[T]he film … provides us with exquisite and clear living images of microscopic creatures and the hidden processes that occur inside the body of an animal, and it also familiarizes us with a great and learned historical character, one of the many who will occupy a better place in a new national history...Footnote 1
In 1924 the medium of film enabled audiences to see what the Dutch microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) had famously observed two and a half centuries earlier. It became possible to revisualize and reconstruct these experiences for large audiences through a combination of Van Leeuwenhoek's original seventeenth-century lenses and microcinematography.Footnote 2 The director, who used Van Leeuwenhoek's original microscope in some scenes, managed to create a novel ‘historic-micro-cinematographic’ genre in science film, thereby opening a new chapter in the history of science – that of visual reconstruction.Footnote 3
Today, the tercentenary of Van Leeuwenhoek's death is being widely celebrated. His personal life, discoveries, observations and achievements are the subject of academic publications and studies.Footnote 4 But his legacy is also celebrated in exhibitions, biographies and public media.Footnote 5 Histories are being told and retold, old drawings are resurfacing and the memories of science past are being made and remade. A new chapter is thus being added to our collective memory of Van Leeuwenhoek – a chapter in the history of the depiction of Van Leeuwenhoek that is constantly changing and has been (for the past century at least) deeply influenced by popular visual culture. This paper explores how science film as a particularly influential visual medium has shaped and continues to shape culture and memory around Antoni van Leeuwenhoek's work. Of particular importance to this analysis is the method of reconstruction, the role of instruments (both historical and contemporary) and knowledge transfer about microcinematography.
Antoni van Leeuwenhoek is an important figure in the history of Dutch science. In 2004, when television viewers were invited to vote for the ‘Greatest Dutchman’, Van Leeuwenhoek came fourth, ahead of famous figures such as the painter Vincent van Gogh and the football player Johan Cruyff.Footnote 6 Van Leeuwenhoek's name continues to be invoked and remembered frequently.Footnote 7 It is used by the Dutch Cancer Institute Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital, for example.Footnote 8 In 2009 one of the microscopes made by Van Leeuwenhoek was auctioned at Christies under the lot title ‘The foundations of modern biology’.Footnote 9 Van Leeuwenhoek's role as the ‘founding father’ of microscopy, microbiology, bacteriology and protozoology has been commemorated both nationally and internationally.Footnote 10
In 1923, the celebrations of 250 years since Van Leeuwenhoek's original observations aroused the interest of the Dutch filmmaker Jan Cornelis Mol (1891–1954). The subject of this paper is Mol's silent film Antony van Leeuwenhoek, which re-creates Van Leeuwenhoek's microscopic observations.Footnote 11 I will look at how the film played a formative role in the dynamic process of collective memory formation around the history of microscopy and bacteriology between 1925 and 1960. The microcinematographic sequences in the film function as reconstructions of the observations originally made using Van Leeuwenhoek's microscopes, and as visual experiments that replicate Van Leeuwenhoek's seventeenth-century observations. The film, its making and its reception are thus examples of the important matters of skills, materiality and the use of instruments in science cinema. To overcome the technical challenges involved, Mol had to construct his own microcinematographic installation, which led him to develop a new function for microcinematographic imagery as part of a cinematographic reconstruction in the history of science. The juxtaposition of material heritage and modern cinematography enabled the film to function as a dynamic mediator in the formation of cultural memory around microbiology and bacteriology. The use of the double lens of Van Leeuwenhoek's original microscope and Mol's camera made it possible for audiences to witness the graceful movements of Van Leeuwenhoek's ‘little animals’ for themselves and, as it were, to look through the eyes of the master microscope maker.
The history of microcinematography and science cinema have been the focus of historians of science and film historians in recent decades. Hannah Landecker's important work on microcinematography in cell biology was followed by studies on the recording of Brownian motion, and microcinematography in embryology and popular cinema, among others.Footnote 12 Studies on science films, popular-scientific moving images and science documentary have also opened up the rich world of knowledge making and knowledge transfer in science cinema.Footnote 13 So far, however, microcinematography has scarcely been studied in relation to the cultural memory of science and the reconstruction of scientific observation. Scientific cinema became part and parcel of commemoration practices from the 1920s onwards, but has never been studied as an important medium in that context.Footnote 14 As Jennifer Tucker has argued, visualization in science should be studied as the constitutive and rhetorical work of science itself.Footnote 15 Similarly, science films, such as Mol's Antony van Leeuwenhoek, were constitutive for the public understanding of the history of biology and bacteriology in the twentieth century. Landecker argues that the use of the microcinematographic apparatus worked as a ‘technological portal to another world of time’.Footnote 16 However, Antony van Leeuwenhoek actually serves as a double portal: the first portal, supposedly to the seventeenth century, involves passing through the second portal of the new microscopic realm that was unlocked by microcinematography. In adopting and experimenting with new optical devices, Mol was actually following in the experimental footsteps of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek himself.
