Communicating science through films: the case of the International Festival of Scientific and Educational Film (1956–1975)

ABSTRACT

The Rassegna Internazionale del film Scientifico-didattico (International Festival of Scientific and Educational Film [IFSEF]) was a pioneering science-based public event held at the University of Padova from 1956 to 1975 in collaboration with the Venice International Film Festival. The IFSEF is treated as a case of a multiform space to question the permeable boundaries between hard scientific content and its aesthetic dimension, educational role, and science communication activity. Through the notions of ‘surplus of meaning’, ‘boundary object’ and ‘boundary space’, which are concepts at the intersection of science and technology studies, film studies and media studies, the IFSEF emerges as a distinctive moment in the construction of science as a multiform object in society, thus providing an opportunity to analyse the management of the evolving boundaries between scientific expertise and science communication at the dawn of modern science communication practice. The main point that emerges from the analysis of the IFSEF is the idea that the identity, meanings, structures and logics that characterise the IFSEF in many ways reflect crucial issues at the heart of the historical evolution of the boundaries between science and society, between the scientific community and other social actors, and between scientific epistemologies and different views of science-related content, thus contributing to a redefinition of the roles and identities of the actors involved in the configuration of the festival.

KEYWORDS:

• Science communication
• film festivals
• science film
• boundary object
• surplus of meaning

Introduction: the International Festival of Scientific and Educational Film

Contemporary science film festivals around the world present a variety of formats; they are organised by a wide range of institutions (from universities to non-profit associations) and appeal to audiences with a shared interest in science and technology. One contemporary example is CineGlobe, a science film festival organised in collaboration with CERN, the world-renowned research laboratory in Geneva, which actively seeks a new format for engaging audiences with the societal concerns raised by science and technology. According to CineGlobe’s motto, the festival is based on the idea that a science film festival should inspire audiences to become aware of ‘how science and culture are both critical in understanding our society’ and encourage people ‘to look further, to educate themselves, and to make their own decisions’.¹ Thus, science film festivals challenge today the idea that cinema is merely a transparent conduit to illustrate and transmit scientific knowledge from expert to lay publics. Moreover, the absence of a canon to which science film festivals can adhere enriches and multiplies the possible configurations among cinema, science and society within these festivals.

Especially since the twentieth century, science films have become privileged means for shaping the relationship among science, film, expertise, and the general public. From the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, at a time when television was increasingly accompanying, and then replacing, the cinema in terms of educational function, film festivals multiplied. During this period, film went from one function to another, often overlapping: from a technique for visualising the invisible, almost entirely controlled by and subordinated to the needs of scientists, to a tool for producing knowledge, albeit in the hands of other experts (non-scientists and the lay public).

The Rassegna Internazionale del film Scientifico-didattico (International Festival of Scientific and Educational Film [IFSEF]), organised between 1956 and 1975, was one of the most notable examples of the emerging of science films and science film festivals’ role and their connection with a differentiated set of actors, institutions and publics. The IFSEF was a thematic festival made of scientific and, to a minor degree, art films; it was conceived and organised primarily by a research institution, the University of Padua, in collaboration with a major international cultural organisation, the Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica (Venice Film Festival [VFF]).

Looking at the organisation, performativity, and fruition of the IFSEF, the article aims to conceptualise science film festivals as a multiform space that questions the permeable boundaries between hard scientific content and its aesthetic dimension, research and education, scientific work and science communication. Sitting at the intersection of cinema studies, science communication and science and technology studies (STS), the article interrogates the socio-material construction of the boundaries between science and non-science and scientific expertise and general publics.

By analysing the case of the IFSEF, we ask as follows: How do science films and science film festivals contribute to shaping the distinction between science production, its dissemination and understanding by a diversified audience? How can we conceptualise the cluster of discussions, decisions and actions through which science film festivals build and simultaneously challenge the boundaries between science and non-science, research and education and expertise and non-expert audiences? Finally, what can we learn from the performative construction of science film festivals in relation to a case from more than fifty years ago, a distinctive stage of development for both scientific work and science film circulation?

Analytical perspectives

Science film festivals as an under-researched subject

Even before tackling the form of a science film festival, the relationship between cinema and science is quite nuanced. The scholarly literature on the relationship between cinema and science continues to thrive, moving beyond cultural historian Frayling’s (2005) portrayal of scientists or the representation of societal anxieties about science. Science communication scholar Kirby (2011), for example, discussed the role that scientists often play as consultants of fictional productions, in particular, thus enhancing the verisimilitude and accuracy of films. From an STS perspective, Burri (2018) examined how films can foster societal discussion on visions of future technoscientific worlds.

Furthermore, cultural studies scholar Bell (2005) began with the spectator rather than the film, arguing that film audiences actively participate in the cultural and intertextual work required to respond to the question of what films say about science and technology (pp. 60–61). Scholarly work on the relationship between science and non-fiction cinema (Landecker, 2006; Boon, 2008; Wellmann, 2011; Gouyon, 2016; Olszynko-Gryn, 2016), Curtis (2013, 2015) highlighted the research, documentation and educational roles that non-fiction films can play within science and medicine.

