganiyka, between the research of the Geigy AG in Basel and its franchise locations in East Africa. Tropical medicine is characterized by the distance between the place of research and the place of evaluation or publication of the results. One medium of translation between here and there was film. This particular film is a powerful example of how film was able to support the assumption that it is possible to do research here about there. It does so not (mainly) through theories or world views that are based on superiority, but through a flow of images that create a space-time continuum between here and there. Film affirms a privileged position from which inequalities can be justified.

I believe it could be interesting to do some more case studies in this manner within the holdings of the Staatsarchiv Basel.

To wrap up, I hope I was able to convey that film and science are not situated at different ends of the spectrum. There are instead quite a few ways that moving images can impinge on our beliefs. They make us know something that cannot be known otherwise. Making something visible or better, Bildgebung, is just one way of doing so. Making connections, bridging realms and places or entangling knowledge, people, politics and capital, is another. Films are key if we want to understand the localness of scientific production, how the produced knowledge travels and is then universalized and used as an asset in an economy that is globally active and reproduces global inequalities. Therefore, as I delve into a collection that is archived so close to the Rheinsprung, I also hope to uncover one of the many colonial pasts of Switzerland, a land that never possessed colonies but is nonetheless shaped by colonialism in a variety of ways.

[1] Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2010. "Making Visible. Visualization in the Sciences – and in Exhibitions?" In The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship. Preprint 399. Edited by Susanne Lehmann-Brauns, Christian Sichau, Helmuth Trischler, Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, pp. 9–23, here p. 9.

[2] Weigel, Sigrid. 2015. Grammatologie der Bilder. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015, here p. 10 (Translation M.S.).

[3] Landecker, Hannah. 2011. “Creeping, Drinking, Dying: The Cinematic Portal and the Microscopic World of the Twentieth-Century Cell.” Science in Context 24 (3), pp. 381–416., doi:10.1017/S0269889711000160. Among others, Jimena Canales, Lisa Cartwright, Scott Curtis, Oliver Gaycken, Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, Hanna Rose Shell, Janina Wellmann and Yvonne Zimmermann have made valuable contributions to the slowly growing literature on the history of research films.

[4] Rheinberger 2010, p. 13.

[5] Cf. a historiography of a one-paper-revolution for example: Anderson Jr., John D. 2005. “Ludwig Prandtl’s Boundary Layer.” Physics Today 58, pp. 42–48; Tani, Itiro. 1977. “History of Boundary-Layer Theory.” Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics 9, pp. 87–111; Goldstein, Sydney. 1969. “Fluid Mechanics in the First Half of This Century.” Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics 1, pp. 1–28.

[6] Lindeperg, Sylvie. 2007. “Nuit et brouillard”: Un Film Dans L’Histoire. Paris: O. Jacob.

[7] Anderson, Warwick. 2009. “From subjugated knowledge to conjugated subjects: science and globalisation, or postcolonial studies of science?.” Postcolonial Studies 12 (4), pp. 389-400, here p. 394.

[8] Geigy, Rudolf. 1956. “Gedanken zur Schaffung einer Film-Enzyklopädie.” Research Film 2 (3), pp. 145–150.

[9] Wulff, Hans J. 2022. “Kontinentale Seuchen. Die Filme der afrikanischen und europäischen Schlafkrankheit.” In Seuchen, Epidemien und Pandemien im Film. Ein kaleidoskopisches Panorama zur Geschichte des Infektionsfilms. Edited by Hans J. Wulff, pp. 137–150.

[10] Lyons, Maryinez. 1992. The Colonial Disease: A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire, 1900-1940. Cambridge University Press, 1992.

[11] Eckart, Wolfgang. 2002. “The colony as laboratory: German sleeping sickness campaigns in German East Africa and in Togo, 1900-1914.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 24 (1), pp. 69–89. See also Bauche, Manuela. 2017. Medizin und Herrschaft: Malariabekämpfung in Kamerun, Ostafrika und Ostfriesland (1890-1919). Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.

[12] The history of sleeping sickness has received intensive attention also in recent years: Webel, Mari K. 2019. The Politics of Disease Control: Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890-1920. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

[13] Geigy, Rudolf. 1946. “Beobachtungen an einer Zucht von Glossina palpalis.” Verhandlungen der Schweizerischen Naturforschenden Gesellschaft 126, pp. 155–158.

[14] Cf. for a history of the Tropical Institute: Meier, Lukas. 2012. Striving for Excellence at the Margins: Science, Decolonization, and the History of the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH) in (post-)colonial Africa, 1943-2000. Dissertation University of Basel. Cf. for a history of DDT: Straumann, Lukas. 2005. Nützliche Schädlinge: angewandte Entomologie, chemische Industrie und Landwirtschaftspolitik in der Schweiz 1874-1952. Zürich: Chronos, pp. 257–311.

[15] Straumann 2005, pp. 257–265. Cf. an overview of the development of the Geigy AG from the 1930s to 1950s: Kutter, Markus. 1958. Geigy heute: die jüngste Geschichte, der gegenwärtige Aufbau und die heutige Tätigkeit der J.R. Geigy A.G., Basel und der ihr nahestehenden Gesellschaften: Jubiläumsschrift zum 200jährigen Bestehen des Geigy-Unternehmens 1958. Basel: Geigy, pp. 13–62.