Science and Cinema

I've been thinking about the important function of the audio track in film since the first class. We talked about how sound is one of the basic film elements exploited by Chris Marker in his spartan narrative film, la Jetee, and sound and music play even a more significant role in the film we'll watch this Tuesday.

This reminded me of an absolutely astonishing bit of animation I saw a few months ago: The Inner Life of a Cell. It's an 8-minute teaching tool created by XVIVO, a scientific animation company for use in Harvard's undergraduate Biology classes. The link above takes you to a short version with soundtrack that XVIVO released to show their skills.

While the version that will be used in Biology courses runs a bit longer and has a voice-over narrative that talks science, it's the sound-tracked one that blow me away. It looks and feels like a narrative film, some kind of avant garde sci fi fantasy. Structurally it is a narrative---it's a series of (molecular) events arranged in an order, after all. But it seems like much more: some of those cells almost read as characters. And I think its the soundtrack that gives the video its overwhelmingly cinematic feel.