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Framework 52, No. 1, Spring 2011, pp. 66–82.Copyright © 2011 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.

I no longer know if I’m looking with my naked eye at a starry sky or at a drop of water in a microscope.

Blaise Cendrars, “Profound Today” (1917)

Hors d’oeuvre, French for “outside of the work,” commonly brings to mind small dishes that come prior to an entrée or, more formally, between the soup and entrée. An hors d’oeuvre performs a modest act of seduction, whetting the appetite, delicately stoking desire, and making overtures or ouvertures (openings) for what is to come. The culinary defi nition is but one of a number of meanings of the term, and is actually a more recent usage. In its most literal sense, hors d’oeuvre refers to supplemental elements of an architectural structure, an artwork, or a piece of literature— an ornamental or decorative fl ourish or an appendix that is supposed to be inessential to a work’s integrity, lying outside of what is proper to it, and vestigial to the vitality of its corpus.1 The hors d’oeuvre is often playful (“I write this hors d’oeuvre to divert you”) but it can also signify extraordinary objects or events that are “outside [the] customary place or time” or “out of the ordinary course.”2

The hors d’oeuvre announces, prefaces, and can even initiate or spur the oeuvre. It comes before. It starts a specifi ed course (the main course) without necessarily belonging to its sequence, succession, or telos. It stands outside of or exterior to the work (even when physically within it), and from this vantage can introduce eccentric and heterogeneous possibilities into the work or draw them out of it. Typically small (or at least relatively smaller) in scale, the hors d’oeuvre is incidental but not inconsequential. It presents a

Hors d’oeuvre: Science, the Short Film, and The Perception of LifeJames Leo Cahill

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beginning, an outside, a diversion, and an uncommon, even slightly untimely event or phenomenon.

* * *The science fi lm has historically played the role of hors d’oeuvre, in its mul-tiple senses, to narrative, documentary, and experimental cinemas. As a broad descriptor, the science fi lm can refer to the highly specialized use of the cinematograph as a visual prosthesis and recording instrument for research within a laboratory context, to educational fi lms used to demonstrate and teach scientifi c techniques and materials, and to pop u lar or documentary fi lms with scientifi c subjects intended for general audiences.3 In most accounts of the history of the cinematographic apparatus, the chronophotographic and cinematic motion studies produced in the physiological, zoological, and psychiatric laboratories by Étienne- Jules Marey, Georges Demenÿ, and Albert Londe, to name but three researchers, produced a set of experiments that inaugurated the principle technologies and techniques for fi lm— providing the cinema with noble ancestors— while largely remaining circumscribed from its commercial development. In their polemic defi nitions of documen-tary fi lm written in the early 1930s, John Grierson and Paul Rotha echo this perspective, amplifying it by explicitly excluding scientifi c, wildlife, and avant- garde fi lms from the purview and vocation of documentary due to a perceived lack of narrative and rhetorical structure as well as for their unruly visual excesses and indulgences.4 Such fi lms were fi ne pre ce dents, accord-ing to Grierson and Rotha (in a rare agreement), but they could not be given admission into the proper corpus of the documentary.

In the early years of cinema, science fi lms were frequently exhibited both as a fairground attraction and in the beginning portions of cinema programs, serving as a visually titillating amuse- bouche—or amuse- oeil—prior to the main course of the feature fi lm’s feast for the eyes. Since such fi lms were projected prior to the feature, however, they often suffered from their status as an expendable part of the program. The critic Émile Vuillermoz, writing in 1917, lamented the fact that the documentaries and science fi lms at the beginning of programs were, for the most part, neglected and even disdained. They were primarily being used, according to Vuillermoz, to “mop up the screen” while the orchestra took a break, or as a sort of beacon for late- arriving spec-tators who used the light refl ected from images of “glistening worms” to fi nd available seats in the darkened theater.5

In addition to being used in place of ushers, such short documentaries, as Sam Rohdie writes, also served a preparatory or transitional function, ferrying spectators between the shores of their real- life concerns and the far-away exotic worlds, fi ctions, and fantasies offered them by the main attrac-tion.6 The scientifi c shorts and documentaries shown at the outset of the program might also incite the diversions or disorientations (dépaysements) alluded to in the epigraph by Blaise Cendrars,7 setting spectators momen-tarily adrift in an ambiguous, crepuscular zone where the quotidian and the fantastic intermingle. This spirit suffuses Luis Buñuel’s incorporation of an

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extract from Éclair’s Scientia documentary Le Scorpion Languedocien (FR, 1912) as an hors d’oeuvre in L’Âge d’Or (FR, 1930) and, working in the opposite direction, the fragments from F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (DE, 1922) grafted into Jean Painlevé’s study of a vampire bat, Le Vampire (FR, 1945).

