Celeste’s Plight

Introduction: Divergence of art and natural science

Once upon a time, art and natural science were married and their unity seemed indissoluble to an external observer. Neither did their practitioners, especially before the positivist era, feel that the two could exist in separation from one another. Natural sciences, such as chemistry or mathematics, were clearly arts, requiring skill and intuition, while art benefited from methodical investigations into possibilities of expression and the frameworks of thought established thereby. But as the time passed, the doubts began to sprout: could natural science be streamlined without this emotional drag of art? Would it be readier to become a sci-fi edifice of the purest vision, a Metropolis (1927) of a kind¹, if only these sentimental contaminants of art were suppressed deep underground? After all, the days when scientists played musical instruments and were avid followers of the arts are long gone and the consensus among the most prolific of them today is that anything appearing excessively artistic in writing or other forms of communication should be met with suspicion. Perceived as a route to diluted rigour or even straightforward fraudulence in natural sciences, inclination to art, let alone verbal lyricism, must be exterminated, the scientists have silently agreed. It is almost as if the future of Fahrenheit 451 (1953) has inconspicuously become present, without anyone noticing it.²

On the other hand, if art let go of its scientific complement, there may be a hope that its flights of fancy would become less restrained, some artists at heart have hoped. With the burial of the analytical mind, all kinds of secret sources of inspiration, all that spontaneity and naturalness on which the arts feed, could become unleashed, carrying art to more sublime heights than ever. And so it happened. Somewhere around the time Gregory Bateson told a story about a train operator and a lady slumbering by dilapidated train tracks as an allegory of this marriage between science and art (Bateson 1978), the two got divorced, quietly, without pomp, with neither a bang nor a whimper. But the world that remained in the wake of this dissolution, the world that we and our children are bound by fate to live in, is dangerous for anyone crossing this divide. An artist implementing too much analytical thought in their methods or a scientist striving to make their science artistic, are bound to experience professional slips, tumbles and falls, from which they may never recover in the course of their lifetimes. Theirs may be gutters to call a home.

Natural science ostensibly profited from this divide, notwithstanding that this may be so on the surface only. The rate at which new discoveries and inventions, albeit incremental, are reported today is unprecedented, and the age-long image of a scientist as a dishevelled romantic with a hole in his shoe and an empty pocket went down the history, having been substituted with the suit and tie of a polished, affluent entrepreneur. Science has become a lucrative business to many and being indifferent to money is these days, sadly, a secure way out of the scientific profession. As ever, though, any niche where monetary rewards have expanded is bound to attract those who prioritize money over creativity and the same fate awaited science. The relationship between science and money has thus grown into an ambiguous one; while money has enabled phenomenal discoveries to be made, it has simultaneously corrupted its soul.

Not so long ago, around the time I began my scientific career, science was still a place attracting true aficionados of knowledge, who paid little to no heed to finance. But this is not so anymore. The general opinion of students in science today is that lots more money would solve all their problems. It would enable better and more numerous experiments to be conducted, thus increasing the quality of science, and it would also bring about the comfort of wealth to scientists’ private lives. Science, after all, is no longer a profession requiring romantic sacrifices of comfort, but one offering extreme wealth to those on the top of its financial reward pyramid and luxurious lifestyles to even those positioned in its midrange. However, the other side of the coin, whereon money spoils this very science that it helps grow, is often overlooked. One reason is that scientific institutions, increasingly adopting aggressive business models, have begun to prioritize the acquisition of funds over the creation of new knowledge. This flawed prioritization has been creating negative selection, especially at the level of junior scientists; namely, those who are very smart and cunning when it comes to acquisition of funds, knowing how to sell their ideas well, even when they are not so inventive, have pushed out of the scientific pyramid those who are not so skilled at selling their science. As in the business world, the quality of the packaging and marketing has taken over the quality of the product. As science evolves on top of these flawed premises, it becomes a cutthroat business where it is not the most benevolent and inventive who are retained, but rather those who are the most talented entrepreneurs. The latter model, very often, feeds on an exploitative environment, careless mentorship and, perhaps most critically of all, superficially conducted science. For, science conducted on the premise that material wealth and prolific resources are all that matter sooner or later becomes akin to a conveyer belt, a factory that inertly produces knowledge with not even a zest of creativeness.

Natural science, as such, as one may deduce at this point, is in need of a superhero, if not a windmill chaser, a soul who would soften and romanticize it, a Kid A³ who would boldly split the STEM⁴ to place a capital A in the middle of it. Provided that she makes sure that those whom she wishes to save do not step on her cape and tear it before she has even ascended into the air, she must know that her secret powers would be the values crafted and transmitted by the arts since the birth of our civilization. Yet, the quest for them appears to be harder than ever. For, neither is art what it used to be; it, too, suffered in its own way as a consequence of this divorce. In its wake, it has become more confused than ever, wiggling its way between soul-drenching commercialism and sheer nihilism, only occasionally offering the glimmers of beauty that warm the soul. Perhaps the way to rescue both can be done by bringing them together once again and then leaving the party quietly, so no one notices neither the handshake nor the ride into the sunset.

In search of comfort, a soul determined to engage in this mission can look to some of the most prolific scientists and artists of the past, who would have been in favour of restoring this marriage. On the other side of this divide, in fact, there have always been the dreamers, not many, but a few, dreaming about science with a soul, science conducted on the wings of poetry, science stemming from divine inspiration rather than the coldblooded machinery of logic. From the musings of an aspiring Glass Bead Game⁵ player (Hesse 1943), a contriver of the great union between science and art and a herald of New Romanticism in the sphere of science do these words spring forth.

Film and natural science: Where is the connect?

Science and technologies made it to film long ago. As a matter of fact, no art has benefited from science and made use of it as much as film has. As a matter of an ever direr fact, one could argue that the birth of no other art has been rooted in science as much as the birth of film. To shoot and develop a film, that first and foremost act in the process of filmmaking, requires a far more sophisticated scientific base than that from which any other art was born. Whether film has lost its soul somewhere down the line, as it ceased to be a master and became a slave to these technologies, is a meaningful question to ask, but not now. Now is the time to ask whether the influence has been mutual in the century or so since the birth of film as an art. Has film equally affected science? The answer is undoubtedly positive if we have the effect of a filmwatching experience on the worldview, the morality and the intellectual stylistics in mind. Any exposure to art, especially if distributed through mass media, as is the case with the products of the film industry, is bound to affect the viewer and change bits and pieces of her mind in the process; a scientist watching a film in his free time or in the middle of an experiment, on her tablet, is no exception to this rule. However, this effect is as superficial as the common conception that science in film ends with Jessica Rabbit’s seductive dance, Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber or the bullet-time effect in The Matrix (1999). There are deeper connections that we must explore.

