Scientific Animations: Filmology, Experiment, and the Human Sciences

Just after the Second World War, a large interdisciplinary group of scientists from all over Europe and some of overseas, joined efforts to found a new science called Filmology. The war had demonstrated the pervasive effects of film as a propaganda tool, on both sides of the conflict. These scientists were convinced that it could no longer suffice to study film as an aesthetic phenomenon: it had to be studied also as a psychological and social phenomenon. Mobilizing all existing human sciences, they tried to develop scientific methods to study the effects of film on man and society. Several of these Filmologists tried to bring the complex problem of cinema to the laboratory. Here, often the use of animation film was promoted, in an attempt to obtain scientific control on the elusive medium of film. Experimental psychologists such as the Belgian Albert Michotte and the British Frederic Bartlett took a leading role. In this paper, I study the history of animation as a shared history of science and media. I explore the use of animation as a scientific experimental tool and examine what its role in these experiments can tell about the changing notion and practice of experiment in the post-war human sciences. The Filmology episode shows how closely media and science have been intertwined: how scientists have investigated media, and how this study of media has challenged their experimental practice. When telling the stories of science, science’s animations, as abstract and short as they are, are worth showing.