Cadavre exquis (5 + 1) or the art of Scientific Cinema

This program, produced as part of the Cadavre exquis project, features five films from the Université de Montréal's 16mm film collection, recently digitized by the Laboratoire CinéMédias. Also included is an experimental film, created from images and sounds taken from six films in the collection, directed by Michaela Grill and Roger Tellier-Craig.

The five films in this program, devoted to the art of scientific cinema, are diverse in nature: a computer-animated film by the team at the Centre de calcul de l'Université de Montréal (Jekyllum), an exploration of the chemical properties of cyclohexane (La stéréochimie dynamique), a microcinematographic study of the formation of the LE cell (Formation de la cellule LE), a subjective-view experiment on impulse phobia, a modality of obsessive-compulsive disorder (Phobie d’impulsion), or a 1953 color work by Père Venance, a pioneer of scientific cinema in Quebec, inviting us to discover “the sources of life” (Aux sources de la vie). What all these works have in common is that they were produced by a research department, a laboratory or a pharmaceutical company, in one case self-produced, with the goal of educating, disseminating scientific knowledge, or promoting new techniques, discoveries, or innovative technologies. These educational, “flatly” utilitarian works – seemingly outdated, outmoded, perhaps scientifically obsolete – tell another story of the moving image and visual culture, parallel, marginal, underestimated. Yet they represent millions of kilometers of film printed over time, neglected by most of the institutions responsible for preserving the “memory of cinema”, relegated to collectors' shelves, in the recesses of archives that have inherited them without always quite knowing what to do with them (not to mention everything that has been trimmed, destroyed, burned). This cinema, unclassifiable and astonishing, has nonetheless been the object of a particular devotion on the part of artists (think of the Surrealists' love of Painlevé's cinema, the fabulous found footage films of Bruce Conner, Abigail Child, Gustav Deutsch, Bill Morrison), passionate researchers-collectors (think of the work of Rick Prelinger, Skip Elsheimer, Dan Streible), and, for several years now, has given rise to a real craze and renewed attention on the part of academic researchers, historians of science and education, museum institutions and others.

These films share also the fact that they are part of the Université de Montréal's collection of over 1,200 16mm films, still accessible today at the Centre de conservation Lionel-Groulx des Bibliothèques de lettres et sciences humaines and at the Direction des archives et de la gestion des informations (DAGI). It was with the aim of enhancing the value of this collection, giving it greater visibility among the community of researchers, the curious and cinephiles, but also to see how it could be activated by filmmakers, musicians, writers, etc., that the electronic magazine Hors champ decided to launch the project Cadavre exquis : ouvroir de cinéma potentiel, in the summer of 2021.

In collaboration with the CinEXmédia partnership and the Laboratoire CinéMédias at the Université de Montréal, Cadavre exquis has since digitized around a hundred films from this collection, created dozens of events, performances, lecture-projection cycles and, soon, an open-access website. It has enabled us to encounter such astonishing works as those of French filmmaker Éric Duvivier (author of nearly 700 films between 1950 and 1990); to participate in the rediscovery of a forgotten pioneer of cinema in Quebec, Father Venance, a Capuchin and biologist, contemporary of Brother Marie-Victorin; to conduct in-depth research into the history of the Centre audio-visuel de l'Université de Montréal; to discover the avant-garde computer animation work carried out in the early 1970s at UdeM's Centre de calcul; to work with specialists in sleep, stuttering, monastic life and more. Since 2021, it has also been the occasion for fruitful collaborations with local artists (Quatuor Bozzini, Anne-F Jacques, Samy Benammar), and most recently with Roger Tellier-Craig and Michaela Grill, who have reworked and re-edited the sounds and images of several films in the collection in the short film, Délire atta, included in this program.

This program is intended as a showcase for scientific and educational cinema, and for the Cadavre exquis project in particular. It also aims to offer an eloquent illustration of André Bazin's phrase: “It is at the extreme point of interested, utilitarian research, in the most absolute proscription of aesthetic intentions as such, that cinematographic beauty develops as a supernatural grace” (Bazin, 1947).

André Habib
Professor · Université de Montréal
Department of Art History, Cinema, and Audiovisual Media
and Editor-in-Chief of Hors champ