To talk about the connection between film and science and at the same time renounce the use of special effects in cinema is to go against a common preconception as to what the link between science and cinema is and leave the listeners somewhat befuddled. Although ways in which film as an art can guide creative efforts in natural sciences have been largely unexplored, treading on them can lead the explorers to new interdisciplinary territories, which may prove to be crucial in the aforementioned attempts to save science from its immanent falls from grace. For example, when Dziga Vertov sought an authentic cinematic language freed from theatre, literature, music and static visual arts, what would it mean to science if such aspirations for independence became popularized among scientists? Could it inspire science to be freed from the chains of industrialized thought and restore the purity of its language and method once again? Or, how relevant to today’s scientists is Jean-Luc Godard’s insistence on making art that questions the very art in question, scientists who are most often paradigm-builders who do not see past the reigning premises of their own disciplines, let alone science as a whole or the sociopolitical, moral and aesthetic contexts in which it exists? How meaningful to science can be the drawing of the parallel between (1) the co-creative lab, where authority is being equally distributed among researchers, regardless of their status, and (2) the transition from traditional directorial efforts, where actors and the rest of the crew are given specific directions, to the docufiction and other cinéma-vérité styles? Natural scientists, through such discussions, especially the most prolific among them, could be led not only to film, but also to arts and humanities in general, in which they have shown little interest on average, and the benefits to the creative efforts in science might be countless. Film practitioners, in turn, may benefit from being exposed to the creative workings in the natural sciences, which might increase the rigour and analytical qualities of their work, so often missing in artists in general. In that sense, to provide a forum for such discussions may be an inconspicuous way of saving science and art and helping them evolve into something more holistic and inspirational.

The co-creational character of film

One of the grandest commonalities between scientific research and filmmaking is that they are both, except in rare circumstances, collaborative arts that feed on the creative input of multiple individuals. One major consequence of this is that the final product imagined by a novice in both of these domains is usually thoroughly different from that captured by the camera or the experimental notebook that is eventually turned into a movie or scientific paper. Consequently, the art of filmmaking impels movie directors to soften up any micromanaging habits and let movies be co-created through a confluence of dozens or hundreds of coworkers before, during and after the set.

It is important to create a solid groundwork, a set of constraints within which the film will take shape. Because I am aware of these constraints, I can ask my actors, nonprofessional actors, to surprise me: unlimited surprises, but within a limited context. Also, you must be constantly alert to seize new ideas on the spot, things you’d never think of, born from the novelty of an unfamiliar character set loose in an unfamiliar context. New and unpredictable things are bound to happen. I am totally against directors who storyboard everything or ask actors to follow scripts to the letter. You must allow yourself to be surprised. (Kotulla, 1966)

This is how Robert Bresson described his approach to filmmaking, while insinuating that the neo-fascistic seizure of control over every aspect of it is unacceptable even to one labelled as an auteur par excellence. Some filmmakers have correspondingly ditched the idea of the script and allowed the actors to improvise lines during the take, whereas others, like Mike Leigh, have carried out the scriptwriting process in collaboration with typically amateur actors (Frost and Yarrow 2007: 41–42), taking the now classical approach of one of the forefathers of improvisation in theatre, Konstantin Stanislavski, according to which ‘a director should be interested in the actor’s process rather than trying to dictate a result’ (Frost and Yarrow 2007: 21), to a new extreme. After all, once a director realizes that ‘the person who stands at the point of intersection between the play and the audience is the actor’ (McCabe 2001: 17), not the director, he may conclude in his thoughts that

if I believe that my job as a director is to fashion the production so that the play reflects my artistic vision, then I am not only bad, I am dangerous; that is to say, the oppression of the actor is a logical corollary to the idea that the director is the center of the theatre. (McCabe 2001: 24)

He may even go so far as to ditch the whole idea of a film director, itself a relatively new, not even 150-years-old concept in ‘the theatre’s 2,500 years of recorded history’ (McCabe 2001: 16)(Fig.1).

Figure 1:

Andrzej Wajda claimed that he became a movie director the moment he learnt how not to direct when things needed not to be directed and how to ‘let others make their own contributions to the film’ (Wajda 1958). Perhaps most famously, he allowed Zbigniew Cybulski to refuse to wear the costume set and supported him in his insistence on wearing his own jacket, jeans, shoes and geeky glasses that, in the end, gave a classy and timeless feel to the character of the freedom fighter Maciek Chelmicki, whom he played in Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament, 1958). This compromise that one must make to the dream of turning one’s dreams into reality by allowing other people to reshape them is common to both research in natural sciences and the art of filmmaking. Shattered, these dreams may turn into ‘ashes that hold the glory of a star-like diamond’.

Conducting collaborative projects by fostering the equal creative involvement of each and everyone working on them is the ideal stemming directly from the basic principles of the co-creational thesis, according to which every product of human perception or reflections is drawn on the canvas of one’s mind with the mutual creative involvement of the subject and the experiential reality in which the subject is immersed (Uskoković 2011). The thesis argues that both the biological and cognitive predispositions of the subject and the external features of the physical reality determine how the world appears as perceived through the subject’s senses, and as such occupies a middle ground with respect to the worldviews of objective realism and subjective idealism (Uskoković 2015). Of course, the drive to assume the stance of an autocratic control freak in conducting an inherently collaborative project, such as making a film, is as old as the human race and quite possibly inscribed in our genes too (De Neve et al. 2013). However, directors who aspire to make the outcomes of their endeavours look like the exact replicas of the blueprints of their personal visions and who create according to the belief that movies could be preconceived in the head, scene by scene, detail by detail, and then converted to reality as such, leaving nothing to the inspiration of the moment or other souls involved in the creative process to contribute to it, usually do so at the expense of the quality of the products of their work. But if a film is to give rise to an impromptu dance of starlit silhouettes on a celluloid tape, not as embarrassingly awkward as that of Lelaina and Vicky in a 7-Eleven store in Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites (1994), but as thrilling and otherworldly as that of Federico Fellini’s Cabiria and Wanda on the sultry streets of Rome, this principle of co-creation, along with room for intuitive improvisations, an eye for the magic of the moment, giving co-creators the freedom to abandon any preconceived rules or principles, including the one that is the subject of this sentence, has to be implemented in every aspect of their work(Fig.2).

Figure 2:

In Histoire(s) du cinema (1988–98): Chapter 3(a): ‘The Coin of the Absolute’ (1998), Jean-Luc Godard superimposes the images of bomber aircrafts and atrocities of fascist regimes caught on tape against the backdrop of frightened children from Hitchcock’s Birds (1963) and the word ‘Tout’, that is, ‘Everything’, as the answer to the question, ‘What does cinema want?’ He insinuates spiritual, if not material fatalities, and the killing of children, those glimmers of innocence and purity in people, whenever the filmmaker despotically aspires to project their inner visions onto the celluloid tape without any input from nature and/or other people.

The co-creational character of natural science

Not only actors, but other members of the film crew, including camera operators, gaffers, set designers and decorators, make-up artists, frame editors, composers and sound designers, directors of photography and various grips, must be given a co-creative role in the filmmaking process, which demands a successful director to talk myriads of languages and appeal to (or occasionally irritate, with the goal of producing a masterful work via awakening a drowsy spirit and eliciting an inspirational expression from it) all kinds of different professionals co-creating the film, while at the same time, in the footsteps of Fellini’s Guido in 8½ (1963), pissing off the producers, the people investing in the film, who, as ever, see it through $ $ $ and ¢¢¢ filling their coffers rather than as the process of crafting a timeless piece that is to become a part of an invaluably rich aesthetic heritage for humanity in the millennia that follow. Now, if actors in the previous sentence were substituted with research assistants, e.g. graduate students and postdocs; other members of the film crew substituted with various administrators, collaborators, teaching assistants, hiring staff, lab maintenance people, suppliers of chemicals and biologics and so on; pissed off producers with department heads, deans, chancellors and/or directors of funding agencies; and Guido, that epitome of the dream to make art metacognitive, self-referential, poetic and natural, with a principal investigator (PI) bearing the same dreams in the sphere of science, the sentence would not lose even an iota of its correctness. Here we touch some of the fundamental similarities between film and natural science.