This analysis contributes to our understanding of the way in which scientific heritage is appreciated, how memory building takes place around important figures in the history of science, and the early cinematographic experiments in reconstructing and re-enacting historical scientific observations. As an example of a late microcinematographic film, Mol's Antony van Leeuwenhoek reveals how technological challenges, personal relationships and the unwritten skills of microscopy and cinematography emerged and became tangible through efforts to reconstruct and re-create the history of science in film. Compared to other early biographical films, such as Jean Epstein's film about Louis Pasteur, Mol approached his subject more experimentally, mirroring Van Leeuwenhoek's own inquisitive approach to lenses and the world that they unlocked. Finally, this paper shows that efforts to reconstruct and replicate episodes in the history of science pre-date the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 17 Mol's Antony van Leeuwenhoek reveals an early attempt to replicate history as heritage in cinema within the context of the absolute film movement.
The film
Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1924) is a silent film in five parts. The first part opens with an intertitle dedicating the film to Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, ‘the father of bacteriology and protozoology’. Footage of Delft, the birthplace of Van Leeuwenhoek, follows. We are shown the house and the street where he lived, followed by a shot of a portrait of him by Johannes Verkolje, painted around 1680. We then see a pair of hands demonstrating the functioning of an original simple Leeuwenhoek microscope, and later also handling an instrument that may have been Van Leeuwenhoek's original aquatic microscope (Figure 1). The hands are those of biologist Wouter Hendrik van Seters (1891–1976), who had an interest in antique microscopes and worked with Mol on the film.Footnote 18 In 1924, the aquatic microscope had just been rediscovered in a repository of the Leiden Physical Laboratory.Footnote 19 The next scene shows images of a cross-section of beechwood made using original Van Leeuwenhoek microscope lenses, according to the intertitles shown on the screen. The original drawing of beechwood that was published alongside Leeuwenhoek's letter on the subject is shown next.Footnote 20 Some of Van Leeuwenhoek's handwritten letters and collected volumes of letters are also shown. Again, we see hands and arms handling books and unfolding drawings. Part One comes to an end with historical engravings of salts, interspersed with quotes by Van Leeuwenhoek and microcinematographic sequences of the growth of crystals of alum, saltpetre and salmiak (Figure 2). The transition from still engraving to moving footage of alum crystals creates a seamless connection in abstract shapes.
Figure 1. Leeuwenhoek microscope. Still, Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1925), Eye Film Collection.
Figure 2. Sal ammoniac (salmiak) crystal. Still, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, Eye Film Collection.
Part Two starts with Van Leeuwenhoek's descriptions of protozoa and bacteria, taken from his original writings and published letters. After footage of some of those letters, the intertitles explain how the following recordings of pepper water were made using the original Van Leeuwenhoek lens (for microcinematography). Illustrations of swarming protozoa are followed by microcinematographic images of these ‘little animals’ made using a modern microscope. Further recordings of bacteria and the unicellular organisms Paramecium and Vorticellidae are shown. Parts Three and Four of the film feature similar recordings of Stylonichia, Daphnia, Vorticella, Hydra, green algae, vinegar eels and Euglena. Lastly, Part Five includes frog and bull sperm cells. Following more footage of the use of Van Leeuwenhoek's aquatic microscope, there are microcinematographic sequences of the circulation of blood with individual blood cells moving through the capillaries. The film's final shots show a medal with Van Leeuwenhoek's portrait and his tombstone in Delft. The closing caption is a quote from Van Leeuwenhoek in an Album Amicorum: ‘Through labour and diligence one arrives at things which one would have previously considered unfathomable’.Footnote 21
Repeated sequences of engravings, quotes and microcinematography re-create the experiments and microscope observations carried out by Van Leeuwenhoek himself. First, we see an original engraving published in the Van Leeuwenhoek letters, followed by quotes from Van Leeuwenhoek about his observations, some accompanied by engravings that transition into microcinematographic recordings of that particular microorganism or phenomenon. Following a quote about Stylonychia swimming with many legs, for instance, we are shown moving images of this single-celled organism, in which we immediately recognize these moving legs and our focus is drawn towards them. In the case of the microcinematographic recordings of Volvox, the engravings and quotes mention the bulging part of the round form of this alga when it is viewed through a microscope; this is followed by microcinematographic footage of moving Volvox that illustrates precisely that observation (Figure 3). The quotes from Van Leeuwenhoek focus on movements, and the microcinematographic sequences function as a visual demonstration of those movements, such as in the case of the movement of blood cells, which Van Leeuwenhoek describes as ‘not an even movement, but being propelled forwards very suddenly’.Footnote 22 The microcinematography serves to convince the viewers and to confirm the accuracy of Van Leeuwenhoek's observations. These returning sequences in the film thus function as visual demonstrations of successful experiments.
Figure 3. Collage of three stills from Antony van Leeuwenhoek, Eye Film Collection.
The film is structured according to biology, not chronology. The five parts are analogous to the evolutionary steps from simple life forms to more complex animal life. We progress through the various kingdoms of life, from bacteria, to single-cell life in the form of protozoa, to small multicellular animals like Rotifer, to complex multicellular life such as mosquitoes, sperm cells and the circulation of blood in fish and mammals. This is consistent with what Landecker has noted with regard to contemporary biologists and others: that early microcinematographic films ‘were experiments in seeing and perceiving life, not just living things, but that which was understood and narrated as the fundament of life’.Footnote 23 However, Antony van Leeuwenhoek was not made for the purposes of academic research.Footnote 24 Nor was it intended for an audience made up only of experts. The film was a tribute to life – as first witnessed and discovered many centuries ago.
