Hors d'oeuvre: Science, the Short Film, and The Perception of Life

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

The science film has historically played the role of hors d'oeuvre, in its multiple senses, to narrative, documentary, and experimental cinemas. As a broad descriptor, the science film 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 films used to demonstrate and teach scientific techniques and materials, and to popular or documentary films with scientific 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 film—providing the cinema with noble ancestors—while largely remaining circumscribed from its commercial development. In their polemic definitions of documentary film written in the early 1930s, John Grierson and Paul Rotha echo this perspective, amplifying it by explicitly excluding scientific, wildlife, and avant-garde films 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 films were fine precedents, according 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 films 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 film's feast for the eyes. Since such films 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 films 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 spectators who used the light reflected from images of "glistening worms...