During the interwar period, avant- garde specialty theaters and ciné clubs throughout Eu rope screened scientifi c fi lms (by then beginning to dis-appear from the screens of pop u lar cinemas) as much for their aesthetic appeal as for their pedagogical content. The slow- motion studies of Marey’s pro-tégé Lucien Bull and the botanical time- lapse fi lms of Dr. Jean Comandon, to name two fi lmmakers particularly pop u lar on the alternative cinema net-work, anticipated and informed the fi lmic research and experiments of impressionist, Dada, and surrealist fi lmmakers. In Paris, Jean Tedesco, pro-prietor of the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier between 1924 and 1932, pre-sented fragments of science fi lms among his “répertoire du fi lm” screenings, selecting them for their photogenic characteristics. Continuing this practice, Jean Painlevé attracted increasingly enthusiastic audiences to his annual fi lm programs affi liated with the Association for the Photographic and Cin-ematographic Documentation in the Sciences (Association pour la documenta-tion photographique et cinématographique dans les sciences) held from 1933 to 1938, and with the International Association of Scientifi c Cinema (Association internationale de cinématographie scientifi que) after the war. The programs at the London Film Society (1925– 1939), refl ecting the tastes of its co- founder Ivor Montagu, a trained zoologist, frequently featured episodes from Mary Field and Percy Smith’s Secrets of Nature fi lms, and likely Smith’s earlier pop-u lar science work with Charles Urban Trading Company, such as The Birth of a Flower (GB, 1910) and The Strength and Agility of Insects (GB, 1911), as well.8

The science fi lm also had considerable infl uence upon fi lm theory, its impact spreading well beyond its rather specialized origins. In the 1920s and 1930s, fi lm theorists such as Blaise Cendrars, Jean Epstein, Colette, Germaine Dulac, and Émile Vuillermoz viewed the science fi lm as a reserve or reservoir for pure fi lm exterior to (outside of) commercial narrative fi lms. The fi lm historian Thierry Lefebvre notes that many among the cinematic avant- garde of the time considered science fi lms an “ideal antidote to the conceits of fi lmed theater and narrative fi lm” and the basis for a nonnarrative cinema expressed solely through the music of movement, form, and meta-morphosis.9 Writing in the late 1940s, André Bazin celebrated the science fi lm’s capacity for the uncommon, unforeseen beauty of chance, exemplifi ed for him by the often surreal effects of the biological and wildlife fi lms and eclectic science fi lm programs or ga nized by Jean Painlevé.10 Bazin, express-ing his debt to surrealism, saw in footage of various microbial life forms, in the growth of cancer cells, and, especially in the surgical footage of the neu-rosurgeon Dr. Thierry de Martel, the presence of disarming aesthetic effects produced by the automated inscriptions of the fi lm camera apart from or outside of artistic intentionality.

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From technology and technique to exhibition and theory, signifi cant correspondences and commitments exist between scientifi c and formal exper-iments in fi lm. Each pursues the exploration and repre sen ta tion of phenom-ena at the limits of the visible world. They both use the cinematograph as a machine for research, revelation, and discovery, endowing spectators with a means of perception—a perception of life— quite different from commonsense experience.

* * *The science fi lm is unceasing in the great education it gives to artists: the education of cinema itself.

Germaine Dulac, “Le Sens du cinéma” (1931)

The affi nities between science fi lms, experimental fi lmmaking, and modes of fi lm spectatorship that take delight or delirium in seeing experimentally offer a useful context for examining The Perception of Life (GB, 1964), the twenty- minute educational science fi lm that inaugurated the professional career of a heteroclite twenty- seven- year- old fi lm student named Peter Lorrimer Whitehead (fi gure 1).11 For it was through the practice of viewing science fi lms with an eye toward their aesthetic characteristics that Whitehead’s fi rst fi lm found its entrée into the cinema (as opposed to the classroom). The Austrian fi lmmaker George Hoellering, then working as the programmer for the Academy Cinema in London, made the inspired choice to use The Per-ception of Life as an hors d’oeuvre for Luis Buñuel’s El ángel exterminador/

Figure 1. The title card from Peter L. Whitehead’s The Perception of Life, 1964

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Exterminating Angel (MX, 1962). The two fi lms charmed each other, bringing out the scientifi c aspects of Buñuel’s scathing study of the bourgeois speci-men, and the experimental nature and latent moments of surrealism in The Perception of Life. Seeing his own science fi lm in a different context seems to have provided a sudden reeducation and re orientation of Whitehead’s eyes, revealing a new dimension of his own cinematic vision. The correspondences between the two fi lms helped convince the young fi lmmaker— unsure of his abilities and fearing he would never mea sure up to the work of his favorite fi lmmakers: Jean- Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman— that “perhaps I was a fi lmmaker after all.”12