Scholarly studies focusing on film festivals tout court abound: from Iordanova’s landmark The Film Festival Reader (2013) and the edited volume on the history, theory, methods and practice of film festivals (de Valck et al., 2016), to a more recent article on the role of film festivals in rethinking the canon in film studies (Vallejo, 2020) and the special issue devoted to non-theatrical film festivals (Dalla Gassa et al., 2022). The attempt to find criteria to enable the clustering of certain events as ‘film festivals’ has been made by Krainhöfer (2018, p. 8), who highlighted, among other things, the criterion of discursive self-representation, which is defined as having the word ‘festival’ or ‘fest’ either as part of the name of the event, an additional title or part of the description of the event.

Science film festivals have no commonly accepted scholarly definition, which is mainly due to the wide range of formats, sizes, budgets, targeted audiences and missions of film festivals in general (de Valck, 2016, p. 1). To compensate for the lack of a scholarly definition, we suggest that a science film festival can be considered a multi-media cultural event aimed at public scientific knowledge construction, circulation and engagement. More significant than establishing the ‘first’ science film festival is to note that in 1947, the French biologist and filmmaker Jean Painlevé, whose work was celebrated within the IFSEF, launched the International Association of Science Film Festivals, enabling a wide range of experiences and formats to gather under an umbrella organisation. In the same year, UNESCO published its first memorandum on science popularisation, placing science on equal footing with education and culture (Nielsen, 2019, p. 246).

Film festivals are sites of power. This is so because the process of selecting films and enabling distribution increases visibility and leisure, which ‘may change our perception of the world’ (de Valck, 2016, p. 9) because of their potential impact on society and public sphere agendas, including those related to science and technology. Canadelli and Casonato (2019, p. 120), in their work on the international science film exhibition held for a few years (1960–1962) at the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, rightly indicated that ‘men of science’ consider the potential of cinema as a tool for education and dissemination purposes.

Today, science film festivals, such as the aforementioned CineGlobe, decentre science by showing how several stakeholders, including the general public, play a central role in the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. At the same time, the potential of such festivals to change public sphere agendas cannot be fully grasped if one regards them as existing exclusively in the realm of communication and public engagement events that feature after scientific research has been carried out. Although a comparative analysis of other science film festivals falls beyond the scope of this article, the case study of the IFSEF demonstrates the potential of science film festivals to bring together research and education by blending scientific realism with attention to aesthetic values and concerns.

‘Surplus of meaning’ at the intersection of science and aesthetics

A key element in the analysis is the ability of science film festivals to engage with diverse audiences, with science contributing to itself becoming a public phenomenon. This ability is motivated by the fact that science film festivals are characterised by what the historian of human sciences Fernando Vidal (2018b, p. 145) defined as a ‘surplus of meaning’ in relation to films. With this concept, Vidal’s aim was to bridge the gap between science communication, cinema and aesthetics by bringing to the foreground the specific nature of film rather than treating it as a transparent conduit for the communication or embellishment of science. Science films never simply represent knowledge, nor are they characterised by a shortage of information or simply by a realist stance.

Through the ‘surplus of meaning’ concept, Vidal hinted at the polysemic nature of films fostered by the interplay of language and audio-visuals. Films, including those of a scientific nature, not only have semantic capital but also semantic potential, as they become open to new signification that fluctuates depending on the onlooker (e.g. background knowledge influences interpretation) and the context of production and fruition of the film. Science films present an excess of signification that cannot be curbed within the tenets of realism.

Vidal’s use of ‘realism’ in his analysis of science films borrows from both philosophy of science and from film studies. In philosophy of science realism is the belief that scientific inquiry aims to produce true descriptions of what the world is like; and acceptance of a scientific theory involves the belief that it is true (van Fraassen, 1980). In film studies realism is the belief that, in contrast to other representational arts, film is a medium that entertains an indexical relation with reality thanks to its photographic nature (Bazin, 2005).

Realism is represented, following Vidal (2018b), by the values of accuracy, authenticity, and fidelity which can be distinguished by certain features. Accuracy has to do with the ability of filmic representations of a scientific topic to adhere to rigorous veracity standards. Authenticity is related to plausibility: cinematic representation of science ‘ring true’ to the onlooker. Fidelity means the degree to which a science film captures the significant aspects of the empirical subject matter depicted in the film. However, the values of accuracy, authenticity and fidelity, while necessary, are not sufficient in shaping the beliefs and attitudes of viewers towards science.

With the notion of ‘surplus of meaning’, Vidal outlined that, in science films, realism co-exists with aesthetic concerns, thus expanding the scope and configuration of the relationship between science, the audience, and society at large. The term aesthetics has to do with the faculty of perception – sensible knowledge (aísthēsis) – and, only after that, with notions of taste and beauty. Information is not only processed rationally but also by means of the faculties of perception, imagination and feeling.

