Cinema e scienza. La cultura del film e il sogno della conoscenza illimitata

[Autom. eng. transl.] The relationship between cinema and science has given rise to wonderful mythologies since the nineteenth century. The cinematograph had yet to project its first moving images when scholars like Ernst Mach fantasized about the potential of an “animated” photograph that would allow us to understand reality in its fundamental functions. The very birth of cinema, as a technological instrument, is closely linked to chronophotography, photography by successive snapshots created to establish modern scientific observations, and already around 1900 research disciplines began to integrate the camera among laboratory instruments, to film ballistic studies, surgical operations, microscopy and vivisections. Cinema has been “scientific” since its origins, and it is no coincidence that it soon began to tell the dream of unlimited knowledge, starting with the great myth of Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, and arriving at the meta-theoretical reflections of Christopher Nolan’s films. The encounter between scientific culture and technological forms of vision will transform the way we conceive and describe the world, reformulating the notions of temporality and spatiality and the ideas of bodily physicality, mind and consciousness. And our very capacity and will to imagine, discover, know.