Film emerged out of science. The invention of motion-picture technology was a scientific triumph, from the invention of photography to the development of sophisticated cameras and audiovisual effects. For early audiences, the mere experience of going to the movies involved participating in a cutting-edge scientific project.
If film and science have drifted apart along the lines of C.P. Snow’s postulation—two polar cultures marked by a “gulf of mutual incomprehension"—a recent enterprise in the world of cinema aspires to reunite the discourses. In our family, where the son (an English professor) followed the father (a biochemist) into academia, the sciences and humanities always blended more easily than Snow described. We joined forces this fall for a kind of Siskel-and-Ebert look at science films at Hungary’s Tisza Mozi International Scientific Film Festival.
Szolnok, an hour from Budapest, might seem an unlikely site for this gathering, but Hungarian scientists have a rich legacy. Besides the Rubik’s cube, their track record includes Ignaz Semmelweis’s discovery that hand washing prevents childbed fever; Leo Szilard’s and Edward Teller’s advances in nuclear physics; and 13 Nobel Prizes in the sciences. A few similar festivals have come along since Tisza Mozi’s 2001 debut: the Goethe Institute’s Science Film Festival, started in 2005, takes place across Southeast Asia, and New York’s Imagine Science Film Festival began in 2008, the same year as Cinémascience, in Bordeaux, France.
We came with two basic questions: What exactly is a science film, and does it follow the “rules” of science?
“A good science film should stimulate discussion, debate, and thought, make science more accessible, and not feel too pedagogic or preachy,” said the British filmmaker Samantha Moore. “It should engage the audience like any other film but stealthily fuel the audience’s curiosity about the world around us and the worlds within us.”
Alex Gabbay, another British director, sees science films “in the process of radical change” as science moves “into the softer and more ambiguous areas that have been traditionally taboo—consciousness, for example.” He hopes to reach audiences “by forcing them to re-examine what they already know,” and to “inculcate a sense of wonder of how the world works and a desire to understand it.”
Offering advice for other science filmmakers, the Australian director Sonya Pemberton told us, “The issue of relationship with the scientist is crucial. Building trust is key. Make sure you have done your research to a high level before you make contact.” Pitfalls include “failing to get independent experts on board, believing the science is static, arrogance, and failing to understand the world of science, peer review, publication, and funding.”
Science films promote appreciation for the ethos of science, Sidney Perkowitz writes in Hollywood Science (Columbia University Press, 2007), stimulating the public to support important projects and research funds. They are “an invitation to learn,” making science more accessible: lifting the veil.
When Einstein asked, “Why is it that nobody understands me, and everybody likes me?” he might have been speaking about science in general. The films we saw help audiences to bridge this gap in understanding.
The National Science Foundation runs a program, Informal Science Education, that supports media projects designed to inspire future scientists and to communicate to mass audiences the excitement of discovery. The National Academy of Sciences, through its Science & Entertainment Exchange, connects filmmakers with scientists “to create a synergy between accurate science and engaging storylines” (see “Science Meets Hollywood,” The Chronicle, Feb. 14, 2010).
Szolnok’s festival taps into the academic discipline of science communication, a field committed to bridging Snow’s perceived gap of incomprehension. Unfortunately, scientists are not as prominent in this field as communication specialists are, and there were not nearly as many scientists attending as film scholars and students. Perhaps there’s some truth to the stereotypical image of lab-bound hyperspecialists.
Two of our favorite films reflected how science may be effectively presented either in microscopic close-up or as a big picture: Pemberton’s Immortal is a keenly focused documentary about discovering an enzyme that delays aging, while Gabbay’s Just Trial and Error presents a broad, rambling theoretical conversation among four thinkers that foregrounds the perspectives and philosophies that motivate scientific inquiry.
In Immortal, Elizabeth Blackburn, a 2009 Nobel laureate in physiology, talks about her work, which grew out of Leonard Hayflick’s findings that normal cells in tissue culture can divide only about 50 times before they senesce, while tumor cells continue to divide and appear immortal. Hypothesizing that such “immortality” is feasible in biological species, researchers subsequently discovered that the ends of chromosomes, called telomeres, became frayed as cells aged. Pemberton’s animations depict this fraying as analogous to shoelace tips’ unraveling.
