animation, animated cartoon and liveliness: eisenstein and

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Animation, Animated Cartoon and Liveliness:Eisenstein and Disney

Marie Rebecchi

To cite this version:Marie Rebecchi. Animation, Animated Cartoon and Liveliness: Eisenstein and Disney. MovingPictures, Living Machines Automation, Animation and the Imitation of Life in Cinema and Media acura di /edited by, 2020. �hal-03226482�

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Moving Pictures, Living Machines Automation, Animation

and the Imitation of Life in Cinema and Media

a cura di /edited byGreta Plaitano

Simone VenturiniPaolo Villa

FilmForum/2019

XXVI Convegno Internazionale

di Studi sul CinemaXXVI International

Film and Media Studies Conference

Dipartimento di Studi umanistici

e del patrimonio culturaleUniversità degli Studi di

UdineDAMS/IMACS

Mimesis

Moving Pictures, Living M

achinesM

IMESIS

INTER

NATIO

NAL

MIMESISINTERNATIONAL

Leonardo Quaresima, Laura Ester Sangalli, Federico Zecca, a cura di,Cinema e fumetto/Cinema and Comics

(Udine: Forum 2009), pp. 680.

Francesco Casetti, Jane Gaines, Valentina Re, a cura di,Dall’inizio, alla fine/In the Very Beginning, at the Very End


Pietro Bianchi, Giulio Bursi, Simone Venturini, a cura di,Il canone cinematografico/The Film Canon


Alessandro Bordina, Sonia Campanini, Andrea Mariani, a cura di,L’archivio/The Archive


Anna Bertolli, Andrea Mariani, Martina Panelli, a cura di,Il cinema si impara?/Can We Learn Cinema?


Alberto Beltrame, Ludovica Fales, Giuseppe Fidotta, a cura di,Whose Right?


Alberto Beltrame, Giuseppe Fidotta, Andrea Mariani, a cura di,At the Borders of (Film) History(Udine: Forum 2015), pp. 496.

Diego Cavallotti, Federico Giordano, Leonardo Quaresima, a cura di,A History of Cinema Without Names: A Research Project

(Milano-Udine: Mimesis 2016), pp. 272.

Diego Cavallotti, Simone Dotto, Leonardo Quaresima, a cura di,A History of Cinema Without Names/2: Contexts and Practical Applications


Diego Cavallotti, Simone Dotto, Leonardo Quaresima, a cura di,A History of Cinema Without Names/3: New Research Paths and Methodological Glosses


Diego Cavallotti, Simone Dotto, Andrea Mariani, a cura di,Exposing the Moving Image: The Cinematic Medium Across World Fairs, Art Museums, and

Cultural Exhibitions (Milano-Udine: Mimesis 2019), pp. 380.

Greta Plaitano, Simone Venturini, Paolo Villa, a cura di,Moving Pictures, Living Machines: Automation, Animation and the Imitation of Life in Cinema and Media


Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi sul CinemaUniversità degli Studi di Udine

Monica Dall’Asta, Guglielmo Pescatore, Leonardo Quaresima, a cura di,Il colore nel cinema muto/Color in Silent Cinema

(Bologna: Mano 1996), pp. 224.

Anja Franceschetti, Leonardo Quaresima, a cura di,Prima dell’autore/Before the Author


Francesco Pitassio, Leonardo Quaresima, a cura di,Scrittura e immagine. La didascalia nel cinema muto/Writing and Image. Titles in Silent Cinema


Leonardo Quaresima, Alessandra Raengo, Laura Vichi, a cura di,La nascita dei generi cinematografici/The Birth of Film Genres


Leonardo Quaresima, Alessandra Raengo, Laura Vichi, a cura di,I limiti della rappresentazione/The Bounds of Representation


Leonardo Quaresima, Laura Vichi, a cura di,La decima musa. Il cinema e le altre arti/The Tenth Muse. Cinema and Other Arts


Laura Vichi, a cura di,L’uomo visibile/The Visible Man(Udine: Forum 2002), pp. 424.