It is thanks to aesthetics that science films foster a hybrid space characterised by the co-existence of realism and imagination. Communication itself is a relationship that occurs via media and among imagination, intuition, and sensitivity, which activate both the intellectual and perceptual apparatuses. If cinema participate to the construction of science in society, it does so through its ability to intertwine realism with aesthetics.

Following an established scholarly tradition of criticism of the ‘deficit model’ (Bucchi and Neresini, 2007), Vidal (2018a) argued that this model of public understanding of science still remains largely unchallenged as the main framework used to discuss the relationship between cinema and science, noting that ‘cinema is predominantly approached in a “deficit” perspective that makes it appear as an unreliable means of transmitting scientific values and knowledge or even as a medium that may harm science literacy’ (p. 130). To correct this distorted view of science cinema, he maintained that the ‘surplus of meaning’ is ultimately what characterises it (Vidal, 2018b, pp. 145–147), making realism – and its values of accuracy, authenticity, and fidelity – co-exist with aesthetic values and concerns.

We argue that the ‘surplus of meaning' that Vidal (2018b) discussed in relation to individual films is a defining feature of film festivals, including those of a scientific nature, due to their being ‘sites of intersecting discourses and practices’ (de Valk and Loist, 2009, p. 180). Thus, Vidal’s (2018b) argument should be applied more broadly to encompass science film festivals: These are polysemic by nature, thanks to their capacity to triangulate between the films, the audience and the context of production and fruition.

Science films as boundary objects, festivals as boundary spaces

To study science films and scientific festivals, we can fruitfully interplay the notion of ‘surplus of meaning’ with the concept of ‘boundary object’, a pivotal concept developed in STS (Star and Griesemer, 1989). In the last two decades, the notion of boundary object has been variously adopted to emphasise the active role of scientific objects in supporting the collective practices that bring together people belonging to different epistemic cultures and sharing different scopes and forms of knowledge.

By addressing the science films presented at the IFSEF as boundary objects, we aim to grasp the ways in which films become ‘plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites’ (Star and Griesemer, 1989, p. 393). Parallel to what the surplus of meaning highlights about the ability of science films to articulate multiple layers of meaning, the notion of boundary object highlights the structural nature of the interactive practices developed around film and festivals and their ability to keep different communities and actors together.

By conceptualising the science films presented by the festival as boundary objects, we can understand the activities and formats of the festival as a proper form of ‘boundary work’ (Gieryn, 1983). This notion helps in outlining how the form of the festival itself – its structure, spaces and screening practices – is a constitutive part of the definition of what distinguishes science from non-science. More specifically, from this theoretical perspective, IFSEF offers a case where the porous boundaries at the intersection of scientific content, educational material and aesthetic products can be explored.

This kind of boundary work is performed by the festival due to its nature as a ‘boundary space’ (Champenois and Etzkowitz, 2018; Horst, 2022). Drawing on Star and Griesemer’s (1989) work, Horst (2022) introduced the notion of ‘boundary space’ in the context of an interactive installation to address contexts where phenomena can simultaneously belong to science and non-science. Accordingly, this notion points the attention to the spatial articulation of the dynamics characterising films as boundary objects within the interaction between different social worlds. Moreover, the notion of boundary space more explicitly addresses the relevance of the organisational dimension in shaping the performative interaction between the various actors involved in science film festivals in different ways (Horst, 2022, p. 463).

In our analysis, therefore, the notions of boundary object and boundary space are adopted to highlight the festival as representing a distinctively constructed context – at once material and conceptual – in which science films are framed in a porous and multi-layered way in order to align and orchestrate the collaboration of actors belonging to different but overlapping spheres (i.e. science, education and aesthetics). Through the concepts of boundary object and boundary space, the IFSEF becomes visible as an organisation characterised by a discursive formation in a Foucauldian sense, that is, a space where scientific knowledge is tied with cultural and social powers.

In this perspective the IFSEF can be seen as a space in which epistemic boundaries are reinforced and transgressed by the main actors, who are involved as organisers (the two institutions), participants (the audience, the journalists covering the festival), the research centres/companies submitting films for consideration, and the shifting categories (based on disciplines or on functions) used by the organisers to cluster the films in different sections. Thus, the epistemic boundaries are constantly reproduced between disciplines, different sections of the festival and even between the IFSEF and other science film festivals elsewhere.

One of the challenges in writing this paper has been giving readers a sense of the language used by the main IFSEF’s stakeholders (organisers and jury members) when identifying categories for organising films in a section or for awarding them. Behind these choices there were heated debates but also a degree of arbitrariness. For the sake of historical accuracy, we stay close to the original terms encountered in the archival material considered its pivotal role in our methodology. Nevertheless, we critically reflect on issues of language. For example, we use both terms ‘didactic’ and ‘educational’ as they are used interchangeably in the IFSEF documents, despite the difference in emphasis these two concepts have, with ‘didactic’ referring to instructional activities/goals happening in the classroom and ‘educational’ to learning activities/goals more broadly. Furthermore, we adopt the term ‘art films’ to include all works that were originally included in what the festival defined as the ‘art section’, including films that did not directly deal with scientific content but were considered to have an educational function, which was one of the key aspects of the IFSEF. Examples of such films are those by Nelly Kaplan on the poetics of artists Gustave Moreau and Pablo Picasso, and the ‘critofilms’ by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, who coined this neologism for his own films that carry out art criticism/interpretation through moving images rather than written words.

