The ciné-biologists: natural history film and the co-production of knowledge in interwar Britain

Abstract

This article analyses the production and reception of the natural history film series Secrets of Nature (1919–33) and its sequel Secrets of Life (1934–47), exploring what these films reveal about the role of cinema in public discourses about science and nature in interwar Britain. The first part of the article introduces the Secrets using an ‘intermedial’ approach, linking the kinds of natural history that they displayed to contemporary trends in interwar popular science, from print publications to zoos. It examines how scientific knowledge was communicated in the series, especially the appeal to everyday experience as a vehicle to engage mass audiences with scientific subjects. The second part examines the Secrets series through the lens of knowledge co-production, detailing how a range of different figures, including academic scientists, nature photographers, producers and teachers, became entangled in making the films. Recovering the term ‘ciné-biology’, it argues that Secrets developed a unique style of filmmaking that generated cultural space for the life sciences in British popular culture. The third part analyses two interwar cinema experiments to explore how audiences, imagined and real, shaped the kinds of natural knowledge characterized by the Secrets films.

Mendel's closet: genetics, eugenics and the exceptions of sex in Edwardian Britain

“…91 Max Long has looked at popular natural history. 92 Katy Price has charted the erratic reception of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in interwar Britain across a broad range of platforms, making a compelling case that 'it is the more ephemeral material from newspapers and magazines that most clearly demonstrates how even very abstract scientific ideas or language may be exploited as a rich and flexible cultural resource, resulting in multiple meanings that vary with audience and outlet.' 93 Price's study underscores just how ideologically and rhetorically multifaceted the processes of popularization are, involving a broad array of actors, texts, personal and professional agendas, and religious and sociopolitical ideologies that shape, reshape and often censor scientific knowledge of all kinds to different, often contradictory, ends.…”

Common Grounds: Thinking With Ruderal Plants About Other (Filmic) Histories

“…26, nº 2, April 2019, pp. 243-265), Max Long's, "The ciné-biologists: natural history film and the co-production of knowledge in interwar Britain" [4] and Colin Williamson's "The Garden in the Laboratory: Arthur C. Pillsbury's Time-Lapse Films and the American Conservation Movement" (Philosophies, 2022, 7, nº 5: 118. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7050118). See also the collective book Puissance du végétal et cinéma animiste.…”

“…6 Produced by British Instructional Films, the extremely popular series Secrets of Nature released 144 documentaries between 1922 and 1933: out of these, 39 films focused on the plants. On Secrets of Nature, see, among others, Max Long, "The ciné-biologists: natural history film and the co-production of knowledge in interwar Britain" [4]. 7 In their book Secrets of Nature (1939), filmmakers Mary Field and F. Percy Smith dedicate a few, amusing pages to the topic of "plants as film stars" (p. 147).…”

“…As early as 1896, there was talk in the French press of documenting the lifecycle of a rose (or of a rhododendron) by means of the movie camera 3 . Before the Institute Marey put the idea into practice, German botanist Wilhelm Pfeffer shot four time-lapse studies on plant motion between 1898 and 1900, the technique "endow[ing] plants with a vivid sense of vitality" (p. 56, [3]) 4 . Envisaged as a new research tool by different disciplines, among which was plant physiology, filmic technology began to unmoor itself from its anthropocentric underpinnings, exploring other-than-human scales and helping to shake the boundaries of century-old conceptions about life and the living 5 .…”

“…technique "endow[ing] plants with a vivid sense of vitality" (p. 56, [3]) 4 . Envisaged as a new research tool by different disciplines, among which was plant physiology, filmic technology began to unmoor itself from its anthropocentric underpinnings, exploring otherthan-human scales and helping to shake the boundaries of century-old conceptions about life and the living 5 .…”