The Perception of Life, like the working- class scholarship boy who directed it, was a benefi ciary of the spirit of Butskellism and the postwar experiments in economic consensus in Britain. The fi lm was initiated by Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfi eld, a pair of phi los o phers and histori-ans of science (at that time, a couple) who, in 1960, assumed directorship of the Unit for the History of Ideas at the Nuffi eld Foundation, a London- based charitable trust dedicated to the “advancement of social well being.” The professors were allotted the sum of £60,000 to produce a series of books and fi lms dedicated to the “Ancestry of Science” over the course of three years (the program was later extended by an additional twelve months). Between 1962 and 1964, the Nuffi eld Foundation’s fi lm unit pro-duced The God Within (GB, 1962), The Perfection of Matter (GB, 1964), Time Is (GB, 1964; subsequently recut as A Question of Time), and The Perception of Life (GB, 1964).13

Goodfi eld, an advocate of the pedagogical power of cinema, oversaw the production of the fi lms, which were intended to be “neither didactic nor documentary” but rather “stimulating and provocative,” or as one reviewer put it, to make fi lms that “consciously deemphasize detail in favor of mon-tage.”14 Toward that end, Goodfi eld sought assistance from Nuffi eld’s neigh-bors at the recently established fi lm program at the Slade School of Fine Art, headed by Thorold Dickinson, director of Gaslight (GB, 1940) and producer of the montage study Overture (G. L. Polidora, US, 1958), and including among its affi liated faculty William Coldstream, the realist paint er, alumnus of John Grierson’s GPO Documentary Film Unit, and future chairman of the British Film Institute.15 Through Slade, Goodfi eld and Toulmin engaged two mem-bers of the original cohort of fi lm students with extensive backgrounds in science: Don Levy, who had a PhD in theoretical chemical physics; and Peter Whitehead, who studied with the biochemist and crystallographer John Kendrew and served as an assistant to Francis Crick and Max Perutz (all Nobel laureates) at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. Through these circumstances, a rather sober philanthropic or ga ni za tion helped to launch the careers of two of the more iconoclastic in de pen dent British fi lmmakers of the 1960s, and contributed to youth cultures very dif-ferent from and even antithetical to that of the classroom: a po liti cally minded underground cinema and an emergent psychedelic aesthetics.

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The Perception of Life takes an ostensibly historical approach to the development of microscopy, cytology (the study of cells), the relationship between techniques of observation and scientifi c knowledge, and the role of repre sen ta tion in epistemology. The fi lm’s commentary, spoken by Toulmin, was drafted by Whitehead and subsequently revised and reined in by Good-fi eld (according to Whitehead, the original draft was close to two hundred pages of loose poetic musings). The commentary is primarily driven by the thesis that scientifi c theory and the techniques and technologies of scientifi c observation are mutually informing (“our theories and instruments have grown together”), but the fi lm treads lightly through its material, not weighing itself down with proper names or lengthy explanations. It traces a loose pro-gression beginning with the emergence of microscopy at the end of the seven-teenth century, its impact upon various theories of cellular life, the reproduction of cells, and the shift to study the interior contents of cells with the addition of staining pro cesses. It follows these lines of development up through the fi lm’s present, showcasing a series of techniques for producing 3- D models of pro-gressively smaller phenomena by means of X-ray photography and computer analysis. These refi nements bring scientists to such “intellectual borderlands” as viruses, which blur the distinctions between the living and the nonliving, life and its other (see fi gures 2– 4). The fi lm concludes by asking “Are we fi nally at the point where our eyes are meeting our imaginations?”

Whitehead’s cinematography and montage suggest that the fi lm’s fi nal question may not have an easy answer. Despite the narrative thrust toward

Figures 2, 3, 4. Computer- generated contour maps of the atomic density of myoglobin crystals