Science in academia, after all, has undergone a dramatic change in the last few decades, demanding from the academic not only that they retain research excellence, but also that they work efficiently on many different levels, from proving themselves to be a spectacular mentor by unravelling the dormant creative potential in students, postdocs, technicians and other lab members, to securing funding and productive collaborations, to overseeing administrative support, to constantly writing papers and grants, to performing an array of departmental and university services, to taking on editorial tasks and engaging in peer review, to communicating science to the public and peers, to teaching grads and undergrads, to being the prime advertiser and an unbiased critic of their own science, and beyond. The similarity between this new way of doing science and the manifold complexity of being a movie director is seen from the following definition of the latter given by Harold Clurman, in which the word ‘direction’ could be easily substituted with ‘being a scientist’:

Direction is a job, a craft, a profession, and at best, an art. The director must be an organizer, a teacher, a politician, a psychic detective, a lay analyst, a technician, a creative being. Ideally, he should know literature, acting, the psychology of the actor, the visual arts, music history, and above all, he must understand people. He must inspire confidence. All of which means he must be a ‘great lover’. (Clurman 1972: 14)

And indeed, to love a thing is the first and foremost step towards eliciting starriness from it, a message that is, strangely, yet to be inscribed in a manual on how to be an excellent mentor and academician.

Therefore, though not the movie director I had dreamt of becoming in my youth, I do implement insights I learnt from decades of meticulous movie watching in a different arena, namely academia. Today I claim that the unwritten rule of putting the names of film directors and PIs on scientific projects at the end of opening credits and authorship lists, respectively – while, of course, reserving the right for the director to take on the main role as an actor and a screenwriter, like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Woody Allen or Gene Kelly; that is, as an experimenter and manuscript writer, in which case the director’s name may be deservedly inscribed at the start of the opening credits and as a first author on the paper – is only one out of a myriad of similarities between these two professions. I did read a bunch of manuals on how to become an academic mentor par excellence, but all they showed me was how to build a fortress around me and protect myself from saying things that could make me vulnerable and give malevolent others the chance to attack and inflict injury with the spears of political correctness. Instead, in my lab, through which I storm with the energy of Jerry Maguire and the dreaminess of Holly Golightly, I pretend to be a movie director of a kind, with a single aim in mind: how to make students and coworkers become stars. Such an approach is far more frenzied, erratic, selfrenewing, anarchistic, genuinely liberal, postmodern and imaginative than what any contemporary manuals on the art of mentoring could teach.

Perhaps most importantly, the approach that I follow in equating the art of filmmaking with the art of running a research lab is diametrically opposite to what people usually think when they hear of this comparison of movie directing with managing a science lab: rather than explicitly directing coworkers as if they were mere puppets on the string of the PI’s ego, the creative personalities dormant within them become empowered and their freedom and independence fostered using the co-creational method of filmmaking. To illustrate the efficiency of this approach over the traditional ordering people around and directing their acts down to the finest details of body language, I often bring to mind the transition in Pedro Costa’s oeuvre from mediocre (Ossos) to superb (In Vanda’s Room), both of which used the same actors and the same Fontainhas district scenery (Fig.3). However, the former was made in the classical directorial style and led the director towards the realization that the concept of power brought about by authoritative direction intoxicates the creative process. The latter film, in turn, was let spontaneously co-evolve in concert with the director’s visions and the actors’ natural impulses, yielding a concocted genre known today as docufiction and presenting a testimony to the many fruits bearable if creations, be they artistic or scientific, were allowed to be co-created by everyone involved in the process of their making.

Figure 3:

The transition from Ossos (1997) to In Vanda’s Room (No quarto da Vanda, 2000) marks the shift in the oeuvre of Pedro Costa from a classical directorial style – where the goal is to create images that veritably match the director’s visions – to docufiction, a style that comprises the fusion of fiction and documentary, partly reflecting the director’s visions and partly letting events unfold before the camera without any effort to manipulate them. The same co-creational balance is intrinsic to prolific research in natural sciences, increasingly becoming as collaborative as the art of filmmaking.

Even the directors who are 100 per cent loyal to the script and insist on the verbatim use of prewritten lines are aware of the need to hand a finite level of creative freedom over to the actors, lest the final outcome be diminished in quality; or, as pointed out by Ingmar Bergman, ‘[t]he moment I force the actors, they may very well do as I wish, but, on the other hand, I know the result will be catastrophic’ (Björk-man, 2010). In fact, the direction in which Bergman’s career as a filmmaker evolved, progressing from very detailed verbal and gestural direction to letting actors improvise the dialogues to eventually communicating only the general idea of the scene to the actors and letting them improvise it, itself presents an illustration of this point. Also, owing to these widely distributed creative involvements in cinema as an art form, movie directors belong to the category of artists most inclined to see their works stare back at them, co-creating the artist to the same extent as the artist co-creates his work of art. According to UCLA film professor Howard Suber, ‘[c]reative people often speak as though the medium they worked in has a spirit of its own. “The film wanted…” is a phrase you sometimes hear from filmmakers’ (Suber 2011: 50). Hence, when Tom Waits observes that ‘everybody loves music, but it’s more important that music likes you’ (Wilonsky 1999: 217), or when I concordantly observe that I may not be as fond of science as science is fond of me, keeping me motivated to move on through its dark night with a torch of romantic thoughts in my hands, against the stream, as it were, like a version of Tom Verlaine from the cover of Television’s Marquee Moon (1977), with a ball of light in my veined, boney hands, walking like a ghost on a highway at night, against the traffic, bedazzled by the myriads of passing lights, you may be sure that the impression of the work of art communicating its aspirations back to the artist while s/he crafts it is even more pronounced in the art of filmmaking, if for nothing else, then for the more immediate human presence within the medium itself. The art of filmmaking, co-creational in its essence, is thus more describable by M. C. Escher’s drawing of two hands drawing the contours of each other than more solitary arts.⁶ In parallel with the growing needs for overspecialization and interdisciplinary collaboration, science increasingly calls for the exhibition of the very same co-creative talents that have typified the most masterful moviemakers.

The Plight of Celeste Pt. 1: Purity

Celeste was a student fond of music and movies, roaming through the lab like a goth version of Monsieur Hulot in Playtime (1967), a question mark perpetually levitating over her head. Oftentimes, when she seemed lost and confused, I would use a movie reference to help motivate her and restore the creative drive inside her. For example, having seen her struggle to think in innovative directions and being inclined to copy the methods and trains of thought widespread in the literature, I would direct her to think of some of the reasons behind the ground-breaking character of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), an experimental movie echoing with relevance to all the experimentalists all the world over, in natural sciences and beyond (Fig.4). I would specifically ask her to consider:

Figure 4:

Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera stands atop a movie camera to insinuate that the film is not only about the film, but also about making the film. This metalogical perspective has been frequent in art, but completely foreign to the sciences. Science, however, could benefit enormously from a broader dissemination of the idea that a scientist should question ‘the medium through which one expresses oneself through one’s science’.