Examining how telomeres could be maintained, Blackburn discovered and isolated the repair enzyme, telomerase. Subsequent experiments, in which the telomerase gene was inserted into dying cells, maintained the telomeres intact and sustained the proliferation of those cells beyond 50 divisions, providing a potential fountain of youth. Unfortunately, telomerase is a double-edged sword, since maintaining the telomere’s structure risks transforming normal cells into cancer cells. Fine-tuning is necessary before scientists can actually increase human life span. This research continues to unfold via genetic engineering, new drugs, and behavior modification, which may enable extending mortality beyond its current limits while maintaining the quality of life.
Both a scientist and a nonspecialist could easily follow Immortal. Knowing that the subject was potentially impenetrable for general audiences, Pemberton explained, “The visual language was trying to be energized, trying to be poetic and elegant and visually pretty, because it’s hard, it’s dense science, and if you just make it as a piece of information, I think we all would have curled up and gone to sleep on the floor.”
Just Trial and Error takes on consciousness and discovery. Two of its four stars are “conventional” scientists: the perceptual neuroscientist Beau Lotto and the cognitive neuroscientist Brian Butterworth (both from University College London). The others, the Internet entrepreneur Twain Luu and the sculptor Antony Gormley, wouldn’t immediately seem to be scientists, but we come to realize that they are in the broader enterprises of exploration and experimentation that Gabbay explores.
They talk about the role of consciousness—perception, creation, existence—in their work as they recount their professional experiences: their trials and errors. For Gormley, seemingly aimless “fiddling” is a crucial mode of discovery: “I’ve always liked fiddling about with stuff as a way of thinking. Because I’m not sure I trust thinking by itself. In fact, it’s got me into a lot of trouble.” Art means asking questions, Lotto says, and “not providing necessarily the answers, but it’s creating the space for other people to create their own answers. And by creating their own answers, it becomes part of them. In fact, that’s what education doesn’t do. Education tells you the answer, and so that answer is no longer part of you. You didn’t discover it.”
Trial and error is how evolution works, Lotto says. “Learning and development and evolution are more or less the same thing ... over different time frames. They’re just different ways of shaping the structure of the brain, according to the history of experience.”
Lotto proposes a new framework for teaching: “Through education we’re taught that there’s a right and a wrong way of doing things. We’re taught that it’s this, not that. We’re taught facts. What we really need to be teaching kids is how to think, that the world’s gray, that there are different ways of solving a problem.” There’s too much certainty in the world, he says. “What we need is a little more uncertainty ... because it’s only through uncertainty that there’s the potential for understanding.”
This discussion is set in a film language grounded in—but also energetically transcending—the documentary default mode of talking heads, as the four thinkers’ contrapuntal dialogue invites audiences into the conversation. Gabbay employs a scintillating variety of techniques: slow motion; stills; fancy graphics; a few lingering, abstract, artsy shots (inflected by Gormley’s stark, resonant aesthetic); landscapes changing from sepia to full color to overbright fade-out; captivating close-ups of eyes and lips when people are talking about sensory output and input, and of hands making and doing.
Just Trial and Error was accessible—not too technical, not too watered down. A film like this could be appreciated by so many audiences. Beyond specialists and students (in neuroscience, art, Internet studies), creative businesspeople and entrepreneurs would appreciate its inspirational and motivational approach. The potential audience for science films is fragile, easily scared off by the subject, but Gabbay demonstrates how to draw viewers in.
Other films that stood out as especially informative include the 2009 German production Swarms: The Intelligence of the Masses, directed by Jakob Kneser. It explores species, including birds, fish, and ants, that demonstrate a collective intelligence resulting in coordinated labor. Ants make local decisions to get food, take care of their young, or remove garbage, but no single ant is in charge: The collective somehow decides. Robotic models based on what investigators have learned from animal swarms offer promising advances for artificial intelligence. With this model, designers wouldn’t need to program robots at highly sophisticated levels but could instead prepare them to “evolve,” adapting to changing circumstances and solving problems together.
Taste the Waste, also from Germany, is Valentin Thurn’s depressing 2010 account (these films not infrequently present disturbing truths) of how much food Western society wastes: enough to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world three times over. The food industry destroys huge amounts of otherwise nutritious food because of finicky consumer demand for produce like straight (rather than curved) cucumbers, and tomatoes computer-certified to be exactly the right shade of red. A baker explains how a generation ago his father’s bakery would sell perhaps 10 kinds of breads, but today’s consumers expect 60 varieties, necessitating more wastage. Like many science films, Taste the Waste implicitly conveys a message that is a key element of science: Learn, and behave more intelligently in the future.