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ever- greater technical and theoretical refi nement, wherein technique, theory, and observation have a progressively asymptotic relationship with the real, the plurality of microscopic and cinematic techniques presented by the fi lm also suggests that questions of visual epistemology ought to be understood as far from settled. Whitehead placed great emphasis on the specifi city of the media under observation. The fi lm opens by informing spectators that “Whenever possible in this Film we have used the Original Objective Lenses, Slides and Drawings of the early Microscopists.” It is diffi cult to discern the extent to which material was fi lmed through the numerous types of apparatus featured, given that the amounts of light necessary for sharp fi lm exposures would be very diffi cult to obtain with antique devices. The fi lm does, never-theless, make considerable use of a number of seventeenth- and eighteenth- century apparatuses placed upon rotating pedestals and set against the sort of black abysses characteristic of the chronophotography of Étienne- Jules Marey and the ultramicrocinematography and time- lapse botanical imag-ery of Jean Comandon. The variance in image quality and in detail of mag-nifi cation from shot to shot, due to the employment of multiple apparatuses and footage sources, endows the fi lm with a vibrant, multiperspectival visual economy. Nicole Brenez identifi es this as the seed of the “heteroscopic vision of the real” characteristic of Whitehead’s oeuvre.16 The fi lm’s commentary makes this point by cutting from footage of wriggling sperm to various illus-trations of sperm: “everybody who gazed into the darkness saw in his own way and drew accordingly.” Despite its title, then, the fi lm pluralizes perception, treating the microscope and cinematograph as looking glasses that expand— without necessarily anchoring or affi rming— the horizons of the real.

The cinematography focuses on the plastic beauty of its subjects, most of which appear onscreen unnamed. With few exceptions, such as the open-ing traveling shots that explore Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical sketches as if they were landscapes, the frames are for the most part stationary due to the constrained visual fi eld of microcinematography. Yet the images are teem-ing with an uncanny vitality. Multitudes of jittery water fl eas (daphnia) dart around buzzer midges (fi gure 5). The Medusa- like hydrae (a freshwater cousin of jellyfi sh) undulate and twist their tentacles. Close- up illustrations and photographs of fl ea anatomy (so beloved by scientifi c pop u lar izers and their audiences during the nineteenth and early twentieth century) are suc-ceeded by fl oating colonies of spheroid Volvox (one of the fi rst creatures observed by the pioneering microscopist and microbiologist Antonie Phil-ips van Leeuwenhoek) that take on the appearance, as the epigraph from Blaise Cendrars suggests, of celestial bodies (fi gure 6). Sperm spasmodically propel themselves. Transparent cells rendered visible through Gram’s method (fi gure 7) reveal baroque interiors. Footage of bacteria dividing and rapidly fi lling the screen is succeeded by the convulsive beauty of time- lapse cine-matography of the division and invagination of living cells (including newt eggs, sea urchin embryos, and nematode eggs).

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To the consternation of Goodfi eld and Toulmin, Whitehead approached the fi lm’s montage as if it were a Brownian motion ballet. (Whitehead rec-ollects a slightly exasperated Goodfi eld exclaiming, “This is not a ballet fi lm, Peter!” and fretting that the montage would overwhelm spectators to the detriment of the information within the images and commentary).17

Figure 5. Daphnia and buzzer midges seen through an early magnifying lens

Figure 6. A Volvox colony

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Whitehead’s montage, exhibiting a skill he would develop further in his pop promos and music fi lms, takes full advantages of the resources of rhythmic cutting, creating an additional set of correspondences between shots and between the image track and sound track through the use of cello and harp-sichord pieces by Bach for the early microscopy sections, and an original electronic music score by Anthony Frossard (a protégé of electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram) for the contemporary images of electron micro-scopes, centrifuges, and X-rays.

The montage also supports an understated collage aesthetic, a modest version of the dense citation practices of Jean- Luc Godard’s fi lms. The com-mentary, as mentioned, is light on specifi c details and uses no proper names, but strings together fragments of verse from such fi gures as Mr. Thomas Brown and Jonathan Swift, who both speculate on the existence of an infi -nite recess of progressively smaller fl eas upon fl eas (a phenomenon Swift likens to the condition of poets and the anxiety of infl uence), as well as some of the more frivolous excerpts from George Adams’s “Essay on the Micro-scope,” in which he states that “investigations of this kind particularly rec-ommend themselves to . . . ladies,” as microscopy is a science that “sweetens the hours of solitude and anxiety.”18 The collage aesthetic is more pronounced at the level of the image. Taking advantage of a fl urry of medical illustration and fi lm units in universities and research hospitals, Whitehead grafted a considerable amount of microcinematographic footage from other sources into his fi lm.19 Time- lapse microcinematographic studies of the morphology

Figure 7. A cell infused with Gram’s stain in order to render its interior structure visible

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of newt eggs by Eric Lucey of the Ge ne tics Department at Edinburgh Uni-versity, sea urchin footage from Tryggve Gustafson of the Wenner- Gren Institute in Sweden and Lewis Wolpert of the Zoology Department at King’s College, and footage of microsurgical procedures developed by Jean Coman-don and Pierre de Fonbrune of the Pasteur Institute at Garches, among others, are interlaced throughout the fi lm.