• The meaning of the man with a movie camera standing on the movie camera mountain in its opening shot, along with the film being about the film being made, suggesting that one has to question the medium through which one expresses oneself if one is to contribute to its evolution to something greater than it has ever been, be it via reflecting out loud on the classroom experience of the moment and globally in an effort to make it more magical or via questioning the many roots, staled principles and multihued contextual skies hovering over one engaged in the lab benchwork and verbally expressing them in an effort to make research less clichéd and corny and more conscious and creative.

• The pervasive collision editing, aka montage, such as the synchronous waking of a city and of the fille full of life in a darkened room, suggesting the ever-present parallels behind the macrocosmic and the microcosmic and allowing for the relationships discovered in real life to be projected onto research grounds and guide the scientific exploration in prolific directions.

• Paying no heed to sequence, time, order, etc., thanks to the collision editing that deliberately breaks the spatiotemporal continuity, later embraced by Godard in Histoire(s) du cinéma, suggesting the necessity of awakening an unstructured chaos in the researchers’ minds to elicit childlike, playfully creative thought, along with myriads of stars of wonderful insight – were we to invoke Friedrich Nietzsche’s metaphor of chaos as the birthplace of stars (Nietzsche 1883).

• The famous moment of freezing the frame and making it all, the music, the action, come to a halt, only to be slowly revived from this suddenly imposed deep sleep of attention, suggesting that spacing out is good and that everything, indeed, is possible, that breaking the dull rhythm of habit and shattering the obedience to rules, written or unsaid, is where the gateways to the glimpses of something unprecedentedly novel and beautiful lie hidden.

• The use of innovative filming techniques not merely for the sake of showing them off, but in order to create a lastingly impressive effect on the viewer, thus indirectly speaking against becoming a slave of technologies and assuming the role of their master instead, in spite of the coalescence between man and machine that the film propones.

• The nonlinear storytelling involving elliptical jumps between intercepted shots in service to the more realistic representation of what real-life perception and mental reflection look like, advising scientists likewise to mistrust the ironed fabrics of thought.

• The quest for authenticity of expression and independence from languages of music or theatre that have usurped cinema ever since its inception.

• The artist’s willingness to risk his life in search of new points of view, speaking of the scope of curiosity and passion that a scientist is to embody.

• The shying away from acting, thus favouring the authenticity of being and behavioural candidness over prostituted pretense, all along with the open-arms spirit of acceptance of diverse points of view and expression that the proliferation of this stance would breed in the world.

Celeste, now convinced that the research she should undertake must be bold in its experimental nature, would still wonder how come, then, all these bureaucratic shackles are tied around the neck of science, stifling it and not allowing it to breathe? I might wave my hand, dismissing the matter as yet another case of corruption of the essence of an art by its conformist practitioners, but then I might recall out loud Nicholas Ray opposing Tab Hunter, whom the studio recommended as ‘the safe choice’, to play the rebellious teenager, Jim Stark, in Rebel without a Cause (1955). The Hollywood director, who had come to believe that safety and portrayals of rebellious youth cannot go hand-in-hand, wanted Jimmy Dean to take on this role precisely because this young actor, as a choice, was not safe. Yet, how rare such a way of thinking is among today’s scientists, who are mostly unaware of the grand act of hypocrisy that they commit by supposedly being experimental in their research but conservative and resistant to risk in a multitude of aspects surrounding their research, thus quietly killing its essence. I would then go ahead and instruct Celeste about the importance of experimenting not only on the lab bench, but also in every aspect of her life and personality if she is to continuously feed her creativity. In such a way, perhaps, the evolution of science could be redirected, away from the rigid tracks laid down by the armies of bandwagon jumpers that populate scientific institutions of the day and to whom obedience of the trend is a religion, and towards the infinity of possibilities that favouring experimentalism over submission to preexisting paradigms would yield. Within this process, if I am allowed to unfold my dreams even more, science would not become ever more corporate, commercial and locked inside this positive feedback loop of ever tighter constraints and ever more depleted wells of creativity, but would begin to evolve in a diametrically opposite direction, that is, towards becoming ever more indie, creative, subversive, anarchistic and free in thought and expression.

Confronted with a barrage of praising everything that is pure in science, Celeste would rarely be convinced and sometimes she would ask out loud what the use of it is in today’s world where the discovery of therapeutic effects in vitro in a biomedical lab is no longer the critical step in the development of new medicines, and where the commercial factors determine which of them will make it to the clinic and which will not. I would agree with her and pull The Scientist article written anonymously and comparing Hollywood to Big Pharma (Bernal 2007), whose success in creating ‘blockbuster’ drugs has been, like in the film industry, thanks to aggressive marketing campaigns more than the good science underlying it. I would particularly highlight the passages in which the pseudonymized author argues even more devastatingly that Pharma should follow the Hollywood path of having the creative workforce, including actors, directors, screenwriters and film editors, leave the major studios and – as is the case with, for example, Pixar – work under independent contracts, while remaining financed and marketed by major studios. In the pharmaceutical realm, this would be analogous to the big enterprises acquiring the startups and small companies that are more prone to be creative and innovative, but lack the momentum of a massive organization to bring drugs and devices to the market. Rather than an invitation for a moment of despair, this ought to be a call for Celeste’s reconsideration of the path that she, a scientific star-in-the-making, is to pursue, being ideally one that rejects anything industrial and commercial in today’s science and embraces everything within it that is utterly pure, genuine and renaissance, i.e., as pure as Dziga Vertov’s vision of what cinema-vérité, untainted by the theatre, literature, painting or music, should be like.

The Plight of Celeste Pt. 2: Prostitution

Celeste was often depressed by the amount of phoniness and counterfeit in today’s heavily commercialized world of science. To iterate my solidarity with her feelings, I would pull the last of Kenji Mizoguchi’s 82 movies, Street of Shame (Akasen chitai, 1956), and notice that the same plot involving the cocottes of Tokyo’s red-light district could be used to portray the scientific community of the day, given that the same moral sacrifices and descents into deception that apply to prostitution, that ‘world’s oldest profession’, apply to modern science too (Fig.5). Next, I would pull out one of many Godard films that tackle the subject of prostitution pervasive in the consumerist, capitalist society, either implicitly, like Week End (1967), Film Socialisme (2010) or Histoire(s) du cinema, or explicitly, like My Life to Live (Vivre sa vie, 1962) or Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, 1967), and give her a task to figure out how to apply conceptually the same strategies to criticize and revitalize these problematic, ersatz aspects of today’s science.

Figure 5:

Kenji Mizoguchi’s final film, Street of Shame (Akasen chitai, 1956), is a story about the prostitution of cocottes in Tokyo’s red-light district and could be used as a metaphor of the scientific community of the day.