Sources, method, and case study

The University of Padua created the IFSEF in collaboration with the VFF and ran it for almost 20 editions between 1956 and 1975. Since its birth, the organisation of the Padua exhibition was entrusted to the Students’ Cinematographic Centre of Padua University, which then became the Centre for Scientific Cinematography in 1961, first oversaw the IFSEF and then gradually settled into the permanent structure, the CDLM (Robuschi, 1975, p. 92). From the 1972 edition, the IFSEF became biennial, and the University of Padua gained greater independence from the VFF regarding the selection and awarding decisions until the IFSEF was terminated in 1975 due to lack of proper funding and institutional support. The first period (1950s–1960s) corresponded to the ‘golden age’ of Italian cinema, motivated by the growth in the national production of films on the world market and characterised by dynamism at the level of production. The same dynamism was evident in the economic, technological, and scientific advancements of the nation. The second period corresponded to the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period characterised by the 1968 protests and its aftermath, with the rewriting of the Venice Biennale statute dating back to the Fascist Era (Brunetta, 2022).

From a transnational perspective, the birth and life of the IFSEF corresponds to a period (the so-called ‘long 1960s’ from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s) of great interest from a socio-cultural and historical point of view: the Hungarian revolution, the space race, the 1968 protests and social conflicts, the emergence of social movements for civil rights, the Cold War and the transition to computers – which are just some examples of key events that occurred during the lifespan of the IFSEF that also influenced the development of strategies of public communication in science and technology.

Our analysis not only briefly discusses individual films screened at the IFSEF; it also engages with structural, symbolic and organisational issues related to the festival as a distinctive cultural format. These issues can be accessed primarily through extensive archival research that considers both filmic and para-filmic material, as discussed in the empirical section. The archive-based methodology and the focus on the organisational aspects rather than just on the films contribute to theorise the broader context in which the IFSEF films were selected, screened, and evaluated by the jury.

More specifically, the materials that have been collected and analysed to develop the case study include a wide array of filmic and para-filmic miscellaneous sources: films in different formats, the scripts of the films organised by country of provenance, the posters used to advertise the IFSEF’s editions, the regulations between the IFSEF and the VFF containing the terms and conditions of the collaboration between the two institutions, the photographs of the awarding ceremonies, the reports of the juries, the IFSEF’s catalogues, the proceedings of the research seminars organised during several editions of the IFSEF, the press releases and articles from generic and specialised press, and the correspondence between the IFSEF organisers and the research institutions and film production companies (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Poster of 1968 IFSEF edition. Courtesy of CDLM, University of Padova.

On these bases we provided to analyse several distinctive dimensions of the IFSEF, including: the institutional and historical context in which it took place; the organisational structure and choices operated to make the event operation; the discursive and symbolic construction of its public identity; the IFSEF programming, sections structure and awarding processes; the content of the films with their aesthetic and visual features; the context of the films’ performances and fruition.

Within the IFSEF, films were initially organised according to their subject (discipline specific), then function: research, educational and dissemination films. Screenings were held predominantly at the Ruzante Theatre, in the city centre of Padua and, in some cases, in selected university classrooms. From a total of 1,227 films screened (an average of 70 films per festival edition), less than 300 are kept in two University of Padua archives. The first (in Palazzo Bo’) mainly contains paper-based correspondence between the IFSEF organisers, the relations of the juries, catalogues, and press material. The second archive in the Centre for Digital Learning and Multimedia (CDLM) contains a selection of preserved films in 35 mm and non-standard film and video formats and a collection of the afore-mentioned miscellaneous material.

Since its early editions in the 1950s, IFSEF aimed to enter the international circuit of institutes and organisations applying cinematography to the systematic search for new knowledge in science and for educational purposes. The exhibition saw the participation of countries around the world (e.g. the former Soviet Union, the former German Democratic Republic, the United States, Czechoslovakia, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland, Japan, and Hungary were the most frequent participating nations), and awards were given to films in different sections.

Most films were short or medium length and of small format (16 mm), with few films in 35 mm; they had magnetic or optical audio bands. Some of them were transferred into analogue U-matic tapes and then transferred into digital format. A selection of these digital films (around 100) is now available on a shared Vimeo channel for members of the University of Padua. Other films (around 50) are available online for free. Others have been lost or returned to their producers; others may be available in other archives (Archives of Contemporary Arts, Sandoz Film Archive, BFI archive, etc.).

The unique collaboration with the VFF can offer a lens through which to better grasp the peculiarity of the IFSEF. The collaboration began with a preliminary agreement in 1956 between the representatives of the two institutions – Floris Ammanniti (director of the VFF from 1956 to 1959) for the Biennale, Giuseppe Flores d’Arcais (professor of pedagogy and president of the IFSEF) for the University of Padua and Guido Ferro (professor of engineering and university principal for the years 1949–1968) – to move the collateral section on scientific documentary films to Padua. The decision was justified with the recognition that the University of Padua offered the ideal conditions to ensure that this collateral section would thrive on one hand, the presence of academic expertise on scientific and medical subjects would strengthen the film selection procedure; on the other hand, the student body in these subjects would be the ideal audience for such films.