Whitehead’s approach—“neither didactic nor documentary” but certainly “stimulating and provocative”— did not go unnoticed by critics. David Wade Chambers of the Smithsonian Institute praised the beauty of the fi lm, but was slightly troubled by its “lack of unifying theme,” complaining that throughout the fi lm “an interesting subject is picked up only to be dropped immediately.”20 Chambers concluded that “the fi lm is almost antihistorical in its inattention to chronology or to the historical progression of ideas” with the result being “an anarchy of vaguely related images dazzling to the eye, bewildering.”21

The Perception of Life traces an overarching narrative of progress, yet many of its specifi c moments have the “bewildering” effect of producing an internal re sis tance to this telos. The fi lm’s images frequently appear and disappear from the screen without identifi cation or explanation; they titil-late the spectator’s curiosity but do not provide much concrete information to the untrained eye. Many of the details that the camera chooses to linger over seem motivated by logics exterior to that of the history of microscopy and cytology, indexing the presence of other desires. The fi lm devotes a fetishist’s attention to the baroque ornamentation and individual organs of early microscopes, which are all dramatically set against a black abyss, so that they appear to emerge and then disappear into the profound darkness by means of skillful lighting effects. Images such as these— as Philippe- Alain Michaud has argued in the context of Jean Comandon’s botanical fi lms of the 1920s— evoke an impermeable atmosphere, a timeless realm, outside of any readily identifi able historical context and closer, perhaps, to the realm of dreams and to the unconscious (fi gures 8– 10).22

The appearance of alogical motivations and unexplained visual compar-isons in the fi lm fi nd striking expression in a transition used to link two of its sections. Without giving anchoring dates, the fi lm connects episodes with the statement “over the next 150 years only a few men continued to study with the microscope.” Instead of serving as a logical bridge between precisely identi-fi ed moments in time, this transition emphasizes fi lm’s capacity for temporal and logical leaps. It is tempting to read such slippery cinematic moments as echoes of the psychoanalytic inspiration and intentionally incoherent transi-tions—“8 years later” and “16 years earlier”— used by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí in Un chien andalou/An Andalusian Dog (FR, 1929) in order to disrupt logi-cal continuity. A modest quotient of this surrealist spirit of dépaysement and its potential for revelation through juxtaposition lurks in the subtle collage and montage practices deployed in The Perception of Life, suggesting that the very shortcomings cited by Chambers have their own generative virtues as well.

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Figure 8. A compound microscope

Figure 9. Silver- plated antique microscope

Near the opening of the fi lm, the commentary addresses the bewilder-ment of scientifi c vision as a historically bounded phenomenon: “when in the late 17th century the lens revealed another world below the level of everyday existence, the men at the time were totally unprepared for what they saw.” The experience of viewing the fi lm’s multitude of microcinematic images clearly retains something of the dislocating surprise attributed to an earlier

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epoch. The dazzling visual experience reveals a potential effect of micros-copy and cinemicroscopy in general; one that the disciplined scientifi c gaze minimizes, but that nevertheless remains a latent force. Microscopy neces-sarily limits the mise- en- scène of the microscope’s stage to a small slice of life detached from its original context, which by means of its magnifi cation consumes the entirety of the visual fi eld. It is not surprising then, that the dis-tanced perspective of historical discourse, founded upon grounding mate-rial within a set of identifi able reference points and contexts, loses some of its sure- footing among the intimate, immersive, and estranging visions of micro-scopic close- ups. These visual disorientations and re orientations, detached from easily readable contexts, existing hors champ (offscreen), may in fact be the primary educational content of the fi lm: a lesson in a specifi cally cine-matic perception of life.

Chambers’s review and Hoellering’s programming decision (pairing The Perception of Life with El ángel exterminador) both seem to inherently under-stand the fi lm as an hors d’oeuvre, with all the virtues and disadvantages that suggests. Recalling the status of the hors d’oeuvre as an “outside” or “exterior” of the work, the fi lm can be understood as generating moments that are, in a modest sense, out of time, outside of time (hors du temps), ecstatic, out of order, disordered, and even a little disorderly. They are out of work and perhaps even unemployable with respect to the demands of institutional edu-cation, to scientifi c sobriety, and to the decorum that maintains a distinc-tion between the eloquence of empirical mea sure ment and the excessively expressive. Paying attention to these elements of the fi lm helps emphasize what makes The Perception of Life such an interesting pedagogical artifact.

Figure 10. Detail from silver- plated antique microscope

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The Perception of Life is by all accounts a beautiful educational science fi lm, but for all its successes in addressing the question of perception, and subtly calling into question the self- certainty and the epistemological limits of techniques of observation, and for all the fi lm’s lively cinematic delights, it comes short on the question of life itself. But here new terms are necessary. Regarding life, the fi lm is not so much an oeuvre as an opening, which sug-gests that getting at life itself requires the development of a science of living, a gay science, for which an experimental ethos and critical, engaged esprit set the terms of practice.