Celeste’s listlessness deprived of that wondrous energy that makes spirits shine was symptomatic and I, the head of a research lab, the forger of stars in analogy with the role of a film director, would often remind her that pop arts, be they musical or film-like in this era of reality-TV shows, have no true stars anymore and that the world seeks stars in another domain, a domain like science, waiting for a Bobby Fischer to bring it multimillion prizes, fame, ads and the concept of stardom or an Elvis to shake off the bourgeois boringness and reanimate everything lifeless in it with the attitude and the sound of a rock star. I would want to impel her to dream of the future day when scientific inventions and personas will be avidly followed on social media, just as reality starlets are being followed today, and when mass media will advertise scientific achievements on every corner, before writing on the blackboard the phrase I so often invoke, ‘scientists in future will be stars’. I would add to this insane spiel that IT celebrities and high-tech startup groupie girls infesting the techie meetups, comic-cons and congresses in this dawn of the third millennium are the first, albeit pale signs of saturation with stardom in the spheres of music and film, and the first signs of a quest for it in more intellectual realms; it is the stardom awaiting scientists of the future in the brightest of limelight. And because stardom invariably bears the sins of staggering shallowness on the other side of its coin, the current spread through the sphere of science of bloodthirsty leeches attracted by money and money only – who have barely anything of intellectual substance to offer, but who climb voraciously to the tops of academic pyramids, who pay no heed to moral scruples and who act as scumbag gangsters at times, making today’s science slowly begin to resemble the world of narcotics or show business at its rowdiest, with backstabbing and stomping over the dead being the rule, and altruism measured by teaspoons – could be perceived as another pale sign of this stardom that awaits scientists in the near future.

If Celeste wondered how lucky she would have to be to ever step into the limelight in the uber-competitive market that science has become, I might pull a quote from a book on the art of misdirecting, saying that

part of the problem is economic; we devalue what is plentiful, and there is nothing in the theatre more plentiful than actors; because directors decide which actors get hired, directors are granted a status that proceeds not from the dynamic of earned authority, but from its evil twin, the dynamic of power. (McCabe 2001: 34)

This would explain her feeling down and depreciated, but also signal to the PI that every student should be constantly sprinkled by the waters of care and attention in order to be guided to stardom. If Celeste now begins to wonder why the funding for the lab goes through rollercoaster cycles and plays that trite roar ‘I live uptown, I live downtown, I live around, I had money, and I had none’,⁷ on an old cassette player with a devilish smile on her face, the explanation would not only tie back to the lethargic effect on creativity that comfort and certainty have and the necessity to constantly change the angles from which the world is viewed – one moment from the clouds and another from the ditch – if we are to preserve the benignity and resilience of our views, but also to a rebellion against the way today’s science works, referring to film again as an anchoring point. Namely, what would happen to a filmmaker who received the funding to shoot a film, but then spent most of his time during the course of that project on writing a proposal for the next film and also a good portion of time shooting scenes for inclusion in some future movies of his rather than the one he was supposed to make to satisfy the producer’s demands? Celeste would immediately notice that he would not go far in his career, as this perk of his would be perceived as fraudulent behaviour. However, in the even more con-servative creative domain that science is in comparison to film, this is not only allowed and encouraged by the funding agencies, including federal sources such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation, it is also the key to success of practically every single PI with a massively productive lab. Specifically, most PIs with considerable funding spend the largest portion of their time crafting and sending out proposals for new projects and collecting preliminary data for them rather than being directly involved in the research leading to the aims of the ongoing projects. The practice of sending out proposals of ideas already executed in the lab, but not published yet, is also so widespread that PIs not resorting to it are a minority on the brink of extinction. The fact that the current system in science favours these types of cunning scientists more than those who are fully committed to a given project during the period of its performance and who may be, in addition to this, focused on producing favourable cost-to-benefit ratios is problematic in itself and should be the cause of fundamental revisions of public and federal science funding policies. As a result, when one is focused on science and science only and is repelled by the idea of becoming an entrepreneur who runs the lab in the exploitative style of a capitalist mogul, one automatically accepts the fact that the lab will pass through periods of highs and lows and alternate between plentitude and poverty. One should be prepared to traverse riotous paths in the evolution of the lab, perhaps close to that pursued by my lab in the course of running its first large NIH project⁸, proceeding over the course of seven years from the PI on the brink of deportation to becoming a star in the field to having the lab undermined, forcefully shut down and buried in boxes, while being affiliated with three different institutions along the way. It was the tortuous path that reflected the wildness that a wild intellect, impossible to harness in the web of administrative rules and regulations, must produce all around itself. Still, it is difficult to grasp how come scientists resorting to this shady practice of deliberate project neglect, analogous to playing a bunco game on public investors, fail to realize its implicit connotation, namely their taking means as goals, favouring short-term profits over the longterm benefits of knowledge creation and prioritizing one such shallow concept as ‘career’ over the drive to discover something of lifesaving importance. Nonetheless, I go ahead and enlighten Celeste by opening her eyes to it, which is where this reference to film becomes meaningful, having the purpose of providing a new perspective on science, making the scientist aware of features that have sunk down into the blind spots of their attention long ago and instigating their revision.

If Celeste now began to wonder why I, the proud holder of the title of a punk, a rebel in the world of science, fostered so intensely the balance between improvisation and conceptualization, oftentimes calling for everyone in the room, during a lecture or a lab meeting, to begin to go with a flow and create a space of free expression, free of judgment and free of the deadening gap between the authority of the teacher and the sheepishness of the student, I might direct her to watch John Cassavetes’s movies until the point of realization that the key to the absorptive effect they exhibit on the viewer lies in the precise balance between the strict following of the script and improvisation. Now, if she were to find the roles in a Cassavetes movie to have a more magnetic effect on her than the roles in, say, a Mike Leigh or Godard movie, I might ask her to perform plenty of routine benchwork upon joining the lab before giving her a specific project to exercise her creative potentials on. In contrast, if she were to be impressed more by the on-screen characters in any of the latter films I would have her sit down, read literature, contemplate and theorize first before engaging in handson experience. The reason for this lies in the vastly different approaches to shooting a scene in these two cases. Namely, whereas Cassavetes insisted on endless repetitions of a scene, until all the actors’ muscles literally memorized the gestures, allowing them to unconsciously perform them and focus their minds on more sublime and spiritual elements of the performance, Mike Leigh and Godard, among a plethora of other directors, including Akira Kurosawa at times, would rather sit and chat with the actors at the filming location, subtly guiding them through interpersonal communication to the right state of mind needed for the scene, and then shoot it in a single take, so as to capture the spontaneity of the performance and avoid the dissipation of its energy through excessive repetition, believing that if an actor knows that she has only one chance at providing the right act, it will end up being significantly more powerful, albeit less polished and perfected, than if she was given dozens or more chances to pull off the right act. Then, if Celeste became more captivated by Cassavetes’s close-ups, serving the role of emphasizing the emotional states of the characters and enforcing empathy with their plights than by, say, Fellini’s sending of Juliet of the Spirits in the final scene of the film to the edge of the frame of a tall forest and then past it, leaving only the forest in sight, so as to hint at her blending in with the world, which then becomes greater than her, I might perceive that she would find frequent face-to-face discussions and working in teams more motivating and fruitful than if she were to be freed into the world of scientific research alone, with as little micromanagement and oversight as possible, and this would be, remember, only one out of a myriad of cues derivable from this preference. Another cue, inferable from the facial close-up paralleling Liv Ullmann’s noticing out loud, ‘I tell myself I have the capacity to love, but I am bottled up’, in Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (Scener ur ett äktenskap, 1973), is that she would need not only cordial contact with another human being to uncork her creativity, but also the very same qualities that the Swedish filmmaker offered subtly as solutions to the pervasive depression of his characters: clownishness, childishness and changeability, through which one breaks the bubble of confinement to the limits of one’s self and becomes a part of the greater whole of divine being.