Indeed, according to its makers, the film served a dual purpose. The director, Jan Cornelis Mol, and his adviser, Wouter van Seters, aimed, first, to draw attention to the life and work of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, ‘the great Dutchman’ and ‘pioneer of microscopy’.Footnote 25 Second, and more importantly for Mol and Van Seters, they wanted to inspire an interest in the ‘miraculous and curious’ world under the microscope as Van Leeuwenhoek set eyes on it. The target audience were laypeople, particularly those active in education. The makers reiterated that the film had been composed in such a way as to enable the layperson to enjoy every aspect of the microscopic realm in full. Mol promoted the film as a historical microcinematographic work, and a national film par excellence.Footnote 26 The cover of the 1925 brochure features Verkolje's oil painting of Van Leeuwenhoek prominently. The images inside the brochure show Van Leeuwenhoek's original microscope, along with references to its components and workings. The last page shows thirteen stills from the microcinematographic recordings made for the film (Figure 4). One picture shows wood photographed through an original Van Leeuwenhoek microscope lens. The images in the brochure, which include both historical material and microcinematographic material, reflect the dual relevance and function of the film as both historical and biological.
Figure 4. Brochure, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, Rijksmuseum Boerhaave.
The makers themselves were also well aware of the importance of the effects of time and movement in their film. The focus on the rhythmic movements of the enlarged protozoa stands out, in particular. Van Seters wrote about the impressive ‘restless wave movements’ of protozoa and the mesmerizing ‘eternal rotation’ of the transparent Volvox balls.Footnote 27 As Malin Wahlberg has demonstrated convincingly, Mol was fascinated by new visual technologies and processes that are invisible to the human eye.Footnote 28 In other films, such as Ontluikende bloemen (Unfurling Flowers) (1928), Mol experimented with time-lapse footage of flowers growing from bulbs and then dying, using the Zeitraffer process. Like several of Mol's later films, Wahlberg argues, Antony van Leeuwenhoek illuminates ‘the fascination with space–time abstraction and visualized rhythm that unifies the practice of science film and avant-garde cinema of that era’.Footnote 29 Mol's 1928 documentary De tijd in de film (Time in Film) is a conceptual film which explores cinematic time, including explanations and demonstrations of slowing down, speeding up or even reversing the movement of cyclists in Amsterdam.Footnote 30 Mol himself mentioned how entertaining this film was for him, and what a welcome break it was after the ‘heavy stuff of my crystal and microcinematographic films’.Footnote 31
But why was making Antony van Leeuwenhoek so challenging for Mol, given that microcinematography and science film in other countries was an established genre at that time? In the next section, I will take Wahlberg's argument about Mol's experiments with ‘cinematography as a tool for scientific enquiry’ one step further. I will describe how, in Antony van Leeuwenhoek, Mol used cinema experimentally – not only for the purposes of scientific enquiry, but also as an opportunity to play with the use of equipment and techniques, and with the reconstruction of Van Leeuwenhoek's experimental observations. The medium of film enabled Mol to re-create the seventeenth-century microworld using contemporary techniques. But just like Van Leeuwenhoek himself, Mol had to find his own way through microcinematography and other techniques in order to arrive at ‘things which one would have previously considered unfathomable’, a quest mirroring the quote by Van Leeuwenhoek in the final scene of Antony van Leeuwenhoek.Footnote 32
Complex experiments with life, time and technology
Filming life under a microscope involved complex set-ups. Bacteria and other microorganisms needed to be kept alive, and blood, semen and salts had to be handled. However, by the time audiences in the cinema were enjoying the recordings of sperm cells swimming and giant Daphnia plankton on the screen, all that messiness had disappeared. Mol completed a long journey of trial and error before he was able to finish Antony van Leeuwenhoek. Like Van Leeuwenhoek himself, Mol and Van Seters had to try out new materials and techniques and discover for themselves the challenges involved in re-creating and filming Van Leeuwenhoek's experiments. These material, technical and bodily dimensions were crucial in Mol's approach to cinema. More importantly, what was possible or impossible in optical, technical, bodily and material terms was instrumental in the re-creation of historical observations in the film.
From a young age, Mol had been an enthusiastic amateur photographer with an interest in optical techniques.Footnote 33 In 1921, he became the editor of the Dutch photography magazine Focus, where he was fascinated by photographic techniques. His first article on film was published in that magazine in 1923, in which he discussed the Ernemann apparatus for tijdloupe, or Zeitlupe.Footnote 34 Like physicist Hans Lehmann in 1917, Mol noted that the apparatus used to capture slow-motion and time-lapse footage was actually capable of extending humankind's power to see the world, just as the microscope had ‘unlocked the world of the infinitely small’.Footnote 35 Soon enough, Mol would be trying this technique himself, after founding the Bureau for Scientific Cinematography (Bureau voor Wetenschappelijke Kinematografie) in 1924.
