International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1934)

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THE CINEMA IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH 75 serves, has succeeded in creating more powerful senses for himself, making his sight more penetrating by using the telescope, to explore the immensity of space, and the microscope, to bring to light the world of the infinitely small. With balance and compass he has been able to determine with exactitude the weight and volume of bodies, which he could have done but very roughly by simple touch. When a phenomenon is so minute or is produced so rapidly that we cannot perceive it, or when it develops at such a slow rate that it would be impossible for us to follow it through its various phases, when, that is to say, it occurs within those limits where the eye ceases to see and the ear to hear, or the sense of touch to feel, or also when our perceptions deceive us, these instruments reveal senses to us that are of portentous precision and become the indispensable intermediaries between mind and matter. Nothing can be done in physics, chemistry or astronomy without the aid of research instruments, and physical and chemical agents are more completely demonstrated and are better defined by the characteristics which are revealed by instrumental analysis alone. The naturalist, when he realized the need of no longer having to restrict his activities to the observation of the forms of animal and plant organization and desired instead to investigate the conditions and manifestations of life, was likewise forced to have recourse to instrumental analysis and to proceed in the same way as the chemist and physicist. It is only in this way that the human mind has been able to get outside the circle in which it had been enclosed for centuries, contemplating the superficies of objects and the less important manifestations of the phenomena of nature, and consuming in sterile dialectics that power which it uses today to carry out rigorous observations for the satisfaction of its need of causal explanation. If we leave aside the telescope, microscope and a few other apparata, it may almost be said that the progress of instrumental re search began with the first years of the nineteenth century, increasing from then onwards in a marvellous way which detaches inquiry more and more from direct observation and eliminates every element of subjectivity from the description of phenomena. The first instruments to appear and take firm hold and impose their use were those of graphic registration ; but this method was found to be not altogether satisfactory for a large number of phenomena, and was gradually replaced by optical registration, which opened new paths that are still being followed with magnificent results. The Cinematograph We come now to the Applied to Scien moment when the pos tific Research, and sJbi,itJes and adyan, its Principal Funo . t L , , . tages or photographic tions. . registration were beginning to be realized, and to the first stage of those experiments and studies which were later to culminate in that most perfect of instruments, the cinematographic camera. In the beginning, scientists saw only a powerful aid for the analysis of certain phenomena in photographic registration, and their experiments were therefore restricted to the search for those subjects which would allow of the taking of a large number of photograms in a unit of time. The utility of the decomposition of the synthesis of movements into their constituent elements was not realized until later, when scientists had a clear notion, through the very results of the analysis, of the advantages that could be drawn from the recomposition of movements under the most suitable conditions for studying them. Cinematography, applied to scientific research, fulfils two distinct functions. The first is of a documentary nature, and therefore enables us to see, study and repeat at will the demonstration of photographically registered facts. The second is intended to compensate the insufficiency of one of our senses, and thereby to render visible a vast complexity of phenomena which are inaccessible to direct observation.