Anna Antonini, a cura di,Il film e i suoi multipli/Film and Its Multiples


Veronica Innocenti, Valentina Re, a cura di,Limina/le soglie del film/Films’s Thresholds


Alice Autelitano, Veronica Innocenti, Valentina Re, a cura di,I cinque sensi del cinema/The Five Senses of Cinema


Alice Autelitano, Valentina Re, a cura di,Il racconto del film/Narrating the Film


Enrico Biasin, Giulio Bursi, Leonardo Quaresima, a cura di,Lo stile cinematografico/Film Style


Enrico Biasin, Roy Menarini, Federico Zecca, a cura di,Le età del cinema/The Ages of Cinema

(Udine: Forum 2008), pp. 448.44.99 $, 33.99 £, 40,00 €

Mimesis Internationalwww.mimesisinternational.com

ISBN 978-88-6977-298-6

9 788869 772986

Moving Pictures, Living Machines Automation, Animation


FilmForum/2019

XXVI Convegno Internazionale di Studi sul CinemaXXVI International


Dipartimento di Studi umanistici e del patrimonio culturale

Università degli Studi di UdineDAMS/IMACS

Mimesis

Moving Pictures, Living MachinesAutomation, Animation


a cura di/edited byGreta Plaitano

Simone VenturiniPaolo Villa

FilmForum/2019

XXVI Convegno Internazionaledi Studi sul CinemaXXVI International


Dipartimento di Studi umanistici e del patrimonio culturale

Università degli Studi di UdineDAMS/IMACS

Mimesis

Questa pubblicazione è stata realizzata grazie al sostegno della Regione Friuli Venezia Giulia, della Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Gorizia, della Camera di Commercio Venezia Giulia e del Consorzio per lo Sviluppo del Polo Universitario, Gorizia.La più viva gratitudine al Magnifico Rettore dell’Università degli Studi di Udine, al Direttore del Dipartimento di Studi umanistici e del patrimonio culturale, ai Direttori degli altri Dipartimenti d’Ateneo.

sommario/contents

Imitation of Life: Moving Pictures, Living Machines

Greta Plaitano, Simone Venturini, Paolo Villa

1. Images of Automation and Automatic Images: From Animation to Virtual Environments

Funny Animals, Hilarious Machines:Automation and Animation in Disney Shorts

(1929-1937)Yasco Horsman

Des jouets, des machines et des hommes : représenter le mouvement au XIXe siècle

Marion Charroppin

Les Aventures extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul. Le avventure straordinarissime di

Saturnino Farandola – (1914) de Marcel « Fabre » [Fernández] Peréz & Luigi Maggi

François Amy de la Bretèque

Tableaux à la puissance trois : la mise en scène cinématographique du tableau vivant entre

animation et pétrification de l’imageMichele Bertolini

Animation, Animated Cartoon and Liveliness:Eisenstein and Disney

Marie Rebecchi

“Unlearning to See Like Humans”:Trevor Paglen on Machine Vision

Antonio Somaini

Electronic Automation in Italy in the 1960s:Two Antithetical Perspectives

Francesco Spampinato

Notes on the Maschine-Mensch: Self-Driving Auto(mata)s and Human-A.I. Machine Assemblages

Sonia Campanini

“Real Virtualities”: Real Time Animation and Immersivity

Giancarlo Grossi

Framing Video Game Agency: Down and Out in Los Santos and

In-Game Photography as Subversive Play Ivan Girina

15

23

25

33

41

49

55

63

69

75

83

89

“Now You’re in the Sunken Place”: Agency in Reaction GIFs

Berenike Jung

Watching the Future. Gender, Automation and Reproduction

Elisa Virgili

2. The Body-Machine Symbiosis: Screens, Automatons, Prosthetic Technologies

San Junipero et le désir de la dématérialisation du corps (et de l’écran)

Jacopo Bodini

Bodies Becoming Screens.How the Machines Experience the World

Anna Caterina Dalmasso

The Application of Animation and Automation in the Simulation of Life in a

Biomedical Research LaboratoryDavid Steinman, Dolores Steinman

Visceral Operators: The Camera Is the MassageChristina Lammer

Street of Crocodiles: The Animated Bodyand the Fantasy of the Flesh

Jessie Martin

La Mariée, l’automate et l’iconographie anatomique (Marcel Duchamp dans La Rue des Crocodiles)