The making of Antony van Leeuwenhoek shows the importance of materials, skills and technique. For Mol there were numerous challenges to overcome. He would often describe how it had taken him a whole year to make the film, recounting all the difficulties that he had faced. According to Mol, his fascination for film was triggered in 1921 by a microcinematographic demonstration by Professor Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm Siedentopf, chief of optics at Zeiss in Jena in Germany, who had developed the ultramicroscope with Richard Zsigmondy.Footnote 36 During a demonstration in a cinema in the Dutch city of Delft, Siedentopf screened recordings that he had made through microscope lenses, showing the movements of single cells, polyps and microorganisms.Footnote 37 It was possible to see the functioning and development of various biological processes in detail and to replay these in slow motion, or even backwards.Footnote 38 Siedentopf himself also referenced Van Leeuwenhoek's discoveries in microscopy, arguing that Van Leeuwenhoek had laid the scientific groundwork for the development of microscopes capable of magnifying by up to four thousand times and for making cinematographic recordings. Such footage enabled a glimpse into the secret world of microscopic life on the move. As one newspaper review stated, ‘Dead substances became alive’.Footnote 39 After the demonstration, Mol asked Siedentopf about the techniques used in the film, but Siedentopf did not want to share his secrets.Footnote 40 Mol then turned to Jean Comandon, a French biomedical researcher and pioneer of popular and scientific microcinematography, but again Mol failed to glean any useful information.Footnote 41 During a visit to the Netherlands in 1922, Comandon demonstrated his recordings in several major Dutch cities, but Mol was unable to get any information out of him about his techniques.Footnote 42 He therefore decided to investigate for himself, relying ‘entirely on my own experiments’.Footnote 43
But given that microcinematography and science films in France and Germany were being produced on a large commercial scale from the 1910s, why was it so hard for Mol to do this in 1924? Three factors are important here. First, Mol was an amateur when it came to microcinematography. Media historian Bert Hogenkamp has referred to Mol as a ‘mentor of scientific, amateur and avant-garde film in the Netherlands’.Footnote 44 Hogenkamp argues that science cinema had barely got off the ground at all in the Netherlands when Mol set up his company in 1924, so he had to be a pioneer out of necessity. Mol published in photography magazines aimed at amateurs because he assumed that amateur film would ‘elevate’ the film industry and theatre film in particular.Footnote 45 Furthermore, Mol claimed that ‘very little literature’ existed on microcinematography. It could be argued that he would have had access to some relevant literature despite the fact that he was working outside the university context, but it is doubtful whether he would have been able to access, understand and gather all the necessary information without a network that extended abroad.Footnote 46
However – and this is the second important factor – even though Mol may have read Comandon's description of his microcinematographic installation, that would not necessarily have enabled him to replicate Comandon's set-up. Quite apart from the difficulty of creating the right conditions using the right apparatus, he would have required very particular skills and knowledge in order to operate that apparatus. For example, in 1909 Comandon had referred to his equipment in this way: ‘The cinematographic equipment used was that of Pathé, which we modified for this purpose’.Footnote 47 This adapted film equipment from Pathé, along with the manpower provided by Pathé, would not have been accessible to Mol. Most likely, Pathé and Comandon would have been unwilling to share the precise technical details for commercial reasons.Footnote 48 Indeed, Pathé had already been granted a patent on the installation in 1911.Footnote 49 This included technical improvements to prevent the overheating of the specimen and to stabilize the recording. Such focus on intellectual property may have forced Mol to develop his own (local) technological solution for microcinematography. Similar commercial considerations may have prevented Siedentopf, who was working for Zeiss, from sharing details about his installation with Mol.Footnote 50
A third important factor was Mol's lack of technical skills and knowledge. According to the Dutch–French Alliance in 1925, Siedentopf had visited Comandon in 1911 ‘to get acquainted with the installation, and to learn how to make recordings’.Footnote 51 A Dutch newspaper reported that Siedentopf had even brought Comandon's instruments back with him to Jena to start producing his own microcinematography.Footnote 52 This exchange between Paris and Jena was crucial in the transfer of knowledge regarding microcinematography. Mol, however, clearly lacked this experience, materials and know-how.
Mol, who loved to experiment, eventually managed to build a working installation for his first films, but this came at a financial price. In his company prospectus, he recorded the costs of his microcinematographic installation, and in later annual accounts he also charged a large amount for this equipment.Footnote 53 It took time and trial and error to perfect his set-up and for Mol to learn how to handle his subjects (Figure 5). Mol described the problems that he encountered when filming through a microscope lens, such as how the organisms would move away from the bright light, or would stop moving, or would even be killed immediately by the light.Footnote 54 A further difficulty posed by filming such highly magnified images was the fast, rhythmic movements of the organisms, up to a rate of sixteen per second, which made recording almost impossible.Footnote 55 Technically, Comandon had already overcome this problem by using a special disc that rotated in synchrony with the cinematograph, and by cooling the light bundle in a glass bell filled with cold water.Footnote 56 But Mol came up with his own tricks. To film a particularly fast-moving organism he added gelatine to the water to thicken the liquid. Physically slowing down the animal thus enabled him to record their movements on film.