The trait d’union between the two institutions was Flavia Paulon, the professional who played a crucial role in the IFSEF as well as within the VFF by taking care of film programming, organisation and press office responsibilities (Paulon, 1971; Casadoro, 2005). Although the collaboration with the VFF became less important to the smooth running of the IFSEF, the art section, significantly smaller than the science-medicine ones, offered visible evidence of the collaboration with the VFF.

IFSEF’s multi-layered and cross-cutting identity

From the criteria listed by Krainhöfer (2018) as necessary components in defining a film festival, self-representation was relevant to the IFSEF. For instance, the IFSEF’s self-representation emerged even in the given title, that is, through the Italian name ‘rassegna’ rather than festival. This is evident by looking at the advertising material for the public (i.e. the poster and audience programme) and analysing the correspondence between the IFSEF organisers and those outside. In correspondence with research institutions/directors in Italy, the term ‘rassegna’ is mostly used, while the English translation of ‘exposition’ or ‘exhibition’ is more frequently used than ‘festival’ to correspond with institutions worldwide. The literal translation of the term ‘rassegna’ is exposition, exhibition, show, festival or fair.

The two terms ‘rassegna’ and ‘festival’, however, are variously nuanced. ‘Rassegna’ means an orderly record of items (films, in our case) connected by a criterion (authorship, historical period, thematic, etc.). A festival is a recurring event held periodically in the same location and targets the public. It is exactly the ‘public’ dimension that is somewhat lacking – at least in the original intentions of the IFSEF’s founders. The Padua exhibition, in fact, accentuates not the public spectacle dimension but, rather, the function of providing a showcase of scientific films, with an eye to their educational function. Furthermore, even though the target audience did not include the general public, the exhibition paid attention to its public reception, particularly by taking care of its relations with the general press, which continued to offer exhaustive coverage of the IFSEF.

Like all film festivals, the IFSEF included awards. However, the archival correspondence makes it clear that the function and purpose of the awards should have been conceptualised as an ongoing process of defining the nature of the IFSEF itself. Across the lifespan of the Padua exhibition, its organisers and jury members worked tirelessly through the mangle of films to establish a taxonomy and categories for first selecting and then awarding some of the participating films. This process entailed discerning between content and form and form and function (i.e. education, documentation, and research). Even though the jury availed itself of external experts in highly specialised subjects, the jurors recognised the challenge of cataloguing and then evaluating films according to their disciplinary belonging. They then suggested that films be evaluated ‘on the basis of their scientific-educational function’ while recognising that a definition of what a scientific–educational film meant was (and still is) lacking.

Across the life of the festival, the IFSEF films were scrutinised by the juries and discussed by journalists and film critics in generic and specialised press articles. In both cases, the criteria used were based on the capacity (or not) of the science film to channel scientific accuracy and embody a didactic function without neglecting attention to aesthetic values. For example, the film Trattamento Operatorio della Stenosi Mitrale (1957, Republic of Czechoslovakia, [Surgical Treatment of Mitral Stenosis], v.o. in Italian) by Kurt Goldberger, a key director of popular science films, and the film Life is Born (1963, Japan, v.o. in English) by Masami Watanami and Masaaki Oshima were both awarded with the Golden Bucranio for their ability to combine aesthetic qualities with attention to scientific evidence. The reason why Japanese films and those from the former Republic of Czechoslovakia were the most awarded ones was to be found in the availability of state funding for science films in those countries.

Goldberger’s film was in the medical-surgical films category. The 1957 jury, chaired by the writer and film critic Gilbert Cohen-Séat, praised Goldberger’s film ‘for its ability to resolve a scientific-didactic problem of complex surgery in exemplary fashion and in the most perfect manner from a cinematographic point of view’ [translation from the original text in Italian]. Selected stills from Goldberger’s film were printed a year later in the 1958 catalogue, a habit followed for any films awarded the first prize (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Stills from Goldberger’s film. Courtesy of CDLM, University of Padova.

Watanami and Oshima’s Life is Born was in the category of biological films for ‘didactic purposes’. The journalist and film critic Nedo Ivaldi praised this film for its research and didactic potential achieved thanks to a combination of ‘astonishing colourful visions’ and time-lapse microcinematography techniques illustrating the development of a chicken’s egg (Ivaldi, 1963). Another film critic, Luigi de Santis, praised it for its ability to move the spectator. This result was achieved, according to de Santis (1963), not just by means of teaching a biological phenomenon and its phases in an objective manner, but through the camera-led process of rediscovering a well-known scientific phenomenon so that it becomes interesting and relevant to the onlooker. Despite the limited function assigned to science films by de Santis, his review of the Japanese film fully supports the idea that a science film works well when it has the ability to faithfully document a phenomenon in all its phases, as well as appeal to the imagination and emotions of the onlooker.