* * *A fi nal remark on The Perception of Life and the cinematic hors d’oeuvre: the fi lm is both a part of, and apart from, the oeuvre for which Whitehead is best known. It was a beginning, an inauguration, but not the singular origin or clear predictor of what was to come. It nevertheless prefaced the questions regarding epistemology, perception and repre sen ta tion, and life that have come to defi ne the stakes of Whitehead’s subsequent corpus. Responding to the issues raised by this fi lm required different methods of exploration, a freedom of expression and form taken up with the burst of lyrical, vérité- style works made between 1965 and 1970— fi lms that explore the confusion, desires, refusals, repressions, violence, creation, and Dionysian energies of countercultures and their discontents. In other words, the hotly contested efforts invent anew the possibilities of life.

In a retrospective refl ection on the lessons of his educational fi lm, White-head mused, “Only years later did I realize how this fi lm helped shape my attitude toward the nature of ‘truth’ in fi lm. Where, how, when, can it really be considered incontrovertibly TRUE?”23 “In the beginning was the image,” he would assert in the opening of The Fall (UK/US, 1969). But prior to the image, as its hors d’oeuvre, was the perception of life, and the felt necessity to devise a fi lm form worthy of pursuing it sur le vif.

James Leo Cahill is an assistant professor with the Cinema Studies Institute and Department of French at the University of Toronto. He earned his doctorate in critical studies at the University of Southern California in spring 2010. He is pres-ently writing a monograph on documentary surrealism and the cinematic wildlife of Jean Painlevé, and serves as a co- editor for Discourse: Journal for Theo-retical Studies in Media and Culture. His research and teaching interests include French cinema, experimental and nonfi ction media, fi lm theory, and criti-cal theory.

NotesI thank Peter Lorrimer Whitehead and Paul Cronin for their generosity with information and access to fi lms and archival materials, and René Bruckner and Drake Stutesman for their comments on an earlier draft of this text.

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1. Jacques Derrida touches upon the hors d’oeuvre in his examination of the role of the parergon and the frame in the visual arts and in aesthetic judgment. Der-rida questions the confi dence with which distinctions between intrinsic and extrinsic, exterior and interior characteristics are made in Kant’s Third Critique, and in theories of art and aesthetics made in its wake. Derrida, “The Parer-gon,” in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 37– 82, esp. 54.

2. These overlapping defi nitions of hors d’oeuvre can be found in Émile Littré, ed., Dictionnaire de la langue française, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 803; Paul Robert, ed., Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française, vol. 5 (Paris: Société du nouveau Littré, 1969), 256; and the Oxford En glish Dictionary (OED), electronic edition, www .oed .com. The OED references the following quotation from Joseph Addison’s The Spectator (1714), no. 576, which emphasizes the singular quality of the hors d’oeuvre: “The Frenzy of one who is given up for a Lunatick, is a Frenzy hors d’oeuvre, that is in other words, something which is singular in its Kind.” Addison is himself working from a reference to Fontenelle’s Dialogues of the Dead.

3. For a basic taxonomy of the science fi lm, see Jean Painlevé, “Scientifi c Film (1955),” in Science Is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé, ed. Andy Masaki Bellows and Marina McDougall with Brigitte Berg, trans. Jeanine Herman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 160– 169; and P. Thévenard and G. Tassel, Le Cinéma Scientifi que Français, preface by Jean Painlevé (Paris: La Jeune Parque, 1948). For an early history of pop u lar science fi lm, see Oliver Gaycken, “Devices of Curiosity: Cinema and the Scientifi c Vernacular,” Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2005.

4. John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” published in the winter 1932, spring 1933, and spring 1934 issues of Cinema Quarterly and revised and repub-lished in Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (1946; repr., New York: Praeger, 1971); and Paul Rotha in collaboration with Sinclair Road and Rich-ard Griffi th, Documentary Film (1936; repr., London: Faber and Faber, 1963). The hegemony that Grierson and Rotha have exerted over the historiography of documentary fi lm, and their exclusion of the science, wildlife, and avant- garde or experimental fi lm from documentary may in part explain why Peter White-head’s work, despite its engagement (at times rather prominent) with the cin-ema of the real has remained almost completely outside of the major literature on documentary fi lm in its classical and revisionist articulations.

5. Émile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’Écran,” Le Temps, April 25, 1917, 3. “Glistening worms” is most likely a reference to Jean Comandon’s ultramicroscopic footage of trypanosoma, the parasites that cause sleeping sickness.