Figure 5. J.C. Mol in his laboratory. Collection Eye Filmmuseum.
Composition, abstraction and editing were central to Mol's experimentation. His sequences of crystals growing would later be recognized as an example of cinéma pur. The sequences were shown as a tryptic (Uit het rijk der Kristallen, 1928) in Studio 28 in Paris, and were celebrated in the Netherlands as an example of absolute filming. Dutch modernist writer and critic Menno ter Braak mentioned Mol's work in his monograph De absolute film (1931) and provided images of microcinematographic stills of crystals.Footnote 57 Mol's work exemplified an understanding of film as an autonomous art form, a non-commercial expression similar to poetry or music. Mol also became a celebrated member of the Dutch Filmliga, an association of avant-garde filmmakers who rejected American kitsch and commercial cinema.Footnote 58 The Haarlem-based department of Filmliga scheduled Antony van Leeuwenhoek for their fourth meeting in 1928.Footnote 59 Filmliga members praised Mol's films for their ‘earnest taste for exploration’, detached from any sensationalist drive: ‘As the microscope extracts nature out of its daily coherence, by making it live as a field of discovery in the mind; so time is shown in the film as subservient to man’.Footnote 60 As a filmmaker Mol would be able to orchestrate the natural elements, not as a mere reporter ‘reproducing’ nature in his films, but as a composer who cinematographically mediates nature through microcinematography.Footnote 61
More specifically, Mol's microcinematography and filmmaking were an experiment in abstracting techniques. As Wahlberg argued, Mol's science films can be understood as ‘cinematic abstractions’ of natural processes that ‘stress the moving image as a plastic form’.Footnote 62 Mol was inspired by filmmaker Jean Painlevé's surrealist films of marine life.Footnote 63 Yet, contrary to Painlevé, Mol did not included any anthropomorphic comments as intertitles, which, according to Bert Hogenkamp, contributed to the level of abstraction in Mol's cinematographic films.Footnote 64 Similarly, contemporary Dutch critics argued that the microcinematographic sequences provided audiences with a completely unknown experience by showing the existence of microlife in gigantic proportions. Re-creating the experiences of Van Leeuwenhoek's first observations of microscopic life, Mol's editing moved between immersion in the details that are revealed by the microscope and the handling of the historical instruments used to reveal those details.Footnote 65 Abstraction worked to unite the observer with the alien realm of the microscopic world as first witnessed by Van Leeuwenhoek – a realm that Mol re-created, composed and celebrated.
Through the lens of Van Leeuwenhoek: celebration and re-creation
Even before the emergence of cinema or large historical science exhibitions, both visual and material culture were central to the commemoration of Van Leeuwenhoek. As science historian Klaas van Berkel has shown, the Dutch cultural nationalism of the nineteenth century included the re-evaluation, worship and celebration of natural scientists.Footnote 66 In 1875, a group of Dutch scientists organized the bicentennial celebration of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek's discoveries. Van Leeuwenhoek represented the ‘pure disinterested science’, inspiring a positive outlook on the future.Footnote 67 Dubbed the ‘father of micrography’ in 1868, the work of Van Leeuwenhoek attracted ever more attention during the 1870s.Footnote 68 P.J. Haaxman, a Dutch apothecary and Van Leeuwenhoek devotee, published a full-length biography in 1871.Footnote 69 Subsequently, in 1872, a German professor in Breslau called for a celebration of the discovery of infusoria, referencing a previous commemoration of Leibniz, and the Dutch Veterinary Association (Nederlandsche Dierkundige Vereeniging) organized a celebration of the discovery of infusoria in 1874.Footnote 70 Many other Dutch biological and medical societies, including two in the Dutch East Indies, became involved in the preparations for the commemoration day on 8 September 1875. One of the activities involved the striking of an Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Medal.Footnote 71 This medal displayed a portrait of Van Leeuwenhoek on the obverse, and a laurel wreath with Van Leeuwenhoek's microscope and space for the name of the winner to be engraved on the reverse.Footnote 72
Images and objects played an important role in these commemorations, and were used to mark events and involve audiences in witnessing the past in the most direct possible way.Footnote 73 Portraits of Van Leeuwenhoek were everywhere, it seemed.Footnote 74 The exhibition that accompanied the 1875 commemoration included twenty-two portraits and busts. The most prominent was the 1687 oil painting by the Delft painter Johannes Verkolje.Footnote 75 Van Leeuwenhoek is shown seated next to a desk, on which there is a globe and the scientist's certificate of membership of the Royal Society, among other things. Verkolje's image was copied many times in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – on porcelain and medals, in sketches and in cinema. This proliferation of images heralded Van Leeuwenhoek's emergence as an icon of science. By 1900, Dutch natural scientists were taking pride in national scientific heroes – such as Van Leeuwenhoek – and their legacies.Footnote 76
