Silent Film in the History of Science: Jean Comandon, a Case Study

Between 1918 and 1924 French doctor and cinematographer Jean Comandon (1877-1970) collaborated with prominent medical practitioners including Édouard Claparède, Jean-Athanase Sicard, and Édouard Long, to produce over fifty films of patients with neurological and neuropsychiatric conditions. Now archived, these films often show graphic images of twitching limbs, motor disorders, and bodies deemed pathological. Most likely they were produced for medical practitioners and students, but how their intended audience was meant to interpret or understand them isn’t immediately obvious. Indeed, all of the films are silent: no sound or text accompanies them. This paper explores the challenges and opportunities provided by silent films as historical sources in the history of science. It aims to contextualize Comandon’s films—many of which were produced by the French production company Pathé—within a wider image economy during the silent motion picture era. Though Comandon’s microcinematographic films of bacteria have been studied in the secondary literature, his neurological and neuropsychiatric films have been largely overlooked. What emerges from an analysis of Comandon’s neuropsychiatric films and their place in the history of medical imaging is his contribution to a larger landscape of measurement and film research on the pathological mind and body in the aftermath of World War I. .