The Power of Hugs, a happier Belgian production by Patrice Goldberg and Veronique Neczyporenko, typified the kind of film that taught us a great deal about something we’d never much thought of before: “Caresses influence our lives to an extent you wouldn’t imagine.” Touch stimulates the release of oxytocin, the hormone of bonding. For nursing babies, cuddling is as important as milk. Hugs make people more resistant to stress. And children who are touched more learn better and have more-expressive language skills. A therapist explains that when a couple comes in with relationship conflicts, she prescribes reciprocal massage.
Is the Magnetic Field About to Flip?, a 2010 film by Yanick Rose, examines the two North Poles. The Geographic North Pole is stationary, but the Magnetic North Pole is moving 50 kilometers per year, headed toward Siberia. There have been 300 reversals, in which the North and South Poles switch, over the past 250 million years, according to scientists who test cores of ocean sediment containing metals that point to differently located poles in different eras.
As in many of the other films, the scientists here come across as resoundingly passionate about their work and determined to make people aware of its implications. The last reversal was 780,000 years ago, and we’re long overdue for another flip. When that happens, multiple poles will crop up and then will clump together as the world again becomes bipolar, but during the several thousand years when this reversal is under way, we will have less protection from cosmic rays (the magnetic shield protects us from the sun’s radiation), and our communications systems will falter.
An exuberantly animated film, An Eyeful of Sound (2010), by Samantha Moore, a senior lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton, in England, portrays the condition of people whose senses are combined in a way that gives them heightened visual responses to sounds. One woman explains: “I like muted sounds, people walking. Not clippity high heels ... but softer shoes. That’s the kind of sound I like. I feel it in my mouth and I taste it. It’s lovely.” The film’s music and images combine to give viewers a dazzling sense of the rare condition of audiovisual synesthesia, which, Moore explains, becomes “more understandable when you have it explained, not through talking heads and a scientist giving a ‘voice of God’ narrative, but by actually seeing what they see.”
The 2011 German film Growth is Florian Heinzen-Ziob’s quirky experimental meditation, infused with Proustian memories, on the paradoxes of life and change. The growth and decline of his grandfather’s beloved cherry tree (and of the grandfather himself) is randomly juxtaposed with planetary change, dinosaur extinction, historical and economic development. The film’s unapologetic self-consciousness provokes viewers to challenge what is usually the more macrocosmic and generalized discourse of science. The stories that science tells so rigidly can also be presented idiosyncratically. The characterization of “experimental film"—like Growth, several of the films we saw fit that category—struck us as resonating keenly with the scientific process of experimentation: Both science and film experiments present something new by venturing beyond the status quo.
If you’d been sitting in the theater near us, the scientist dad and the humanist son, here’s some of the dialogue you might have heard as we appraised the films from our different perspectives:
“As a scientist, I’m surprised at how much science I’m learning here.”
“I am, too, though I’m not always sure how I know if it’s accurate. It seems to be, but how would I know—except for the fact that you’re sitting beside me? I guess they’re ‘accurate’ to the extent that they’re ‘scientific.’ From your perspective, do you consider these films ‘science’?”
“If science is defined by the use of the scientific method—making a hypothesis, testing it by systematically collecting evidence, and analyzing the data to see if the original hypothesis is true or false—these films present me with enough ‘data’ to convince me that swarm logic, the synesthetic experience, the anti-aging effect, the magnetic shift are all ‘true.’”
“As much as I appreciate the insights of each individual film, they sort of start to meld together after a while—especially the nature documentaries. Did you feel that?”
“No, I think I appreciate each on its own merit, as if it was a separate data point.”
“Notice how a lot of films include archival clips from those grainy old-style classroom science films, with lots of test tubes and dials. It’s postmodern intertextuality: They reference those stiff, dull filmstrips from the past to remind us how perky and dynamic and technologically sophisticated they are today.”
“Huh.” (Rolls eyes.) “I notice a pretty direct relationship between how good a film is and how long its credits are. The best films are clearly well-supported by funding agencies, government organizations, and other partnerships. You see the same correlation between the quality of a scientific publication and its monetary support. You get what you pay for.”
“These films really bring viewers right into the labs, peering over scientists’ shoulders. How would you feel about someone coming into your lab and watching you do science?”
“No problem, as long as it was posthumous, so it wouldn’t interrupt my work.”