Barbara Le Maître

Danse avec le robot. Un moment de la rencontreentre le vivant et la machine

Arnauld Pierre

Thinking People and Machines Together: The Aaton Case

Introduction: The BEAUVIATECH Program,Between Technologies and Aesthetics

Jean-Baptiste Massuet, Gilles Mouëllic

Camera Anthropomorphization or Bodies to Fit Cameras? Contradictory Aspects of the Purposes

and Uses of Aaton ProductsSimon Daniellou

Hand-Held Camera and Virtual Cinema. Between Automaticity and Portability: Reinterpreting

“la Paluche” in the Digital Animation EraJean-Baptiste Massuet

99

109

117

119

127

135

141

151

157

165

173

174

179

185

Cameras for Each or for All? Automatization and Adaptability in the Design of Technical Objects on

the Basis of the Aaton CaseÉric Thouvenel

3. Technological Vitalism: The Liveliness of Medias and Their (After)Lives in the Archives

From “Time-Based Media” to Genuine Media Tempor(e)alities

Wolfgang Ernst

The Suspended Life of Films:The Archive as Resuscitation of the Past

Trond Lundemo

Google Photos and Personal Memory: Who Lives, Who Dies and Who Tells Your Story

Daniel Bassan Petry

The Ghost in the Machine – Reflections on Rapture (Arrebato, Iván Zulueta, 1979)

Mats Carlsson

Haunted Machines and the Fear of Mechanic LifeGiuseppe Previtali

Automation, Representation, and the Question Concerning the Legibility of the Image/Machine Today

Pepita Hesselberth, Janna Houwen, Esther Peeren, Ruby de Vos

Archive Robots: On Bernard Stiegler’s Visions of Work and Futurity

Jaka Lombar

Crossing Boundaries in Digital Archives: Activating Audiovisual Heritage Through

Human-Machine InteractionJulia Noordegraaf

Animating and Re-Shaping Cinema’s BodySara Tongiani

The Humanistic Digital: Digital Restoration Tools and the Paradoxes of Uniqueness

Sabrina Negri

Algorithms for Film Digital Restoration: Unsupervised Approaches for

Film Frames EnhancementAlice Plutino, Alessandro Rizzi

191

197

199

205

211

221

227

233

239

245

253

259

265

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Marie Rebecchi, Università degli Studi di Udine/ Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3

Animation, Animated Cartoon and Liveliness: Eisenstein and Disney

Marie Rebecchi

“Scientific in form, socialist in content –The highest point on my line!!!”

Sergei Eisenstein, Disney (19 Jan. 1944)

My article focuses on the plastic and “metamorphic” power of certain living forms, in particular plants, which are apparently inert (or rather, inert to the naked eye) but can be animated by different media. From an aesthetic perspective, I examine on one hand the relationship between movement and the metamorphosis of living forms; on the other hand, I delve into the relationship between the animation of images and animism, drawing on reflections by directors and film theorists such as Jean Epstein and Sergei Eisenstein on the “an-imist” power of the cinematographic medium, reflections first posed in 1910 and 1920. This thinking has developed in both the plastic universe of drawing and that of cinematic time-images: two media, drawing and cinema, that are capable of bringing non-living matter to life (as in the case of drawing) and transforming it through movement into an “animated cartoon,” thereby passing through an unending series of metamorpho-ses and transformations.I will analyze certain filmic forms such as time-lapse and close-up as used by the British naturalist and docu-mentary filmmaker Frank Percy Smith to depict the growth of plants, especially in films from the 1910s and 1920s. I will also examine these filmic forms in the work of the French doctor and pioneer of micro-cinema-tography Jean Comandon, as well as Jean Painlevé’s scientific films (such as Hyas and Sténorinques, 1929, and L’Oursin, 1928). Through this analysis, I explore the manipulation of the spatio-temporal coordinates through which we perceive the internal movement – or rather the “soul” – of the various manifestations of living matter.Eisenstein wrote a series of notes on Walt Disney at the beginning of 1940 that were meant for inclusion in his monograph Method, although this book was not published until 2002.1 In these notes, he sees the idea of cartoons as offering a chance to understand the “method of animism” at the basis of the internal movement of graphic lines and their power to “grant” a soul to apparently motionless things. Eisenstein clarifies this idea in several passages of his notes on Disney:

The very idea, if you will, of an animated cartoon [animation: literally. A drawing brought to life] is practically a direct manifestation of the methods of animism. Whether the momentary endowment of life and soul of inanimate object, which we retain from the past, for example, when we bump into a chair and swear at it as if were a living thing, or the prolonged endowment with life that primitive man confers upon inanimate nature. […]Animal – L fr. Anima breath, soul


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Animate – L animates p.p. of animare, fr. Anima, breath, soul. Akin to animus soul, mindGreek ἄνεμος windSanskrit an to breath, liveL to give natural life to, to make alive, to quicken, as the soul animates the body.Animated pictureAnimism L anima soul… the belief that all objects possess natural life or vitality or that they are endowed with indwell-ing souls. The term is usually employed to denote the most primitive and superstitious forms of religion…2

In this passage, Eisenstein refers to the concept of animism not only as a system of primitive beliefs in which all the various elements found in nature and all inanimate objects are possessed of a soul and consciousness, but also in terms of another perspective, as Anselm Franke observes: “Animism doesn’t exhibit or discuss artifacts of cultural practices considered animist. Instead, it uses the term and its baggage as an optical device, a mirror in which the particular way modernity conceptualizes, implements, and transgresses boundaries can come into view.”3 From Eisenstein’s perspective, cartoons are one of the most immediate concretizations of animism. In Disney’s drawings, the line delimits the form; it is always in a state of “ecstasy,” always in motion: animation is a “drawing come to life.” Viewed in this way, cinema represents a true animist medium. Eisen-stein’s idea of animism is therefore wholly embodied in the “protoplasmic” nature of Disney’s drawings, as plasma is the driving principle of metamorphosis, the element that suggests movement in the sense of trans-formation. In relation to this idea, in another section of his notes on Disney titled Animism, Eisenstein states: “In English, the moving drawings of Disney are called… an animated cartoon. In this term both concepts are bound together: both ‘animation’ (anima – the soul) and liveliness (animation – liveliness, mobility). And surely, the drawing is animated through mobility.”4

It is also in his notes on Disney that Eisenstein examines the constituent laws of pre-logical thought as part of a reflection on the production and reception of artwork, especially in drawing and cartoons. Eisenstein develops the idea that two concepts could be merged in Disney’s cartoons: “animation” (“soul”) and “mobil-ity” (animation, in the sense of movement). Movement as “organic” transformation, as growth, “motionless” movement whose mobility lies in the ability of an organism to shape its own living architecture.In a note on drawings written on September 14th, 1932, Eisenstein already refers to the “plasmatic quality of form” and the “visual rhythm” of cartoons: “What we notice is that these drawings are ‘protoplasmic’ before all else. And their elementary and natural strength lies in the fact that they span the entire process between the original prototype and the already formed man.” In these same notes, Eisenstein observes that “Mickey Mouse – the first real dynamic design – possesses this protoplasmicity par excellence: this is the true basis of that which I have pushed to the ‘Kretschmarian’ limits of vegetative development (as a plant).”5 In this case, vegetative development is understood as dynamic, internal, aesthetic development in which the plant gives shape to its own matter: a life-giving process in which dynamic effects can be observed precisely through the movement of the line, that is, through animated drawing.6

Plants movements

As noted by philosopher Michael Marder, despite the apparent immobility of plants, the vegetable soul dis-plays three of the four types of movement listed by Aristotle in his treatise on the soul (De anima: 406a14-17).7 A plant can move in this sense by changing its state, by growing and by decomposing, but it cannot change its position. Plants therefore “move” in a manner appropriate to their being, housing a type of soul that is suited to their way of life and existence. Plants are not capable of moving and changing their position in space, but they are capable of a self-shaping movement that manifests in growth. In the very first pages of his early 1940 work, Non-Indifferent Nature, Eisenstein states that: “It is on the basis of a fundamental factor that distinguishes living organic nature from other phenomena that we might more easily identify and define these signs. This factor is growth, and it is this formula of growth, a fundamental sign of the organic phenomenon,

