In the biographical files of the New York Academy of Medicine, sharing a page with news entries documenting French claims to international railway speed and air flight records, appears a 1954 obituary for Auguste Lumiere, patriarch of the cinema. The appearance of Lumiere's obituary among these items is not surprising. The Cinematographe, an instrument for the recording and projection of living motion invented by Lumiere and his brother Louis in 1895, certainly would seem to deserve a place alongside these technologies of movement. However, the obituarist barely notes Lumiere's reputation as a founder of the cinema. Instead, he extols his near-lifelong commitment to medical biology, pharmacology, and experimental physiology.
After 1900 Lumiere's work, and much of the production of the Lumiere plant in Lyons, turned toward medical research and production. The obituarist singles out as Lumiere's most significant accomplishment not his work on the cinema but his laboratory research on tuberculosis and cancer, diseases that continue to elude scientific control even now, at the end of the twentieth century. By the end of his life, Lumiere believed scientific medical research to be one of the most important areas of work in Western culture. In a text on the achievements of science published six years before his death, he attributes Western progress to advances in pharmaceutical and medical technology:
It would be impossible to deny that the discoveries of Science always have affected Humanity's material progress. . . . Formal proof of this is found in the fact that these discoveries have permitted the existence of man to be prolonged to the point that the average life span has tripled since the beginning of our century.
Although he here cites the prolonged life span as proof of "Humanity's material progress," Lumiere relegates the Cinematographe, an instrument of mass culture that can record but does not appear to alter the body physically, to a few anecdotal pages near the close of the book.4 Oddly, Lumiere does not explain that many of his European and North American contemporaries regarded his popular invention as a key contribution to physiology—the very field of research through which he contributed to the advancement of French public health and the prolongation of the average life span. Certainly he was not unaware of the use of his invention in physiological research. In addition to the manufacture of products for a mass-audience cinema, the Lumiere laboratory designed and produced specialized cameras and film stock for the laboratories of scientists and physicians—researchers for whom the Cinematographe was no less an instrument of physiological research than the microscope or the kymograph (a rotating drum-shaped apparatus used to inscribe movement in a wavelike linear trace).
Lumiere's historical elision of his own popular invention from the history of science and medicine is symptomatic of a broader disregard for the cultural implications of the technological interdependency of science and forms of popular culture. It is a commonplace of film scholarship that the popularization of the serial motion photography of physiological movement produced by Etienne-Jules Marey in France and Eadweard Muybridge in the United States was key to the technological development of the cinema, and a few early film histories describe the scientific film as an important genre of the early cinema. However, what remains largely unconsidered is the extent to which the particular visual modes that were operative in laboratory techniques like kymography and chronophotography, or in the science film, are integral to other genres of the cinema and of popular visual culture.
Scholarly descriptions of many Lumiere films as realist do underscore their indebtedness to the genre of the science film. Lumiere films such as La sortie des usines Lumiere a Lyon (1895) or Arrivee d'un train en gare de Villefranche-sur-Saone (1895) are cited often as precursors of documentary cinema. Alan Williams suggests that actuality films like these were implicated in the popular science genre of the 1890s media and press. His point is that the Lumiere public "was presumed to be interested in the question of the 'realism' of the images, though certainly not for the sake of the subjects represented but for the demonstration they afforded of 'scientific' interest and technical virtuosity." Williams implies that these films qualified as realist because they allowed living movement to be observed, and not because they depicted "real" events. "What was documented," he explains, "was the work of the apparatus itself."
In this book, I examine closely the place of film in the scientific project of observing the movement of living bodies, in order to propose an alternative to the designation of the science film as a documentary and realist mode of representation. I suggest that the scientific analyses of living bodies conducted in laboratories of medicine and science were in fact based in a tradition that broke with the photographic and theatrical conventions that would inform both the documentary and the narrative cinema—a tradition that is linked to laboratory instruments of graphic inscription and measurement such as the myograph, the kymograph, and the electrocardiograph. Scientific interest in physiological movement and its technological instrumentation is indebted precisely to the modes and techniques of motion recording and observation developed by experimental physiologists in France and Germany throughout the nineteenth century, those physiologists whose work falls within Auguste Lumiere's "other" field, medical science.
