ZusammenfassungWurde die Geschichte der Filmdigitalisierung jemals in Fragen der Beweis- und Wissensproduktion einbezogen? Die gerade stattfindende Digitalisierung von vielen Tausend Filmen des ehemaligen Instituts für den Wissenschaftlichen Film (IWF) gibt Anlass, über die Provenienz und Wiederverwendung von Filmbildern nachzudenken als auch über die Art und Weise, in der sie behaupten, wissenschaftliche (oder in diesem Fall historische) Evidenz zu produzieren. In den Jahren von 1956 bis etwa 1960 initiierte der deutsche Sozialdemokrat, Historiker und Filmemacher Friedrich „Fritz“ Terveen Filmreihen, die mit vorgefundenem (...) Filmmaterial Hochschulstudent*innen über Zeitgeschichte aufklären sollten. Die erste kleine Filmreihe darunter warLuftschifffahrt in Deutschland, die vier kleine Filme mit gefundenem Filmmaterial über Zeppelinflüge umfasste, von denen die frühesten Bilder aus der Zeit um 1904 und die letzten aus dem Jahr 1937 stammen und die „Hindenburg-Katastrophe“ zeigen. In diesem Artikel soll gezeigt werden, wie Terveen die politische Landschaft des Geschichtsunterrichts in der neu gegründeten Bundesrepublik Deutschland zu gestalten suchte, indem er erstens danach strebte, ein bundesweites Bildarchiv mit historischen Filmdokumenten einzurichten und zweitens die politische Bildung einer neuen Generation junger Deutscher mithilfe des bewegten Bildes verbessern wollte. (shrink)

Has the history of film digitization ever been incorporated in questions of evidence and knowledge production? The digitization of thousands of films from the former Institute for Scientific Film (IWF) that is currently underway gives an occasion to think about the provenance and reuses of filmic images as well as the ways in which they claim to produce scientific (or in this case, historical) evidence. In the years between 1956 and 1960, the German Social Democrat, historian and filmmaker Friedrich “Fritz” (...) Terveen initiated a film series that used historical found film footage in order to educate university students about contemporary history. The first small series of films was entitled Airship Aviation in Germany which consisted of four short films using found footage of zeppelin flights, of which the earliest images stem from around 1904 and the latest from 1937, the moment of the “Hindenburg disaster.” This article explores how Terveen sought to shape the political landscape of history teaching in the new Federal Republic of Germany by first setting up nation-wide visual archives to host historical film documents, and secondly by seeking to improve the political education of a new generation of young Germans with the aid of the moving image. (shrink)

This introduction outlines the threefold contribution that this Focus section on research film offers. First, it introduces the vast collection of films from the former Institute for Scientific Film (Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film [IWF]), arguably the most ambitious endeavor ever undertaken to manage the distribution, production, and archiving of research films. At the same time, the institute’s questionable roots in the National Socialist education system and in war research are addressed. Second, the introduction points out that the Focus section (...) enters largely uncharted terrain in the history of research films. Third, it argues that a focus on the multiple reuses of research films, as this section attempts, not only suits the medium specificity of film but helps us to map the aesthetic, intermedial, and cultural-political practices of disseminating knowledge. In this vein, the organizers asked established scholars working on film and science to share with us a short story of a reused research film. Scott Curtis, Vinzenz Hediger, Anja Laukötter, and Hanna Rose Shell responded. Their contributions can be found in the supplementary materials to the online edition. (shrink)

The article analyses the role of time in the visual culture of two phases in embryological research: at the end of the nineteenth century, and in the years around 2000. The first case study involves microscopical cytology, the second reproductive genetics. In the 1870s we observe the first of a series of abstractions in research methodology on conception and development, moving from a method propagated as the observation of the “real” living object to the production of stained and fixated objects (...) that are then aligned in temporal order. This process of abstraction ultimately fosters a dissociation between space and time in the research phenomenon, which after 2000 is problematized and explicitly tackled in embryology. Mass data computing made it possible partially to re-include temporal complexity in reproductive genetics in certain, though not all, fields of reproductive genetics. Here research question, instrument and modelling interact in ways that produce very different temporal relationships. Specifically, this article suggests that the different techniques in the late nineteenth century and around 2000 were employed in order to align the time of the researcher with that of the phenomenon and to economize the researcher’s work in interaction with the research material’s own temporal challenges. (shrink)