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around which we will concentrate our research.”8 According to Eisenstein, the fact that primordial organisms have not yet reached a stable form means they occupy a state of openness that allows them to assume all possible forms, virtually and organically, through a series of transformations and metamorphoses. In the end, they finally stabilize in any of the various forms of the animal kingdom. Mickey Mouse is thus exemplary of this “protoplasmic” state, an ecstatic figure par excellence (always outside of himself) that might give rise to virtually anything (for example, an indistinct society, without class divisions, a form of primordial commu-nism). In a chapter of Method titled “The Leap to Biology,” Eisenstein reflects on the way natural history and human history blur and overlap, an idea based on the hypothesis that all living phenomena have an identical structure. This point allows him to delineate a heterodox evolutionary trajectory that consists in a sort of “jumping chronology,” that is, qualitative (rather than quantitative) jumps that connect the most elementary and primitive forms of life (such as plasma, a substance with a liquid and protean appearance) to the highest and most evolved forms (man). In the pages of Method dedicated to Disney, Eisenstein develops this idea by arguing that: “Man in the image – the form of the animal. […] The animal ‘form’ is a step backward in evo-lution with respect to ‘content’ – man! […].” In a section of the Walt Disney notes titled The Animal Epic, Eisenstein notes that: “A man in images – in the form of an animal. In an animal ‘form’ he is evolving, taking a step backwards with respect to his ‘content’ – man!”9 (fig. 34).In another passage of his notes on Disney, Eisenstein uses the term “attraction of the plasma,”10 that is, the om-nipotence of plasma which in its liquid state contains all possible forms and appearances in a potential state. Here, plasma is identified with a protean (alluding to the myth of Proteus) and disordered state of matter. Eisenstein therefore conceptualized protoplasm as a reservoir of bodily memory based on a particular logic, namely the concept of “sensitive thought” and the “law of participation” described by French philosopher and anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in his writings on the Primitive Mentality (1922).11 Most of the plas-matic elements found in the 1930s Silly Symphonies are presented by Eisenstein as one of the main features of Disney films. This list, he argues, reveals a process of gradual animation that moves across individuals and the species, ontogeny and phylogeny, the idea of organic transformation beginning from a “plasmatic-original” foundation. In a note from November 1941, Eisenstein writes:

A. The drawings come to life.B. Drawings sketched in a stroke.C. Humanized animals.D. That’s not all: they are animated (given human soul).E. Absolutely synesthetic (audio-visual).F. Metaphorical, and in two senses at that: both in plot and in form.G. Not only the animal, but also the vegetative world!

The Silly Symphony “Flowers and Trees” (1932) is an excellent example of the plasmatic and ecstatic qualities of plant forms. In this case, the key idea is that of plant matter (trees and flowers) coming to life and, at the same time, becoming anthropomorphized. This depiction presents only unstable and variable forms in contin-uous evolution, forms capable of generating an inexorable process of metamorphosis and frenzied distortions.In another note on Disney, Eisenstein insightfully speaks of metamorphosis in these terms: “Metamorphosis is not a lapsus – because, leafing through Ovid, <we see that> some of its pages seem to be the transcription of Disney cartoons.”12

“Anarchitecture” and the porosity of the underwater environment

Starting from this Eisensteinian idea of metamorphosis as “protoplasmatic,” that is, as the capacity of the most basic organisms to assume all forms, we can formulate the hypothesis that some research films by director and


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biologist Jean Painlevé influenced, or even inspired, Eisenstein’s specific notion of “protoplasmicity,” under-stood here as the constant transformation of all unicellular forms, plants and organisms leading up to humans.Shortly after their meeting, Eisenstein and Painlevé developed a strong friendship, as evidenced by the cor-respondence they maintained during all of Eisenstein’s travels in the United States and Mexico (1930-32) up until his return to the Soviet Union.The correspondence between the two allows us to grasp, on the one hand, the influence of Painlevé’s films on Eisenstein’s anthropological thinking in the 1930s, and, on the other hand, to reconsider Eisenstein’s trip to Paris and his exchanges with prominent figures in “heterodox” surrealism associated with Bataille (Painlevé himself included) as a decisive moment in the Soviet director’s intellectual and biographical life. One could, in fact, hypothesize that some of Painlevé’s scientific films – like the one entitled Protoplasm Movement in Elodea Canadensis (Mouvement du protoplasme d’Élodea canadensis), 1927 – inspired Eisenstein’s “protoplasm” the-ory, based on the idea that primordial organisms, which have not yet achieved a stable form, are in a state that allows them to assume all possible forms through a continuous series of transformations and metamorphoses.In another film, L’oursin (1928), made at about the same time of Mouvement du protoplasme d’Élodea Canaden-sis, Painlevé evokes the morphological process and the architectural elements of this spiny, globular animal. In a description written rather late, just before his death, Painlevé speaks of this vegetable dimension inscribed in the very body of the sea urchin:

In sea urchins, the most surprising part is the shell. Looking over it distractedly, we see only an impenetrable forest; then we make out the spines that begin to move. But let us try to penetrate the forest with magnification. Around the spines, which have become Doric columns, we discover another smaller forest made up of shrubs. These are the pedicellariae, small organs belonging to the sea urchin. A limestone stalk that culminates in three jaws, where the muscles close and open constantly. Some pedicellariae have long, thin and perforated jaws. Others evoke the powerful, compact heads of serpents... L’oursin for me was an architectural film, composed of an entire series of very beautiful structures and extraor-dinary colonnades. I would not like to speak ill of Buren’s columns, but the columns of sea urchins are no less important. (fig. 35).

This architecture of the sea urchin is not unlike the concept of vegetal “ana-architecture” Michael Marder dis-cusses in his book Plant-Thinking. Anarchitecture is a neologism coined in the 1970s thanks to a collaborative effort by artists including Laurie Anderson, Tina Girouard, Carol Goodden, Suzanne Harris, Jene Highstein, Bernard Kirschenbaun, and Gordon Matta-Clark.13 In March 1974, a group project under the same title was exhibited at 112 Greene Street in New York City. A revolt against architectural foundationalism, anarchitec-ture not only negates the preceding set of practices and their “products” but also shatters into a multiplicity of semantically indeterminate word combinations.Insofar as plants display something of a living architecture – or better, architectonics, a system of structures or an identifiable structural pattern – they are the prime exemplars of anarchitecture. In the first place, while the DNA of, say, a pine specifies the kind of tree that will germinate from a nut or a seed, it does not predetermine the precise shape of the tree, its height, the arrangement of branches along its trunk, and so forth. All these factors depend on environmental conditions, that is to say, on what is exterior to the plant itself. An architec-tural – an anarchitectural – equivalent to this phenomenon would be a building that responds and adjusts to changes in its surroundings by changing its structural and functional aspects, by expanding or contracting, opening up or closing in on itself.

The growth of plants: time-lapse and the hetero-temporality of the vegetal world

One compelling attempt to visualize the animation process of living forms which are apparently incapable of movement can be found in a film made with modelling clay (a form of 3-D animation carried out by “clay animation”) by Hans Elias, a physician who emigrated to the United States to work as a professor of anato-my in 1950s Chicago. This animated film, entitled Développement de la fleur de Atropa Belladonna, depicts a

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flower unfolding through the plastic power of the moving image. Here, movement and animation allow us to grasp a phenomenon invisible and imperceptible to the naked eye, namely the life of plants; at the same time, the film also reveals the plasticity of an inert material such as modeling clay. In so doing, it demonstrates the “vitality” of plants in terms of the timing and movement through which we consider them. The film shows a manifestation of life, the vitality of a plant, through the vital process of growth.Hans Elias’ animated film can be read as an example of what Teresa Castro, writing on Jean Epstein’s “animist cinema,” defines as the “dual significance of animism”: the way it attributes “interiority to the things of the world” while simultaneously assigning cinema itself a vitality, a soul or intelligence.14 In Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna (1926), Epstein suggests that cinema is both a machine that brings things to life and a machine that is itself alive and intelligent:

Cinema grants the iciest apparitions of things and beings the greatest gift that can be given before death: life. And it confers this life beginning from its highest aspect: personality. Personality passes through intelligence. Personality is the visible soul of things and people, their apparent heredity, where their past becomes unforgettable and their future already present. All the aspects of the world that cinema selects for life are selected only if they have their own personality.15