6. Sam Rohdie, “Four Essays: Painlevé; Jennings; Vigo; Ford,” posted online at Screening the Past: www .latrobe .edu .au/ screeningthepast/ 25/ four -essays -sam - rohdie .html. The literature on short fi lms has experienced a recent growth spurt. Edward Dimenberg gives a particularly economic overview of the his-tory and stakes of the short fi lm, an impure form specializing in philosophical, scientifi c, and aesthetic inquiry, in “These Are Not Exercises in Style: Le Chant du Styrène,” October 112 (2005): 63– 88, esp. 64. For two engaging, diverse stud-ies of short fi lms and their essayistic tradition, see Suzanne Liandrat- Guigues and Murielle Gagnebin, eds., L’Essai et le cinéma (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2004); and Dominique Bluher and François Thomas, eds., Le Court Métrage français de 1945 à 1968, de l’âge d’or aux contrebandiers (Rennes: Presses Universi-taires de Rennes, 2005).

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7. Blaise Cendrars, “Profound Today,” in Modernities and Other Writings, ed. Monique Chefdor, trans. Esther Allen in collaboration with Monique Chefdor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 1– 6, quotation on 3.

8. See David Curtis, A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain (London: British Film Institute, 2007), 10; and John Maddison, “Experiment in the Scientifi c Film,” in Experiment in the Film, ed. Roger Manvell (London: Grey Walls Press, 1949), 266– 273.

9. Blaise Cendrars, “The ABCs of Cinema,” in Modernities, 23– 29; Jean Epstein, “Magnifi cation (1921),” in French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907– 1939, vol. 1, ed. Richard Abel, trans. Stuart Liebman (Prince ton, NJ: Prince ton University Press, 1988), 235– 241; Colette, Colette at the Movies: Criticism and Screenplays, ed. Alain and Odette Virmaux, trans. Sarah R. W. Smith (New York: Ungar, 1980), 59– 61; Germaine Dulac, “L’Essence du Cinéma— L’Idée Visuelle (1925),” “Quelques Réfl exions sur le ‘Cinéma Pur’ (1926),” “Du sentiment à la ligne (1927),” and “Le sens du cinéma (1931),” in Écrits sur le Cinéma (1919– 1937), ed. Prosper Hillairet (Paris: Paris Expérimental, 1994), 62– 67, 73– 74, 87– 89, 160– 178; Émile Vuillermoz, “Courrier Cinématographique: Films de laboratoire,” Le Temps, February 19, 1927, 6; as well as contemporary theorizations by Thierry Lefebvre, “De La Science à L’Avant- Garde: Petit panorama,” in Images, science, mouve-ment: Autour de Marey, ed. SEMIA (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), 108– 109; Hannah Landecker, “Cellular Features: Microcinematography and Early Film Theory,” Critical Inquiry 31 (2005): 903– 937; and Paula Amad, “ ‘These Spectacles Are Never Forgotten’: Memory and Reception in Colette’s Film Criticism,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies 59 (2005): 119– 164.

10. André Bazin, “Beauté du hasard: Le fi lm scientifi que,” L’Écran français, October 21, 1947; translated by Jeanine Herman as “Science Film: Accidental Beauty” in Science Is Fiction, 144– 147. For an illuminating reading of Bazin’s essay and its relation to Painlevé’s programming, see Oliver Gaycken, “Accidental Beauty: Film Ist,” Journal of Visual Culture on Science and Documentary 12.2, eds. Oliver Gaycken and Joshua Malitsky (forthcoming).

11. The epigraph to this section comes from Dulac, “Le Sens du cinéma,” 166. By 1964, Whitehead had already made a number of student fi lms, believed to be lost, or in his words, “binned” or thrown out. These include two short “entertain-ments” created for the Slade School of Fine Art’s Christmas Student Ball. The fi rst was in homage to Alain Resnais’ L’Année derière à Marienbad/Last Year at Marienbad (FR, 1959), shot among the University College London’s neo- Greek agora. The second was a spoof of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée/Orpheus (FR, 1949), fi lmed at Clacton- on- Sea with Slade students and Hells Angels bikers. He also made a fi lm called The Theft while at Slade, which featured an electronic music sound track made for Whitehead by the soon to be celebrated dentist turned composer Wilfred Josephs. Details for these fi lms come from personal corre-spondence with the artist, June 14, 2010.

Whitehead also mentions having made an additional fi lm for Slade, “using images from abstract paintings all cut to music which has been a great success and has been sent to the Bergamo Festival,” in a letter seeking work that he sent to A. C. Sibert of Gillett and Sibert (specialists in scientifi c instruments, who helped provide microscopic equipment for The Perception of Life), dated June 29, 1964 (letter held among the personal papers of Peter Whitehead).