Lots of other things in the lab made Celeste depressed. For example, Celeste would often despair over massive piles of data from which we were to start working on a technical paper or a conference presentation and I would tell her that, in the spirit of Sergei Eisenstein and other members of the Soviet montage school, the real work on defining the qualities of the presentation was just about to start; namely, just as a talented filmmaker can transform an average set of frames into a marvellous cinematic experience in the editing stage, so should a seasoned scientist be able to create an excellent paper out of mediocre data. Celeste would also often fall into the trap of experimental erroneousness. Once, she was capturing images under an electron microscope at low magnification and then zoomed in to discern the fine-scale events of interest. Glimpsing this over her back, I told her of Akira Kurosawa’s dislike of the movement of focus in tracking shots and on insisting that the camera slides as a whole on a dolly in parallel with the protagonist so as to most veritably capture the impression of his movement, as in the famous sequence involving the woodcutter’s walk through the woods in Rashomon (1950), thus subtly insinuating that the same aesthetic criteria that guide artistic creation can be applied in the conductance of a scientific study. Finally, towards the end of her stay in the lab, close to the completion of a thesis or dissertation, she began to feel sad and lethargic because right after something magnificent had been created, she said, this whole gig was over and the student and the PI must part ways for good. In response, I evoked the movie-set musings of Valentina Cortese playing Séverine in François Truffaut’s film about filmmaking, Day for Night (La Nuit américaine, 1973): ‘What a funny life we lead! We meet, we work together, we love each other, and then as soon as we grasp something, it’s gone!’

The Plight of Celeste Pt. 3: Poverty

Celeste would often ask me why I mostly choose students and not established professionals for members of my lab. I would tell her that when the British filmmaker, Mike Leigh, was asked what he values most in his actors, his answer was ‘a non-overwhelming confidence’(Fig. 6), something that Woody Allen, having patted his son on the head in his nihilistic saga about Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and commented how he had always loved ‘the under-confident person’, would have certainly agreed with. Being fond of the grace of uncertainties, of wonder and doubt, of the trembly energy that makes angels ‘fear to tread’ where ‘fools rush in’, many renowned filmmakers, from Roberto Rossellini to Truffaut to Mike Leigh to Nuri Bilge Ceylan, gave prominent roles in their movies to either nonprofessional and virtually unknown actors or to complete amateurs picked from the street. Pier Paolo Pasolini went even as far as to say, ‘I’m not interested in actors; the only time I’m interested in an actor is when I use an actor to act an actor’ (Pasolini 1969: 40), having rarely ever used one in any of his movies. Ermanno Olmi thought that the Italian neo-realist movement in cinema was hypocritical because it celebrated realism while relying exclusively on professional actors; as a sign of revolt, he gave the most prominent roles in his films to amateurs exclusively and did so to great effect – the roles of Loredana Detto and particularly Sandro Panseri as young job applicants in Il posto (1961), the former of whom appeared in no other movie since and the latter of whom appeared in two more movies before becoming a supermarket manager, standing as monumental examples. A fascinating thing about Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989), a movie about tourists from the future taking a ‘pilgrimage to the birthplace of the most significant part of the American empire after its decline’ (Jarmusch 2001), that of pop stars, is that its non-actors, including Joe Strummer, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Spike Lee’s brother, Cinque, bluntly out-acted its professional actors, including Steve Buscemi and Nicoletta Braschi. In light of this idea that the best acting is such that it eats away at its own essence, all until the essence of this essence becomes exposed on the surface and acting starts to be made up of being oneself and not acting at all, it is impossible not to mention My Dinner with Andre (1981) and Jerzy Grotowski’s leaving theatre for good after he realized that everybody in real life is acting, which, in his head, made life on the stage superfluous. Life, as such, acted, as it were, reinforces phony mindsets encaged within the coops of self-centred premises, each of which is a tragedy in a shoebox, allowing the infinite beauty of reality to pass by unnoticed.

Figure 6:

Naked (1993). Mike Leigh must have known that ‘the worst thing in acting is acting’, as two of his actors became so blended with the mindsets of their characters during the shooting of a scene for Naked that they got into a fight and were almost arrested (Leigh 2008). Even though the police arrived and quickly resolved the cause of the brawl, the actors openly regretted not being jailed and tried because they could not figure out who would be tried: the actors or the characters (Leigh 2008).

Celeste’s wonder over the prioritization of the amateur over the professional in my lab often went hand in hand with her fearing weak career prospects and feeling swamped by an impending sense of failure because of working for a PI in a third-tier institution. As a rule, at that point, I would bring to conversation the cases of Jean Cocteau or Pasolini, who compensated their work with little-known, low-budget actors at the time – albeit often turning sparkles into stars rather than the other way around – with the focus on the creation of stylistic, storytelling or structural innovations, an approach that is well-suited to small labs and that proves that poverty can be a great facilitator of innovative ideas, a principle that I have mastered over long years of creative growth in the face of the destitute conditions for life and research in my homeland. It helps to have the heart of Buddha or Mother Teresa by birth, who, remember, were drawn away from luxury and towards the poor and sick lining up the city streets; but in its absence is where it becomes critical to be exposed to the arts, including films such as Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945) or any minimalistic masterpiece by Yasujiro Ozu, which soften and sensitize the stony corners of our souls and teach us to recognize the grand void in the life of riches and the route to wisdom and godliness resting in all things poor, a principle that is directly applicable to inventive research.

Still, Celeste had a perpetual inclination for wealth and, like most students I have mentored, thought that access to state-of-the-art equipment was the key to her scientific success. But the more she relied on expensive equipment in her science, the more did the wells of ingenious ideas dry inside her. Then I asked her to draw a parallel between (1) the reigning belief that delicate, deluxe devices for synthesis and data acquisition during experimentation are needed to guarantee acceptance into the most reputable journals in the field; and (2) the implicit request for ‘special effects’ in movies before they are allowed to be played in cinemas. I would bring up the example of Ozu, whose rising fame and the increasing budgets he received for his movies coincided with his deliberately making them with a lesser and lesser budget, yet at the same time making them more and more beautiful (Fig. 7). With this counterintuitive approach, he paved the way for the aesthetics of poverty, which many directors, particularly in his home country, Japan, embraced, including Mikio Naruse, who went so far in his obsession with frugality and low-key production as to opt to shoot each actor delivering lines of dialogue in a scene separately and then splice them together in post-production to reduce the amount of celluloid tape wasted with each retake and allow the scene to be filmed with a single camera. A similar aesthetic principle served as the guidance for Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose approach to the shooting of his masterpiece, Ordet (1955), was such that he practised a single frame with the crew for a whole day and then shot it in one take, never repeating it, regardless of whether it lived up to his expectations or not, then continuing until the whole film was shot one frame per day. In contrast, today’s popular TV series and Hollywood blockbusters have each scene shot with dozens of cameras, yet what results is a bunch of meaningless pans, cuts and zooms, boiling down to a search for the sexiest angles in this, in many respects, backward line of progress for a human art whereby the greater material exquisiteness yields lower spiritual wealth and vice versa.

