Arts & Culture: Science and Filmmaking in an Equal Relationship
Many blockbuster movies resort to science for the compelling story ideas and imagery it provides. But the film industry’s relationship with science usually only goes in one direction: filmmakers often borrow from science to pepper up their plots without concern for accuracy. In Hollywood movies, instant phone calls are placed to distant planets without delays, explosions in cosmic vacuum produce audible sounds, and humans serve as power generators that provide more energy than they consume. At the Imagine Science Film Festival, however, scientific rigor and film aesthetics go hand in hand. The event, which takes place every fall in New York, is striving to create a new relationship between science and cinema, one in which scientists and moviemakers work closely together.
This year’s festival featured 83 movies from over 20 countries, selected from 1000 submissions, and attracted a crowd of hundreds of people keen to walk across the boundaries between science and art. Alexis Gambis, a professor of Biology, Film, and New Media at New York University Abu Dhabi, was one such person when he founded Imagine Science in 2007 while completing a Ph.D. on the degeneration of neurons in the retina. “The mission of Imagine Science is to offer a space where scientists and filmmakers come together on the same footing,” he explains.
This even relationship was perhaps best epitomized by the festival’s Symbiosis competition. A jury selected six scientists and six filmmakers from a number of applicants and paired them up randomly. The scientist–filmmaker duos had to create short movies in just one week, working together on all aspects of the production. Along the way, they reported to the jury—the depth of their collaboration was a key evaluation factor. “We want to see them equally involved,” says Gambis, “Where it becomes really interesting to us is when they act, write, edit, and film together.” Geneticist Andres Mansisidor and film director Beatrice Copeland earned the competition prize with Light Hearted, a visual poem describing love in terms of electromagnetism, chemistry, and radiation.
The rest of the program, focused on the theme of light, illustrated the many different ways science can be combined with cinema. Some films were simply effective outreach tools: The Max Planck Society from Germany presented a short film on STED microscopy, a technique that can beat the resolution limits of diffraction and can image biomolecules. Physics Reimagined—a group at the Laboratory of Solid State Physics in France working on new forms of presenting physics to the public—showed animations about atomic-force and scanning-tunneling microscopy. And a section called Scenes showcased the beauty of raw science data through unprocessed footage from magnetic resonance imaging, microscopy, electroencephalograms, and other experiments.
Sci-fi was also featured in the festival’s program, but it wasn’t marred by implausible astronomy or post-apocalyptic scenarios. The collaborations between filmmakers and researchers that happened behind the scenes meant the movies were grounded in science facts and inspired by actual research. A case in point was the film Bow Shock, which filmmaker Javier Díez developed through close interactions with scientists from the Javalambre Physics of the Accelerating Universe Astrophysical Survey (J-PAS) in Spain, a project that will deliver an accurate 3D map of the Universe. In the movie, J-PAS researchers spot an electromagnetic “bow wave” traveling in the Oort Cloud, a shell of icy bodies surrounding the Solar System. A sudden deceleration of the wave suggests it is not caused by an astrophysical object, but by alien spacecraft. The researchers are left to wonder whether the wave’s trajectory indicates the aliens have spotted Earth and are considering attacking it.
Lastly, science and personal life were tightly woven together in the beautiful movie that swept the major festival awards, Reconsolidation. Directed by Liron Unreich, the film bagged both the festival’s “People’s Choice Award” and the “Scientist Award” for the best portrayal of a scientist’s life. (See the movie trailer. The full movie will be available in the December 2017 issue of Labocine.) The film’s protagonist is Daniela Schiller, a neuroscientist leading the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Schiller studies how our brain processes emotional memories, hoping to find ways to “reconsolidate” our darkest memories—that is, to rewrite them so they become easier to bear. In the film, Schiller’s life and research are deeply entangled. She travels to Israel in an attempt to compel her father to reveal his traumatic memories of the Holocaust. According to Schiller, the shooting of the movie opened a new bridge to her father, thanks to the formal atmosphere of a recorded interview and the connections he developed with the movie crew. “Through art I got what I had never been able to get,” says Schiller. “We finally talked.”
International editions of the festival will be held in Abu Dhabi (March 2–4, 2017) and Paris (June 1–3, 2017). And if you’d like to tell an intriguing physics story through images, try your luck with the next call for submissions. The exciting theme of the 2017 festival is “attraction.”
–Matteo Rini
Matteo Rini is the Deputy Editor of Physics.