The collective effort of the organisers was to provide a systematic evaluation grid that would speak not only about the award-winning films but also the IFSEF itself. Thus, the process of attributing the awards in subsequent editions (with the notable exception of the non-attribution of the Bucranio d’Oro prize in the 1968 edition in the aftermath of the students’ protests in 1968) acted as an opportunity for the organisers and jury members to adopt a self-reflexive approach to the role of science films in the context of university teaching and research.

The debates among the jury members and organisers, especially during the 1960s, highlighted the friction between the deficit model of science communication, which was still predominant, and a more decentred, integrated model that was based less on scientific accuracy and more on a self-reflexive approach, enabling each stakeholder to ‘reflect on the status of their own knowledge and situate themselves vis à vis science and vis à vis others in relation to science’ (McKechnie, 1996, p. 129, as cited in Gouyon, 2016, p. 756).

This self-reflexivity present at the onset of the IFSEF continued throughout its life cycle, not only in the jury’s discussions but also in the interventions and debates occurring during the research seminars that accompanied IFSEF’s 18 editions. The topics of these seminars, which are listed by Robuschi (1975, p. 97), were quite generic in the first editions (i.e. the relationship between cinema and the university) and became more focused on education (i.e. the 1968 seminar concerned, e.g. the critical evaluation of the educational efficiency of film on biology) until the final seminar in 1975, which examined the active role of personnel working in university organisations in scientific cinematography across Europe.

Despite its explicit educational commitment, the Padua exhibition was never simply a tool at the service of university scientific education. However, it offered a space for rethinking, first, what a science film festival was and, second, what public engagement with science could become through the art of cinematography, that is, through the aesthetic value of science films. This case was observed, for example, at the 1969 seminar on the topic of science popularisations with film and television. The documentary filmmaker and early cinema historian Virgilio Tosi, whose films were screened in several IFSEF editions, acknowledged the ‘reality of two cultures’ – the scientific and the humanistic – as one of ‘crisis’ and welcomed ‘a new kind of humanism (…) embracing at the same time and with the same approach, biology and morals, physics and law, mathematics and history’ (Tosi, 1969, p. 5).

Even though he criticised the type of cinema that narrowly focused on the ‘marvels’ of science and nature, he understood the advantage of cinema over television: The latter tended to give images an ancillary role, whereas the former was aimed at ‘striking the mind of the audience through the eye’ (p. 11), thus appealing to the perceptual, sensory and imaginative faculties of the onlooker. The IFSEF, therefore, was well placed to provoke discussion about any clear-cut category and dichotomy, including that between humanistic and scientific culture, which is discussed further below.

Organisational format as an amplifier of the ‘surplus of meaning’ and of ‘boundary work’

The IFSEF was a space to debate the role of science films in the context of university research and education, not just a platform for showcasing the best of international science film production for research and educational purposes. The notion of ‘surplus of meaning’ (Vidal, 2018a, 2018b), with its attention to aesthetics and realism, was evident at multiple levels of the IFSEF. The first was the collaboration with the VFF, which resulted in the presence of a section on ‘art films’ that prompted the IFSEF’s organisers and jury members to pay attention to the role played by aesthetics in educational films. The second was the presence of films by directors, such as Éric Duvivier or Jean Painlevé, who embraced an approach to science filmmaking called ‘scientific surrealism’, characterised by a blending of science and aesthetics (Lefebvre, 2014; Cahill, 2019; Casini, 2022).

The third was the attention paid to design choices and aesthetic values in the materials produced for engaging the public with the festival, such as the catalogues and the IFSEF posters with their changing aesthetics. The fourth was the double evaluation of the films made by the VFF and IFSEF using the criteria of aesthetic values and scientific accuracy, respectively. The final point was the attempt by the jury in their discussions to move beyond an idealistic educational model based on the philosophy of Benedetto Croce, as explained later in this section.

Both the VFF and the Padua exhibition were affected by the political events of 1968 and their aftermath. The members of the National Association of Cinematographic Authors supported the protests of 1968 against the awards and the dependence of the VFF on the production and distribution system. Following the protests, the awarding process was abolished, and the VFF became a non-competitive festival until 1980.

In Padua, the IFSEF became one of the protesters’ targets, as the Bulletin of the Centre of Scientific and Didactic Cinematography clarified in its front-page article, ‘The Scientific–Didactic Cinema and Students’ Demands’. The Bucranio d’Oro prize was not awarded that year, and the festival also hosted filmmakers and producers from the Prague Spring. The nature of the IFSEF and its collaboration with the VFF changed: The Padua exhibition gained more independence in the selection of films and awarding decisions; however, it was also challenged by the lack of proper financial support from the University of Padua and the Ministry of Tourism and Spectacle.

More than a decade after its birth and despite the huge success of the first editions, which saw public crowding outside the Ruzante Theatre, all well documented by the generic press, the IFSEF was still perceived as semi-clandestine for the public and almost unknown for non-university audiences, underscoring its ambiguous role, which was part of how it generated a surplus of meaning.

