Peter Whitehead's The Perception of Life and the Biological Aesthetic

For several years now, I have cotaught a film studies course with a biologist: The Biology of Science Fiction Film.¹ Designed as a genre course in cinema and an exploration of some significant concepts in biology, the course asks both professors and students to consider the discursive relations between scientific fact and social, political, and ideological constructs, and particularly where a cinematic aesthetic informs those relations. So I was immediately intrigued when asked by the editors of this special issue on the work of Peter Whitehead to look at his first film, The Perception of Life (1963)—an educational science "documentary," or one of what Timothy Boon has perhaps more aptly called "films of fact" (after Paul Rotha's documentary film production company)—to distinguish science cinema from the documentary tradition.² The notion of looking not just at science fiction but also at the manner in which a figure such as Whitehead began his diverse and experimental artistic career with an educational science film made in the ser vice of what was called, fascinatingly enough, "The Nuffield Foundation Unit for the History of Ideas," seemed a rich opportunity for further investigation into where cinema's aesthetics and technologies intersect with the scientific community. And certainly Whitehead's short film does not disappoint—The Perception of Life is remarkable not just for what was then an early theoretical exploration of how lens-based technologies influenced thought and understanding of the scientific world but also by showing how the art and politics of the time were intersecting in an aesthetic of biology.

I was immediately struck by how The Perception of Life makes itself known as a film that is not only introducing its viewers to images of the microcosm of life but is also bemusedly reflecting on its own envisioning of those microcosms. Opening with a caption—"Wherever possible in this Film we have used the Original Objective Lenses, Slides, and Drawings of the Early Microscopists. We gratefully acknowledge the generous help and cooperation of The Royal Microscopical Society and Gillett and Sibert Ltd."—the film would seem to announce an earnest investment in the perceptive capabilities of the microscopic lens and its own reframing of microscopic photography. However, the suspicion of irony one might gather from the highlighted notion of the "Objective Lenses, Slides, and Drawings," is borne out relatively early in the short film by the playful approach to the perceptions of these "objective" lenses. A voiceover announces that the early microscopists of the seventeenth century were "totally unprepared for what they saw," and then addresses the audience directly in asking, "Moving for the first time to this other world inside of ours, what would you have made of these?" We are then presented with a harpsichord-accompanied montage of microscopic moving images of tiny organisms without comment—as wonderment, as an aesthetic experience. Following this is an image of a microscope itself and a colorfully narrated history of lens-based investigations of life, referring to the microscope as both a "looking glass" to another world and a "plaything of the drawing room." Thus, the opening caption's emphasis on the objective and the scientific is quickly rendered alongside what become continuous literary and cultural references and an implicit critique of the objectivity of scientific pursuit, and—more self-reflexively—an undermining of the very film we are watching as a point of access to pure fact.

The film goes on to provide a voiceover history of how microscopes were developed, alongside the aforementioned slides, drawings, and films. In combination with this is an account of how theories of life were developed from these visual renderings of cells, and almost constant classical musical accompaniment that serves to frame and contextualize the scientific pursuits documented in the film as themselves part of a tradition of aesthetic practice.

In watching the film from the perspective of twenty-first-century film scholarship, I thus couldn't help but notice how much of later theoretical work the film seems to anticipate, and how it seemed very much to be the film's self-conscious...