Figure 7:

A still from Ozu’s final film, An Autumn Afternoon (Sanma no aji, 1962). As Ozu’s budget for making films increased, so did his films become more low-budget-like. And more beautiful, too. Science performed in my lab has been conducted with this path in mind. The quest for elegant simplicities and the rejection of unnecessary complexities – including the refusal to procure funding for the sake of funding only – are perpetual priorities.

The same principle applies to today’s science, where rejecting the belief that state-of-the-art resources are necessary for the conductance of world-class research may have sound repercussions for the boost of creativity in the lab and beyond. Yet, how come do we fail to see the enormous extent to which this obsession with high tech obliterates the quest for original concepts as seeds of progressive expression and thought, in science and cinema alike? Though we may remember Jean Renoir’s claim that ‘the major question of the age was how to maintain primitive vitality in the face of sophistication’ (Crouch 2006: 332), we have become indifferent to the death of this vital energy-force, in the wake of which all the sparks of creative thought that adorn the intellectual heritage of humanity have originated, but which has succumbed to idolization and the worship of the gods of high-tech grandeur. If a tight budget is often cited as a key motivator behind the stylistic innovations of the French New Wave in cinema, which to this very day represents a powerful analogy for what the products of an innovative scientific mind ought to look like when posed against the backdrop of traditional, mainstream scientific expression and thought, then why do we, scientists, escape from poverty and seek shelter in luxuriousness instead of taking advantage of the shortage of resources for the sake of devising something otherworldly inventive? Today, we witness the great corruption of modern art, including film, to a large extent thanks to the overuse of technological tools as synthetic substitutes for the real, spiritual substance. In a way, all these things happening as we speak are the corroboration of the age-old Serbian proverb, which, need I say, must sound strangely foreign to the capitalists’ ears: ‘Money spoils people’. Per John Glubb’s timeline defining the life of an empire, once the age of pioneers transitions into the age of conquest and then of mercantilism, when the focus of the pioneers’ descendants’ interests shifts from creative and altruistic expression to money per se and the various forms of self-interest associated with it, the crisis of intellectualism begins and a fork in the road appears, leading one way into the dissent of progressive thinkers and the other way into dispensable, vacuous talks, eventually resulting in the entrance of the empire into a state of decadence wherefrom its final fall begins (Glubb 1978). Applying this scheme to science on a scale from past to present, we could conclude that the current times – where science has become poisoned by money and where the most prominent scientists are primarily superb self-promoters, entrepreneurs and merchants who know how to sell their points well, whereas authentic scientific spirits, humble and reserved, always on the lookout for a gap in their own fabric of knowledge, are marginalized and on the brink of extinction from today’s entrepreneurial climate of academic research – foreshadow the beginning of the fall of the scientific empire, especially so in the eyes of an eternal romanticist, such as myself. The long-term outcomes of this negative selection are too early to estimate, but must be, nonetheless, devastating.

But if we know all of this, then why isn’t there anyone in the sciences to go on and boldly challenge these premises of the spoiled riches and assume a low-budget, DIY approach similar to the way Godard rode the camera manually on a shopping cart on the Champs-Élysées during the shooting of Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960) in an effort to counteract the plutolatry of Hollywood at all possible levels, firmly believing that it fundamentally spoils the human spirit and stomps over many things divine that are concealed in us and that crave to be released in bursts of light? Why would this call for a soul on such a sacred mission bounce back to us, like an echo on the edge of a cliff, having found no receptive minds to absorb its message along the way, as if to tell us that none other than we must be the ones to travel down this revolutionary road running through the spellbound forest of science? For, indeed, aired into the ether, an analogue of Godard’s dedication of his first and perhaps most famous feature film to date, Breathless, to Monogram Pictures, an American studio that produced cheap Westerns, as a statement of ‘alliance to an aesthetic related to impoverished budgets’ (Rosenbaum 2007), is bound to travel for light years in the sphere of science before coming across a sympathetic mind that it will resonate with. Having vowed never to cease embodying the aesthetics of poverty in the scientific method practised in my lab and seeking to this end inspiration in art for scientific studies, I have wondered whether learning from the way that French New Wave cinema artists challenged the art of cinema of their times – using little-known actors; jump cuts; abrupt scene changes and fragmentary narratives; punctuation of scenes by moments of reflexivity; deconstruction of the plot for the purpose of abolishing naïve causal connections and reflecting life more veritably; improvised dialogue; intrinsic experimentation with form and expression; ambiguous conclusions; resistance to becoming a movement for the sake of preserving the uniqueness of each auteur’s individual style; pervasive antiauthoritarianism; antagonism with high-budget, blockbuster cinema; and self-referential critique of the art of cinema per se – and thus spurred its evolution into something fresher than before can indeed help one succeed in becoming astoundingly creative in the lab, and if so then why do we not see a greater intersection of art and science in academic curricula, especially if the attendance of such compound classes would help science students become more prolific researchers?

Instruction for instructional science

Film is a relatively young art whose rapid growth from birth and through the days of erratic childhood and adolescence, all along with its many impasses and breakthroughs, is well documented. As such, it may provide excellent grounds for guiding scientific thought towards originality and invention through instructive analogy. Jazz presents another example of a young art that went through its full lifespan, from swinging cradle to bebop adolescence to modal adulthood to the free crisis of middle age to the fusion grave, in a couple of decades, going down a path that took classical music centuries to cross, perhaps thanks to the explosive, exponential growth of everything in the twentieth century. But then again, a teacher entering a classroom, like Gregory Bateson did, with a crab and a seashell in his hands (Bateson 1979), demanding from the students that parallels be drawn between them – in this case substituting the crab with a film scene, a pop tune or Bird’s anarchic saxophone line, and the seashell with a scientific train of thought – would be most probably labelled as madcap in today’s dry and insipid academic setting, by both students and faculty. An instructor offering a course on, say, film and science, would be considered a lunatic by the great majority of his/her peers in natural science departments, and this is where this enthusiastic effort may end. Yet, a greater deal of conversation about the analogies between film and natural science, such as those that helped guide Celeste in the lab, is what this discourse aspires to incentivize.

If this discourse is to pave the way for the academic courses that would infuse scientific approach with insights derived from film theory – its aesthetics and history – then at the very end of it we must engage in an ephemeral reflection on how film could stylistically influence education per se. Where else to turn to at first but to the points of view of generations of French filmmakers? They, as it is widely known, had nothing positive to say about traditional, authoritarian education and they used every opportunity to show that its demerits outweigh its benefits. Sharing my aversive view of schools with those of the French filmmakers of the mid-twentieth century, from Jean Vigo’s mocking of stringent instructors and headmasters in Zero for Conduct (Zéro de conduite, 1933) to Truffaut’s portrayal of dismissal from educational institutions as a route to perplexity, but also freedom, in The 400 Blows (Les Quatre cents coups, 1959), to Jean Rouch’s filming a classroom conversation by showing only the outside of the school in The Punishment (La Punition, 1962), as if to insinuate that the school is but a giant, albeit grandiose, wall, I have tried my best to be a postmodernist educator who slams education in the form in which it is practised today, be it authoritarian or entertaining, passive or active, lifesucking or vacuous (Uskoković 2017, 2018a). Today, when hundreds of students pass through my classroom every school year, I can proudly say that I still live up to Jello Biafra’s maxim that ‘we do not believe in schools, we are blowing up the schools’ (Biafra 2011), given than ‘deschooling’ (Illich 1970), unlearning and undisciplining are what I claim to be my primary tasks in the classroom (Fig. 8).