In this case, animism is understood as both the material presence of a vital substance and interiority, that is, personality and intentionality.16

Epstein’s theorizing also establishes a link between accelerated motion techniques and the discovery that cer-tain life forms which might seem inert to the human eye actually do move:

The breadth of playing with space-time perspective, games that involve accelerated movement, slow motion and close-ups, reveal movement and life in what was considered immutable and inert. Through accelerated projection, the scale of the kingdoms is shifted – more or less, depending on its relationship with acceleration – towards a greater qualification of existence. Thus, crystals begin to vegetate in the manner of living cells; plants come alive, choose their sources of light and sustenance, express their vitality with movements.17

We have seen that “viewing the invisible” through cinematographic (and micro-cinematographic) techniques enables a form of mediation through which the vitality of things becomes visible. Imperceptibly ultra-slow movements can only be viewed thanks to certain specific techniques such as time-lapse, a highly accelerated effect created image by image. To obtain the acceleration effect, the frame rate cannot follow the standard projection speed of 24 (or 25) frames per second; it must instead be set to 12-8-6 frames per second, thus ac-celerating projection by 2-3-4 times. British naturalist Frank Percy Smith (1880-1945) was one of the pioneers of time-lapse in cinema with his 1910 Kinemacolor film The Birth of a Flower. The film contains nine scenes depicting the spectacular opening and transformation of nine different types of flowers, including hyacinths, lilies, anemones, daffodils, tulips, roses and anemones that curl and unfurl their petals like the lenses of a ka-leidoscope.18 The flowers open and close in a temporal space manipulated by the cinematographic technique to render it perceptible to the human eye.Jean Comandon’s contribution was the invention of various devices for observing the invisible in the living world, including both ultra-fast and ultra-slow effects. “The vegetable world that he films at a very slow speed, for long periods of time, ceases to appear motionless; flowers bloom, present themselves in their fullness and then wither.”19 Like the first time-lapse films of plant life by German botanist Wilhelm Pfeffer and American photographer Arthur Pillsbury, Comandon’s La Croissance des végétaux (1929) was probably influenced by Charles Darwin’s writings on the movement of plants – The Power of Movement in Plants, 1880 – and Ernst Mach’s discoveries about supersonic speed from the second half of the 19th century.20 As we have seen, this drive to visualize the movement of plants necessarily requires intervening in temporal coordinates. Indeed, the temporality of plants is a “hetero-temporality,”21 a temporality which is quantitatively and qualitatively differ-ent from that which characterizes the existence of human beings. It is a “vegetal-time” that requires the use of cinema – as a technical medium with the power to develop and extend the innate capacities of an organism – to be transformed into a form of temporality with which the human eye can engage.


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Through time-lapse films, cinema reveals that plants possess a complex sensory motility, that is, a sensitivity that allows them to move in response to their environment, such as the ability to perceive different types of stimuli (light, temperature). As made visible by the spatiotemporal manipulations of cinema, recognizing the sensitivity and movement of plants is tantamount to attributing them two faculties generally considered exclusive to animals.As revealed by photography and cinema, this common “soul” possessed by animal and plant life forms alike, this porosity between plants and animals speaks to the sort of “unity of life” that Jean Epstein asserts in a very concise passage from his essay L’Intelligence d’une machine: “The entire universe is an immense beast whose stones, flowers, and birds are organs, all exactly consistent by virtue of participating in a single, common soul. All those rigorous and superficial classifications that are supposed to characterize nature are nothing but ar-tifice and illusion. Underneath those mirages, the people of forms are essentially homogeneous and strangely anarchic.”22

Illustrations

34. Ernst Haeckel, “Sea anemones,” Kunstformen der Natur (1899-1904), in Olaf Breidbach, Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt (eds.), Art Forms in Nature, Prestel, Munich-New York, 1998.

35. Jean Painlevé, L’oursin, 1928, © Jean Painlevé Archives, Paris.

Notes

1 There are two different Russian editions of Sergei Eisenstein’s Method: Naum Kleiman (ed.), Metod. Tajny masterov volumes 1 and 2, Muzej kino, Moscow 2002; Oksana Bulgakowa (ed.), Metod, volumes 1-4, Potemkin Press, Berlin 2008. An Italian translation of Method I, edited by Alessia Cervini for Marsilio, will also be published in 2020.

