Eva Hielscher

Neurocinematography in Pre-World War II Netherlands: The Magnus-Rademaker Collection.

Historical films made by neuroscientists have shown up in several countries during past years. Although originally supposed to have been lost, we recently found a collection of films produced between 1909 and 1940 by Rudolf Magnus (1873–1927), professor of pharmacology (Utrecht) and his student Gysbertus Rademaker (1887–1957), professor of physiology (1928, succeeding Willem Einthoven) and neurology (1945, both in Leiden). Both collections deal with the physiology of body posture by the equilibrium of reflex musculature contractions for which experimental studies were done with animals (labyrinthectomies, cerebellectomies, and brainstem sections) and observations on patients. The films demonstrate the results of these studies. Moreover, there are films with babies showing tonic neck reflexes and moving images capturing adults with cerebellar symptoms following cerebellectomies for tumors and several other conditions. Magnus’ studies resulted in his well-known Körperstellung (1924, “Body Posture”) and Rademaker’s research in his Das Stehen (1931, “Standing”). The films probably had an educative and scientific purpose. Magnus demonstrated his films at congresses, including the Eighth International Congress of Physiologists (Vienna, 1910) and Rademaker screened his moving images at meetings of the Amsterdam Neurologists Society (at several occasions as reflected in the Winkler-Monakow correspondence and the Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde). Next to these purposes, the films were used to analyze movement and a series of images from the films were published in articles and books. The films are important historical sources that provide a portrait of the pre-World War II era in neuroscience, partly answering questions on how physicians dealt with patients and researchers with their laboratory animals. Moreover, the films confirm that cinematography was an important scientific tool in neuroscience research.

Walter Ruttmann and the cinema of multiplicity: avant-garde—advertising—modernity

where made her a ‘confusing chimera’ on the American screen (286). Ian Christie argues that Asta Nielsen was the ‘first transnational European star’, but she was also a unique exception in the temple of other European and American stars (361). As the second instalment in the series KINtop Studies in Early Cinema the volume Asta Nielsen: The International Film Star in the Making 1910–1914 attests to a continuing interest in early film history. In contrast to similar publications in German, the collection introduces Nielsen’s celebrity to an English-speaking scholarly community. Despite its pronounced (and given Nielsen’s origins, understandable) focus on the European context, it also attempts at diversifying its reach into the world. Although somewhat misguidedly the chapter on Brazil, the Netherlands Indies, Australasia and Japan is named ‘Outside the Western World’, the contributions in this section and the anthology as a whole make a compelling case for inclusion, and illustrate the complexity and vibrancy of local film cultures. In the final analysis, Asta Nielsen’s celebrity embodies the drama of cinema’s institutionalization in a play between an outside and an inside, between foreign interest and local economies, between a hunt for profit and a search for art and between sensuality on the screen and social empowerment in the public. Cinema in the age of Asta Nielsen was still in its making.