One of my primary claims here is that the cinematic apparatus can be considered as a cultural technology for the discipline and management of the human body, and that the long history of bodily analysis and surveillance in medicine and science is critically tied to the history of the development of the cinema as a popular cultural institution and a technological apparatus. Accounts of the prehistory of the cinema almost always begin with a description of the legacy of science in the cinema vis-a-vis the physiological motion studies of Muybridge and Marey. It is by now a commonplace of film history that many of the techniques and instruments that contributed to the emergence of the cinema were designed and used by scientists, and that they were developed as a means of investigation into optics and physiology. As F. A. Talbot, the author of a 1912 history of the motion picture, explains,
In its very earliest stages the value of animated photography was conceded to be in the field of science rather than that of amusement. [Marey] realized the inestimable value of "chronophotography" for the study and investigation of moving bodies, the rapidity in the changes of the position or form of which was impossible to follow otherwise.
The historical narrative quickly shifts, however, from science to popular culture. Marey, the story goes, by failing to see the value of the Cinematographe, failed to bring the film motion study into the twentieth century. His rejection of the Cinematographe, an instrument so heavily laden with the promise of visual technology's future, coincides with the moment of the birth of the cinema in the public sphere, its availability to mass audiences in public screening halls. The prehistory of the cinema is conventionally told as a tale of early scientific experimentation marked by a break with science around 1895 with the emergence of a popular film culture and industry.
What this narrative leaves out is that the scientific film culture that contributed to the emergence of the popular cinema thrived beyond 1895, extending well into the twentieth century. This book traces the course of scientific cinema into the twentieth century, a history elided from most film history texts. But my aim here is not simply to set the film historical record straight. The history of the cinematic motion study is a crucial part of the history of the human body. Through such techniques as cinematic motion study, the body was measured, regulated, and reconceptualized in medicine and science. My aim then is to trace the history of this reconfiguration of the body through scientific techniques of motion recording and analysis—techniques that were used to put forth a model of the body as a dynamic, distinctly living and moving, system. A history of the film motion study is thus also a part of the history of twentieth-century scientific knowledge and power. This volume seeks to uncover a history of the cinematic techniques that science has used to control, discipline, and construct the human body as a technological network of dynamic systems and forces. But it also seeks to demonstrate that this history is complexly interwoven with other areas of visual culture.
I argue throughout this book that the importance of the film motion study is primarily neither its contribution to a singular dominant industry or optical paradigm nor its contribution to medical knowledge. Its greatest importance is its function as an intertext between popular and professional representations of the body as the site of human life and subjectivity. As a mode of knowledge, the film motion study is interesting less for what it showed researchers about the mechanics of human life than for what it tells us now about the cultural desires, pleasures, and fantasies surrounding the modernist dynamic model of "life" generated in physiology and medical science and advanced through technologies like the cinema. The film body of the motion study thus is a symptomatic site, a region invested with fantasies about what constituted "life" for scientists and the lay public in the early twentieth century, and anxieties about whether the "life" scientists studied in the laboratory was something that could be seen, imaged, and ultimately controlled (whether by prolonging it, as Lumiere wished to do, or by having the authority to determine the moment of death).
Throughout this book, I consider instances in science in which film is implicated in the task of tracing the movements and changes of the body's systems and processes. I argue that, on one level, this cinematic tracking of the human body was a form of medical surveillance and social control. In this sense, the films I consider can be seen as a counterpart to the institutional practice of using photography to classify, to diagnose, and to maintain control over subjects deemed criminal, mentally ill, or otherwise aberrant.11 But I also show that these films contributed to the generation of a broad cultural definition of the body as a characteristically dynamic entity—one uniquely suited to motion recording technologies like the cinema, but also one peculiarly unsuited to static photographic observation because of its changeability and inferiority. Many of the films described in this volume were the culmination of years of effort on the part of scientists to glimpse a view of the body's interior systems in action. But, as I will try to show, this compulsion to reveal the interior technologies of the living body on motion-picture film involved a break with older conventions of photography and, perhaps para doxically, instituted a crisis in scientific observation generally. The cinema I trace in the following chapters, then, is a cinema that is linked in important ways not only to the traditions of photography and the theater but also to a nonpictorial system of representation functioning in science throughout the nineteenth century, a tradition that emerged with physiology, the science devoted to the study of living systems in motion.
In the section that follows, I attempt to theorize this nonpictorial tradition of cinematic representation through accounts of the cinematic apparatus in order to ground my discussion of this distinctly nonpictorial, analytic, and surveillant cinema. My intention is to show that theories of the apparatus and spectatorship have not adequately accounted for the long-term impact of the scientific culture and economy so prevalent in the cinema's early history.
Moreover, the techniques of scientific observation and analysis considered throughout this volume constitute a mode of visuality that subtends some popular cinema genres in subtle but important ways. The pleasures of "distanced" analytic viewing, I argue, are not peculiar to the genre of the motion study but have pervaded the popular cinema and other institutions. Surveillant looking and physiological analysis, then, are not just techniques of science. They are broadly practiced techniques of everyday public culture.
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