2 Sergei Eisenstein, Disney, Oksana Bulgakowa, Dietmar Hochmuth (eds.), Potemkin Press, Berlin 2011, p. 33.

3 Anselm Franke, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls, or The Sudden Disorganization of Boundaries, in Id. (ed.), Animism, Extra City/M HKA/Kunsthalle Bern/Sternberg Press, 2010, p. 11.

4 Sergei Eisenstein, Disney, cit., p. 51.5 Idem, see p. 87 and p. 164.6 See Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, Polity Press, Cambridge

2018.7 Michael Marder, Plant-Time (I): Vegetal Hetero-Temporality, in Id., Plant-Thinking. A Philos-

ophy of Vegetal Life, Columbia University Press, New York 2013, p. 20.8 Sergei Eisenstein, Non-indifferent Nature: Film and the Structures of Things, translated by

Herbert Marshall, introduction by Herbert Eagle, Cambridge Studies in Film, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge-New York 1988.

9 The theoretical sources Eisenstein draws on in developing this idea of evolutionary biology include authors such as Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel as well as Max Hartmann’s book Allgemeine Biologie (1933). In a page of his diary from 1930, Eisenstein captures Haeckel’s idea of ontogeny, which summarizes phylogeny, in the synthetic phrase “From fish to man.”

10 Sergei Eisenstein, Notes on Disney, 8/VII/1946 (Kratovo).11 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, La Mentalité primitive, Alcan, Paris 1922; English edition: The Note-

books on Primitive Mentality, trans. Peter G. Riviere, Harper and Row, New York 1975.12 Sergei Eisenstein, Disney, cit., p. 32.13 Michael Marder, “Vegetal Anarchitectures,” The Philosophers’s Plant, LARB, 21 June 2016,

https://philosoplant.lareviewofbooks.org/?p=164, last visit 11 January 2020. See Michael Marder, The Shape of Freedom, in Id., Plant-Thinking. A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, cit. See also Antonio Sergio Bessa, Jessamyn Fiore (eds.), Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitecte, Jeu de Paume, Paris 2018.

14 Teresa Castro, Penser le “cinéma animiste” avec Jean Epstein, in Ramery Hamery, Éric Thou-venel (eds.), Jean Epstein. Actualités et postérités, PUR, Rennes 2016, p. 248. See also Teresa

Marie Rebecchi

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Castro, Perig Pitrou, Marie Rebecchi, Puissances du végétal. Cinéma animiste et anthropologie de la vie, Les presses du réel, Dijon 2020 forthcoming.

15 Jean Epstein, Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna (1926), in Id., Écrits sur le cinéma, vol. I, coll. “Cinéma Club,” Seghers, Paris 1974, p. 140 (my translation).

16 Philippe Descola, Rapport à soi, rapport à l’autre, in Id., Par-delà nature et culture, Gallimard, Paris 2005, pp. 168-69.

17 Idem, p. 287.18 For a discussion of the analogy between kaleidoscopes and anemones in the sequence in Per-

cy Smith’s film The Birth of a Flower, see Oliver Gaycken, Devices of Curiosity. Early Cinema and Popular Science, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, p. 74.

19 Text introducing “Ballet botanique,” an afternoon of study on Jean Comandon’s film-mak-ing organized at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF),16 February 2012. See Laurent Mannoni, Jean Comandon technicien, in Filmer la science comprendre la vie. Le cinéma de Jean Comandon, CNC, Paris 2012, p. 59.

20 See Oliver Gaycken, Early Cinema and Evolution, in Bernard V. Lightman, Bennett Zon (eds.), Evolution and Victorian Culture, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2014, pp. 108-109.

21 Michael Marder, Plant-Time (I): Vegetal Hetero-Temporality, in Id., Plant-Thinking. A Philos-ophy of Vegetal Life, pp. 95-107.

22 Jean Epstein, L’Intelligence d’une machine (1946), in Id., Écrits sur le cinéma, cit., p. 257 (my translation).

animation, animated cartoon and liveliness: eisenstein and

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