In the Netherlands, interest in the history of science gained momentum from the 1910s onwards. The Belgian–Dutch Society for the History of Science and Universities was founded in 1913.Footnote 77 The awareness of material scientific heritage also increased. This culminated in 1928 in the foundation of the Stichting het Nederlands Historisch Wetenschappelijk Museum – a national museum devoted to the history of science located in Leiden (the current Rijksmuseum Boerhaave). The museum opened to the public in 1931, and one of its goals was to pay ‘homage … to the memory of the important men who upheld Dutch scientific honour in previous centuries’.Footnote 78 Visitors to the museum could enjoy microscopes, instruments and portraits of scientists. From the outset, its collection included microscopes and specimens prepared by famous Dutch scholars and physicians, including two original Van Leeuwenhoek microscopes.Footnote 79
The use of historical microscopes in Mol's Antony van Leeuwenhoek can be seen as an early attempt at reconstruction. The phenomena of reproduction and reconstruction were not new in the history of microscopy.Footnote 80 Microscope collectors were keen on owning both originals and replicas.Footnote 81 Wouter van Seters owned three replica Van Leeuwenhoek microscopes himself, and many replicas had been around since the 1870s.Footnote 82 Producing replicas can be considered an early instance of ‘RRR’ methods (reconstruction, re-enactment, replication, reproduction and re-working).Footnote 83 Similarly, Mol's microcinematography offered new possibilities for extending reproduction and replication techniques by using the original Van Leeuwenhoek lenses. Mol and Van Seters were keen to stress that they had used the original lenses in their film, placing the footage recorded through those lenses side by side with footage made using a modern microscope. The film itself also includes references to this comparison in a scene in which a Van Leeuwenhoek microscope and a Zeiss microscope are shown side by side, referred to as ‘David and Goliath’ in a review (Figure 6).Footnote 84
Figure 6. Van Leeuwenhoek microscope (left) and a modern microscope. Antony van Leeuwenhoek, still, Eye Film Collection.
Contemporary reviews of Antony van Leeuwenhoek also frequently emphasized the importance of the use of the original lenses in allowing people to witness anew the observations originally made by Van Leeuwenhoek. The Dutch biologist and popular-science author Jac P. Thijsse compared the movements described by Van Leeuwenhoek and those shown in the film.Footnote 85 With regard to the ‘exciting’ microscopical blood circulation sequence, he noted, ‘These clever authors show us this once again, photographed through one of Van Leeuwenhoek's own lenses, so that we can appreciate even better that Van Leeuwenhoek was delighted by that spectacle’.Footnote 86 In another review, Thijsse wrote, ‘In this way we are given, as it were, Leeuwenhoek's very own view of things’.Footnote 87 The use of original heritage in the film thus invited audiences to relive Van Leeuwenhoek's discoveries for themselves.
This was all the more important during moments of commemoration. Mol's Antony van Leeuwenhoek must be contextualized in a culture of celebrating the national history of science. According to one reviewer, the film not only showed the ‘excellent and clear moving images of microscopically small creatures’ but also ‘familiarizes us with a great and learned historical character, one of the many who will get a better place in our New National History than they have had to be satisfied with up until now’.Footnote 88 The frequent screenings of the film in the Dutch East Indies are particularly revealing, since the film played a prominent and formative role in scientific identity politics there. One screening on the island of Sumatra in 1927 was organized by the Algemeen Nederlandsch Verbond, an association that promoted the Dutch language around the world, and in Dutch colonies in particular.Footnote 89 At another screening in The Hague in 1929, Mol mentioned how the Netherlands should be as proud of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek as it was of other famous national figures, such as the celebrated admirals of the Golden Age, Michiel de Ruyter and Piet Hein.Footnote 90 When the British Physiological Society paid a visit to the Netherlands in 1925, its members not only were shown famous sites such as fields of tulips and the laboratory of the Dutch physiologist Willem Einthoven, but they also attended a screening of Antony van Leeuwenhoek.Footnote 91
As Mol and Van Seters intended, the film found fertile ground during the tercentennial celebrations of Leeuwenhoek's birth in 1932. The film was screened as part of these celebrations in October 1932.Footnote 92 Later commemorative events organized by the Dutch Society for Microbiology and the Dutch Natural History Society also screened the film as part of their commemoration programmes.Footnote 93 Van Leeuwenhoek's legacy was also remembered with programmes that consisted of combining speeches and a screening of Mol's Antony van Leeuwenhoek.Footnote 94
But Antony van Leeuwenhoek was also part of a wider revival in interest in the historical foundations of bacteriology and microbiology. International bestsellers published at that time included bacteriologist Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters (1927).Footnote 95 Protozoologist Clifford Dobell published his biography Antony van Leeuwenhoek and His ‘Little Animals’ (1932) a few years later.Footnote 96 Films on education and microbiology included Mol's other 1924 film Malaria, and a Dutch film on infant care made in 1926, which provided information on how to prevent babies from catching infectious diseases.Footnote 97 Mol even had plans to make a film about microscopist Johannes Swammerdam (1637–80), a natural historian and contemporary of Van Leeuwenhoek.Footnote 98