During this same period, Whitehead worked as an assistant to the cinema-tographer Fotis Mestheneos, who sent him out in the “mean streets of London” with a 16 mm Arrifl ex, affording him an opportunity to develop his technique

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as a roving camera operator covering events for Greek tele vi sion and RAI TV in Rome. This work surely infl uenced the spontaneous, fl uid cinematography that characterizes Whitehead’s better- known fi lms.

12. Whitehead recounted this story in his fi lmed interview with Paul Cronin, In the Beginning Was the Image: Conversations with Peter Whitehead (2006); in Nicole Brenez, “Je rêve donc je suis: Je doute donc je fi lm; Entretien avec Peter Whitehead,” Cahiers du Cinéma 654 (March 2010): 80– 85, quoted on 82; and in personal cor-respondence with the author dated June 14, 2010.

13. Information on the Nuffi eld Foundation draws from “Film History of Ideas: Nuffi eld Foundation Unit Series,” Times, May 16, 1964; “Uncovering Science—By Films,” Guardian, May 15, 1964; “Nuffi eld Foundation: Unit for the History of Scientifi c Ideas,” Nature 186 (May 1960): 436; “Notes and Comments: The History of Scientifi c Ideas,” New Scientist 7, no. 182 (May 12, 1960): 1187; and Geminus, “It Seems to Me . . .” New Scientist 22, no. 395 ( June 11, 1964): 678. The Times and Guardian articles are courtesy of Peter Whitehead’s clippings fi le.

14. These phrases are repeated verbatim in reports of a 1964 screening of the fi lms published in the Guardian and in Geminus, “It Seems to Me . . . ,” 678, suggest-ing press release wording or the remarks from an introduction to the fi lms pro-vided by a member of the Nuffi eld Foundation. The description of the emphasis on montage comes from David Wade Chambers, “History of Science on the Silver Screen,” Isis 57, no. 4 (1966): 494– 497, quote on 494.

15. David Curtis observes that Slade’s faculty, especially Dickinson and Coldstream, who were both members of the Film Society, helped link the fi rst cinematic avant- garde of the 1920s and 1930s with the emergent avant- garde fi lmmakers of the 1960s. Curtis, A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain, 24. One can speculate then, that an appreciation for the science fi lm may have been trans-mitted from one generation to the other through their teaching. In a personal correspondence with the author dated June 14, 2010, Whitehead could not recall being exposed to science fi lms prior to making one, though he may have been infl uenced by his Slade classmate Don Levy’s work with Nuffi eld on the adventurous documentary about the invention of time, Time Is (GB, 1964). Time Is, largely a work of montage, apparently found an extended second life as screen-ing material at happenings and acid tests.

16. Brenez, “Je rêve donc je suis,” 81. 17. Whitehead, personal correspondence with the author, June 14, 2010. 18. The sources of these lines are: Mr. Willis of St. Mary Hall Oxon, with additions

by Mr. Thomas Brown, “A Comical Panegyric on That Familiar Animal by the Vulgar Called a Louse” in The Works of Mr. Thomas Brown: Serious and Comical, in Prose and Verse (London: Sam Brisco, 1707), 18; Jonathan Swift, “On Poetry: A Rhapsody (1733),” in Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings, Miriam Kosh Starkman (New York: Bantam, 1962), 633; and George Adams, Essay on the Microscope Containing a Practical Description of the Most Improved Microscopes, etc., 3 vols. (London: Dillon and Keating, W. and S. Jones, 1798), 2: 666.

19. From the mid 1950s through the 1960s, a number of research centers, benefi t-ing from postwar economic amelioration efforts, found the resources to estab-lish experimental fi lm units to support research. Eric Lucey was hired to head an experimental fi lm unit in the Department of Ge ne tics at Edinburgh Uni-versity, Peter Cardew founded the photography and cinematography lab for medical illustration at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School, and researchers in the Zoology and Anatomy Departments at King’s College also utilized fi lm in their work.

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20. David Wade Chambers, “History of Science on the Silver Screen,” 496. 21. Ibid., 497 (emphasis added). 22. Philippe- Alain Michaud, “Croissance des Végétaux (1929): La Melencolia de Jean

Comandon,” 1895, no. 18, “Images du Réel: La Non- fi ction en France 1890– 1930” (1995): 265– 283. This is the very sort of mise- en- scène Friedrich Nietz sche describes as the unhistorical atmosphere necessary for the germination of life. See “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life” in Unfashionable Observa-tions, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 83– 167, esp. 91.

23. Whitehead, personal correspondence with the author, June 14, 2010.