The IFSEF’s format and some of its choices at the level of selected films embody the values of accuracy, authenticity and fidelity outlined by Vidal (2018b), which are key to communication and public engagement with science. These values do not necessarily bear upon a deficit model of knowledge transmission; they can coexist with the surplus of meaning that the film medium embodies, allowing movies to act as boundary objects used by different communities for articulate multiple levels of meaning about science and its identity in society; moreover, the work of selection and performance of movies by the IFSEF can be addressed as a specific work of ‘boundary work’ because of, first, its curatorial choices (i.e. which films to showcase and the awarding process) and, second, its peculiar format and organisational structure.

First, we considered the role of the film selection process and then the logic of prize awarding as forms of boundary work. A notable example is the scientist/filmmaker Éric Duvivier, who presented 10 films at the IFSEF and whose work was also showcased at the VFF. His films were often produced by the pharmaceutical company Sandoz, thus highlighting corporate trust in science films as a medium for research, dissemination, and promotion.

Duvivier was awarded two prizes for his medical films (for Chirurgia intracardiaca a cuore aperto [open-heart intracardiac surgery], the Silver Bucranio in 1958 and for Terapia chirurgica del cancro del colon e del retto [surgical therapy of colon and rectal cancer], the Golden Bucranio in 1959). The jury’s motivation, in both award decisions, acknowledged the co-presence of science and aesthetic values by praising the mastery of the filming techniques (i.e. editing, script and cinematography) and the in-depth knowledge of the subject (‘scientific excellence’) (Buzzo, 2013, p. 120), which, taken together, would make a film perfect for a wide range of purposes and audiences.

For several of its editions, the IFSEF included a section devoted to ‘art films’. The available correspondence does not make explicit the rationale for adding this section to the Padua exhibition beyond the fact that it was a vestige of the collaboration with the VFF. One could speculate that a possible reason for having the art section might be that the focus of the IFSEF was not only on scientific films but also on films with socially and pedagogically oriented content.

Most films screened during the IFSEF editions were characterised as medical and surgical works for documentation and educational purposes, with the art section, in the last editions of the IFSEF, being increasingly sidelined in spurious sections named ‘films of art, pedagogy and sociology’ (Buzzo, 2013, p. 14). This uneasiness reflects two factors. First, a certain resistance towards acknowledging the role played by the surplus of meaning within a festival primarily devoted to science films was symptomatic of the lasting presence of the separation of the ‘two cultures’. Second, the art section reflected the fluctuating definition of the sections (based on subject fields) and functions (research, documentation, and educational film) adopted by the IFSEF organisers and jury members.

Looking at the structure of the IFSEF programme and at the press articles relating about that, one could also speculate that the ‘art film’ section was an attempt to contrast the compartmentalisation of knowledge and to ensure the sustained engagement of the public confronted otherwise with rather difficult subjects (surgical procedures, industrial manufacturing processes, biological and physiological phenomena happening beyond the threshold of human vision). The art section, namely, was greeted by the generic press as a ‘soothing break’ interrupting the cycle of projections devoted to surgical procedures and mathematical concepts. Usually, films in the ‘art section’ were screened either in the evening or in the last day of the exposition, with an additional exemplary art film shown together with films included by the IFSEF in the ‘science section’ during the opening day. For example, in the 1963 edition the art films section was present in the fourth day of the IFSEF.

The opening day ceremony screened one after the other, in this order, four short/medium-length films: the British film Introduction to Oil by Segaller, the Japanese film Secret in the Hive by Higuchi, the Italian art documentary on Antoni Gaudí by Ricchetti, and the Czech film L’Erosion du sol by Fuksa. The selection is in itself an example of how the ‘surplus of meaning’ can be generated by programming in the same screening slot a variety of ‘science’ and ‘art films’ such as a sponsored film on the oil industry; a scientifically accurate and poetic visual essay on the enigma of the life of bees illustrating events such as the dance to transmit information, the system of work division, and the warfare with hornets; an educational art documentary on the Catalan architect Gaudí and, finally, a film to teach students a geological phenomenon.

Thus, the IFSEF was strategically structured and organised as a boundary space, whose features emerged from material interactions of expertise, epistemic demarcation, and audiences (real or imagined), constructing and transgressing borders, for example, between disciplines or groups of experts in the context of the collective experience of sitting in a classroom or in a theatre watching art and science films.

The archival material lends itself to speculative rather than evidence-based considerations around the IFSEF’s audience. The presence of students as targeted audiences can be inferred from the archival material; at the same time, the archive also reveals the lack of student involvement in matters related to the selection and awarding of films. The lists of experts who took on these roles never included students. Students’ pivotal role in shaping the public identity of the IFSEF, as briefly mentioned before, came to the foreground only after the 1968 protests. Unfortunately, except for a few black and white photographs documenting the awarding ceremonies, the aliveness of the IFSEF can only be inferred, as the archival material does not enable an overarching reconstruction of the collective nature of the spectatorial experience.