As Pnina Abir-Am notes, commemorations in science are not purely nationalist, by definition.Footnote 99 In 1922, Pasteur's birth was celebrated in France and Robert Koch's discovery of the tubercle bacillus was commemorated in Germany. Jean Epstein's 1922 film about the life and work of Louis Pasteur was made in a similar context to Mol's film Antony van Leeuwenhoek, and it is instructive to compare Antony van Leeuwenhoek to Epstein's film about Pasteur.Footnote 100 Both films are a tribute to the discoveries of a famous figure in microbiology. Both films begin with the places where those famous figures were born, and both can be considered reconstructions or re-enactments. Epstein's film re-creates episodes and (imaginary) scenes from the life of Pasteur, while Mol's work is a reconstruction of Van Leeuwenhoek's observations and experiments. But there are clear differences between the two films too. In Antony van Leeuwenhoek, microcinematography is the primary focus, and this is linked with the use of the original microscopes. Epstein's film contains no microcinematography, and features only one microphotograph. Mol's aversion to commercialism and narrative is also evident from the lack of a linear narrative in Antony van Leeuwenhoek, while Epstein's film features a strong chronological narrative about Pasteur's life and achievements. Epstein uses actors to re-enact famous scenes in Pasteur's life and research, and human emotions play a central role. Mol, by contrast, used no actors and stayed true to the Filmliga approach – resisting any urge to add narrative or compromise to commercialism. Antony van Leeuwenhoek was not a movie but an artistic experiment that used the medium of film. The viewer becomes part of that experiment, whereas in Epstein's film about Pasteur the viewer remains on the sidelines as a spectator to the scenes being re-enacted or reimagined.
There are more similarities between Antony van Leeuwenhoek and the popular microcinematographic films made by Henry Siedentopf in the 1920s. The themes that Siedentopf touches on, according to one description of his screenings, are very similar to those of Antony van Leeuwenhoek.Footnote 101 Even the order of the microcinematographic scenes is similar. It is no surprise, then, that Mol's company prospectus in 1925 contained many letters of recommendation that compared Mol's work with the films of Comandon and Siedentopf.Footnote 102 Mol clearly wanted his film to be firmly in the tradition of science films. On the other hand, the film's focus on Van Leeuwenhoek as a character from Dutch history comes closer to the celebration of national science portrayed in Epstein's film on Louis Pasteur. One reviewer referred to Van Leeuwenhoek himself as embodying the national Dutch identity: ‘sober and phlegmatic’.Footnote 103
Conclusions
What would otherwise have been reserved for the traveller in distant lands, the participant in difficult expeditions, the experienced researcher working in a laboratory – can now enrich the intellect of the many.Footnote 104
Watching Antony van Leeuwenhoek was not merely a passive experience: the film created a community of witnesses of past science and national cohesion.Footnote 105 As such, the film functioned as part of the identity of a nation.Footnote 106 As Landecker argues, the cinematographic techniques used in science also allowed ‘people other than scientists to participate visually in the sights of scientific work and the mode of experimental looking’.Footnote 107 In Antony van Leeuwenhoek this meant that laypeople could actually step into the shoes of Van Leeuwenhoek and witness the past anew. Between 1925 and 1935, many people did precisely that; Van Seters wrote in 1932 that the film was screened at least 250 times ‘between the river Ems and the river Scheldt’ over an eight-year period, with an average of three hundred people attending each screening.Footnote 108 Wherever possible, a presentation by an expert would also be given. Between 1924 and 1926, Mol gave at least eighty presentations to accompany his film.Footnote 109 Other commentators included Van Seters, Schierbeek and Jacob van Rees, a professor of histology. Mol funded Antony van Leeuwenhoek himself and sought a return on his investment by travelling around the country and presenting cinematographic fragments taken from the film.Footnote 110
The screenings were held in various locations – from the meeting halls of local societies and centres for adult education or evening classes (volksuniversiteiten) to city cinemas, and from conferences to secondary-school theatres.Footnote 111 They were not confined to the large cities in the west of the country, and audiences in the north, south and east were also able to enjoy the film.Footnote 112 They included photography enthusiasts, biologists, amateur natural historians, university students, medical professors, the members of an aquarium club and secondary-school students. In some cases, the film was reserved for viewers of sixteen years and over.Footnote 113 It remained popular for many years. Cinema listings and newspapers were referring to the film as ‘well known’ by 1928 and ‘famous’ by 1932, and the scientific press gave the film a positive reception.Footnote 114 After the commemorations in 1932, the film went on to be shown abroad in the UK, France and the USA.Footnote 115 During a Leeuwenhoek commemoration in Ann Arbor, the Society of American Bacteriologists also organized a successful viewing.Footnote 116
By 1932, the film Antony van Leeuwenhoek had penetrated the collective memory with Van Leeuwenhoek as the father of protozoology and bacteriology. Van Seters, who was a high-school teacher, recalled in 1932 how images from the film had lodged in his pupils’ memories:
It is also remarkable that the memory of the images does not fade as quickly as people often imagine. When we were studying single-celled organisms, my pupils would often remark: ‘We saw that in the van Leeuwenhoek film’ (which they had sometimes seen four years earlier).Footnote 117