Figure 8:

In The Punishment, Jean Rouch films a walk through an academic hallway, the entrance to a classroom, the conversation within it, the expulsion of the protagonist from it and their walk out of the building solely from the outside, showing only the external walls of the building, as if to send the message that schools and universities are grand walls, quite like those Pink Floyd had in mind with their bleak portrayal of educational institutions in The Wall (1982). A wall, of course, can teach neither more nor less than how to become another wall.

In this classroom, where I teach strictly natural science courses, references to film are frequent. With one of them I will come to the end of this discourse. It is usually accompanied by the image of Jean-Luc Godard projected on the screen and the following adage: ‘An artist should be obliged to implicitly call into question the art through his art’. It is one of many ways to paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre’s description of the type of artist to whom the twentieth century would belong (Roud 1968: 8). Godard has been a filmmaker who epitomizes this balance between connecting with the viewers on the emotional plane, but also levitating above it with insights that reflect on the premises and conventions with which things are crafted on this emotional plane. Hence the frequently aired opinion that he has been a stronger film critic than filmmaker (Uskoković 2018b), even though in reality he has been both, as must a scientist who aspires to revolutionize science be. His/her science must not only report on exciting practical findings, but also challenge the way science is done for the sake of preventing the slumps into one of its innumerable blind spots and helping it evolve past their chasms. Science, performed with one such balance, becomes conceptually analogous to a conceptual art. Evoked in the classroom, this balance instructs students to widen their views and make an effort to grasp science as a whole, from its historic, political, socio-economic and epistemological angles. Education as such distances itself from the contemporary tendency to narrow the views down the STEM channels and turn universities into craft schools, the type of effort that has been historically typical for neo-colonial, imperialistic states, from the Roman Empire to the United States. But on the basis of an education that is profoundly second-order, holistic and self-reflective, the students gain not only skill and know-how, but also a broader awareness of the contexts in which this know-how is gathered and applied. Their capacity for manipulation and brainwashing gets minimized thereby, and they begin to drift towards becoming individuals that question science as a pragmatic enterprise, an act without which its evolution past the deficiencies of the current state and towards something more harmonious could not be imagined. With this emphasis on second-order insights exemplified by the art of Jean-Luc Godard, the students become less and less robotic and more and more human with each new class, distancing themselves from Alphaville and approaching the Outlands with an ‘I… love… you’ (Alphaville [1965]) throbbing in their hearts.

If hard sciences become softened by arts and humanities during this journey away from the bowels of Alphaville, so would education become less despotic and dogmatic. In its place, an anarchic renouncement of the concepts of syllabus, classroom and perhaps institutionalized education as a whole would take place. An artist ‘should not allow himself to be turned into an institution’ (Sartre 1964), is another one of Sartre’s norms that the French New Wave filmmakers faithfully adhered to. Tireless ruination of one’s reputation and of any sheepish processions of followers that turn beautiful ideas into something stale is, thus, a noble goal set before the mind of a complete artist. This is how film can evolve education in natural sciences in antiauthoritarian, anarchistic directions that disseminate disobedience and dissention, that instruct about the toxic effects of instruction per se, and that prepare the students for co-creation in togetherness and harmony with other people and nature as a whole.

Conclusion

The evolution of natural sciences is in jeopardy. Following their explosive growth after the development of the empirical method, they have entered a phase of growth typified by a larger than ever number of scientific reports, but little fundamental inventiveness. Access to high-tech equipment and massive funding as well as vague publication records are the key criteria used to estimate scientific success, while creativity is measured by teaspoons. Unlike in the art circles, where independent critics are assigned the role of discerning wheat from tar and have the opportunity to praise wit and style, disparage conformity and be indifferent to raw power, scientists act as each other’s critics through the peer-review system, which is an assessment approach that is broken, conflicted and falling flat on its face. The pervasive absence of creative thought has given rise to the epidemics of trend-following and unquestioned obedience to the paradigm. The mediocre prospect for countless popular research directions is hidden from the public eye, as scientists continue to dishonestly praise the pros and hide the cons in their reports and presentations. Meanwhile, educational institutions fail to teach creativity in science, partly because the prospects for retention, tenure or promotion directly translate to good student reviews, which directly translate to light assessments, which, on the other hand, favour the bottom of Bloom’s taxonomy pyramid, rather than the top, where the notion of creativity is nested (Uskoković 2018a). Ironically, all this stagnation is happening at a time when the proportion of scientifically educated individuals is higher than ever in the history of humanity. How to thoroughly analyse science and its progress from metalogical perspectives is thus a burning question that must be dealt with urgently. In this article, I have shown that analogies with film can clarify many of the topical and contextual issues troubling science. These issues crave to be confronted for the sake of liberating science from magisterial shackles and fostering its freer flight.

The drawing of parallels between film and science is worthwhile from numerous angles. First, film is the most popular visual art, and references to it usually resonate with people in the natural sciences with greater relevance than references to other arts. Film is also a highly collaborative art and so connections with science, which has become increasingly cross-disciplinary and collaborative in the past few decades, are natural. Also, film, unlike music, writing or painting, is a comparatively young art, whose progress, as such, along with its many ups and downs, pitfalls and breakthroughs, has been well documented, all throughout the period of its birth, infancy, childhood and adolescence, when its development was rapid, exciting and explosive, as in every person’s life. As such, film presents a perfect art medium for drawing instructive analogies with the development of any human discipline, including the natural and social sciences. Rather than a distraction or a favourite pastime, film can be a source of analogies that guide innovation in hard sciences. Some of these analogies, repeatedly tossed before students to guide them towards the treasures of inventive ideas and creative expression, have been mentioned here. There is a hope that these analogies may grow into a whole new discipline that would establish deeper and more philosophical connections between natural science and film, rather than the superficial ones dominating casual conversation and populating the popular literature. Next to this, there is also a hope that with such efforts, science would become more artistic at its foundations, and that the vision of a science of the future – a science that would feed on the insight from the arts to keep the fire of creativity ablaze inside the scientists’ hearts and minds – is not a dream destined to dissipate in our plain sight. Although puritans, prosaics and positivists will air choruses of voices that warn of falling off the edge of a flat, flat world if science is ventured far enough in this direction, there are whole new continents of thought waiting to be discovered and settled. Touched by film, science can reach afar. Some things that are dark and downfallen in science can be made beautiful again. Taking the steps outlined in this treatise, shy and sonorous, a new horizon and a new dawn for science may be walked into.

It is almost as if the future of Fahrenheit 451 (1953) has inconspicuously become present, without anyone noticing it.

One of the grandest commonalities between scientific research and filmmaking is that they are both, except in rare circumstances, collaborative arts that feed on the creative input of multiple individuals.

‘What a funny life we lead! We meet, we work together, we love each other, and then as soon as we grasp something, it’s gone!’

As such, film presents a perfect art medium for drawing instructive analogies with the development of any human discipline, including the natural and social sciences.