Van Seters expressed his satisfaction that the film had done its job, in educational terms.Footnote 118 Antony van Leeuwenhoek thus served as a ‘medial process’ through which memories about Van Leeuwenhoek's observations became collective memories. It was the medium of film that enabled these memories to ‘come into the public arena and become collective’.Footnote 119 Stills from the film also circulated in books published during the commemorations of 1932.Footnote 120
The influence of Antony van Leeuwenhoek persisted after the Second World War. Screenings of the original film continued to take place until 1950.Footnote 121 But in 1951 Mol began a reworking of the film entitled Van Leeuwenhoek tot electronenmicroscoop (From Leeuwenhoek to the Electron Microscope) (1951), which incorporated scenes from the original film. The new film included some sequences taken from Antony van Leeuwenhoek, including scenes featuring the use of original Van Leeuwenhoek microscopes and recordings of protozoa.Footnote 122 The effect of the viewer as microscopist was enhanced by the addition of audio, with original letters written by Van Leeuwenhoek being read aloud to accompany footage of moving microscopic creatures.Footnote 123 The other footage from the original film includes the sequences showing pepper water, Volvox, Vorticellidae, bacteria, salt crystals, spermatozoa and blood circulating in small fish. The new film was first screened at the fifth conference of the International Scientific Film Association in The Hague, and in 1952 it was featured in the Holland Festival, a performing arts festival.Footnote 124 After Mol's death in 1953, sequences from Antony van Leeuwenhoek were also used in a film about Mol himself in 1961.Footnote 125 Around that time, other educational science films appeared that included recordings made through original historical microscopes, such as Peter Whitehead's The Perception of Life in 1964.Footnote 126 By that time, the microcinematographic sequences made by Mol and Van Seters had become separated from the figure of Van Leeuwenhoek. These sequences concerned microscopic life and movement, as in abstract paintings, as novelist and narrator Cees Nooteboom noted in the 1961 film about Mol: ‘Everything moves, even that which is still. Life itself is one movement’.Footnote 127
Antony van Leeuwenhoek contributed to refashioning Van Leeuwenhoek's heritage. From his work as the foundation of microscopy and observations of infusoria in the nineteenth century, the film helped to reframe Leeuwenhoek's work in the public eye as the very origins of bacteriology. In the last decennia of the nineteenth century, authors of handbooks in bacteriology started mentioning Van Leeuwenhoek as the first person to ever observe bacteria with his microscopes.Footnote 128 Within thirty years, the perception of Van Leeuwenhoek and his work changed from his being a naturalist who discovered infusoria to being the founding father of bacteriology. The film was instrumental in this process, allowing a broad audience to virtually witness the (supposed) historical starting point of bacteriology on-screen, tracing the swarming bacteria in pepper water filmed through Leeuwenhoek's original lenses. Van Leeuwenhoek's public legacy as a father of bacteriology originates from this period, with the film as visual proof helping to remake Leeuwenhoek into the ‘first of the microbe hunters’.Footnote 129 Antony van Leeuwenhoek formulated a memory as the oldest origins of bacteriology, framed for a broad audience in the context of the fight against infectious diseases.
Antony van Leeuwenhoek provides a window into the making and remaking of memory around microscopy and bacteriology in the Netherlands in the interwar period. Cinema became a place for memory building and for visual culture as memory practice.Footnote 130 Film functioned as a medium for, but also an actor in, identity politics.Footnote 131 Just as text played an important role in ‘editing the nation's memory’, Antony van Leeuwenhoek contributed to visual memory building.Footnote 132 As Astrid Erll and others have argued, films can become powerful ‘media of cultural memory’ which have the potential to ‘create and mould images of the past’.Footnote 133 In the case of Antony van Leeuwenhoek, this potential for creating cultural memory was realized between 1924 and the early 1960s, during which time audiences enjoyed the film (or parts of it that were included in other films), used it in commemorative events and education, and cross-referenced it in other media and writing. Now, almost a hundred years since its appearance, the film will potentially feature in commemorations, exhibitions and television broadcasts once again.
Antony van Leeuwenhoek, and popular-science cinema in general, enable us to explore assumptions and practices around the representation of the history of science, scientists, memory building and the role of heritage and technology. Microcinematography, reconstruction, heritage and the new visual medium for retelling the history of science have the power to contribute to visual memories of science past.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editor and two anonymous referees of the BJHS for their insightful comments and valuable suggestions on drafts. For their feedback on earlier drafts also I thank Huib Zuidervaart and Eric Jorink. For the many insights and discussions about visualizing the microscopic world I thank all members of the research team of the NWO project Visualizing the Unknown: Tiemen Cocquyt, Geertje Dekkers, Wim van Egmond, Sietske Fransen, Erma Hermens, Hans Huijbrechts, Tim Huisman, Eric Jorink, Ellen Pater and Frank van Campen. I am grateful to my colleagues at Rijksmuseum Boerhaave and Leiden University Medical Centre for providing me with the possibilities for researching this subject and helping me to obtain the figures. Finally, I am indebted to the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam for their support and help with archival materials and film stills.
Open access