Sporadic references to the audience and considerations of public reception can be found in the general interest press articles. The newspaper Il Gazzettino for example, describes the ‘many professors and students’ at the awarding ceremony of the 1957 IFSEF edition or the ‘qualified public of intelligent people’ (Bertolini, 1957) able to appreciate the poetry of everyday life depicted in the non-commercial film Every Day except Christmas by the British New Wave documentarist Lindsay Anderson or the aesthetic quality of The Message of Beaty by the Czech documentarist Alan František Šulc. Despite the relative invisibility of students in the archival material, the debates arising from the IFSEF seminars and the attempts to define its identity prove how IFSEF nurtured the formation of an active spectatorship, especially among experts, such as the university professors who positioned themselves, along with the cinematographic medium, as the ideal vehicle of knowledge transmission.

Empowered by its collaboration with the VFF and the reputation of the University of Padua in scientific and medical subjects, the IFSEF sought to position itself within the international community devoted to making and showcasing scientific films for research and educational purposes. In this community, notable research centres and cinematographic institutions included the International Scientific Film Association (1947), the Paris Institut de Cinématographie Scientifique (1930), the Service du Film de Recherche Scientifique (also in Paris), the Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film in Göttingen, the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratory and Film Archive in Switzerland, the Education Development Center in the United States, Tokyo Cinema Co. in Japan, the Factory of Films for Scientific Divulgation in Kiev, etc.

These institutions supported the development of a scientific–didactic type of cinema, which saw the collaboration of scientists and filmmakers, sometimes with the result of creating hybrid professional figures capable of creating works embodying both scientific realism and aesthetics, such as Jean Painlevé – a biologist and filmmaker. In Italy, however, no strong connections existed between universities/research institutions and cinematography for scientific and didactic purposes.

The reasons are twofold. The first is the lack of a uniform distribution of scientific knowledge and education across the country, motivated by the late reunification of Italy as a nation (1861) (Govoni, 2002, pp. 56–58). The second is that, in Italy, the dichotomy between cinema as pure entertainment and cinema as a technoscientific tool was hardly questioned due to the prevailing model of Italian idealism (Canadelli & Casonato, 2019, p. 2). This model characterising the Italian cultural life was initiated during the spiritualism of the nineteenth-century Risorgimento tradition and culminated in the first half of the twentieth century. The impact of Italian idealism is clear when analysing the written exchanges of the IFSEF jury members, who fiercely debated the alternative offered by John Dewey’s more progressive educational model in comparison to the idealistic one offered by Benedetto Croce.

The jury’s 1958 report has a lengthy preliminary introduction, outlining the theoretical debate that sought to overcome Croce’s ideal of the universal aesthetics and embrace Dewey’s pragmatism. According to scientists – the report argues – a scientific–educational film faithfully records a scientific phenomenon or procedure (e.g. a surgical intervention) in such a way that experts or students can learn even more by watching it than by attending the real event. However, this is not enough unless one ‘reduces cinema to a pure and simple recording technique’ [translation from the original text in Italian]. The other position, usually embraced by humanists and philosophers, is that a film – because it is a type of language – should use the most appropriate formal features to present certain content.

Reality is not that simple, however, as argued by the report; a scientific–educational film of quality can never simply illustrate what can otherwise be said in words, precisely because, we argue, it has a surplus of meaning. In contrast, a good scientific–didactic film that is linguistically coherent needs to express itself as an ‘intertwining of images, of their rhythms’, thus recognising the role of form and aesthetics in fostering audience building and engagement with science.

After grounding the problem theoretically, the report mentions the criteria to be used by the jury members in the grid to evaluate the films in competition: ‘Scientific content; mastery of cinematographic techniques; didactic function; linguistic coherence; intensity of expression; likely “poetical” value’. The intellectually rich debate accompanying the first editions of the IFSEF speaks to the awareness of the educational potential of the scientific film, the interest in discussing different pedagogical models in education and the attempt to create an alternative model for what the scientific film can or should be.

Conclusion: what the IFSEF tells us about the science–society relationship

The history, development and organisation of the IFSEF help in exploring several crucial issues at the centre of the contemporary reflection on the science–society relationship. The main point that emerges from the analysis of the IFSEF's archives is the idea that the identity, meanings, structures and logics that characterise the IFSEF reflect in many ways the issues at the heart of the historical evolution of the boundaries between science and society, between the scientific community and other social actors, and between scientific epistemologies and different views of science-related content. These tensions can be seen in the presence of the term “educational” in the IFSEF name, in the way the festival has articulated the link between aesthetic and scientific content, and in the way it has worked to involve different actors, both individuals and collectives.

Emerging in a specific cultural and historical context, the distinctive approach of the IFSEF to science films, which was characterised by what we defined as a ‘surplus of meaning’, reveals the artificial nature of some of the most enduring dichotomies and prejudices framing the current debate on the relationship between cinema and science. The choices made by the IFSEF – such as the division into disciplinary areas and sub-areas, the distinction between screenings of films in competition and side-events (e.g. celebrating the work of a particular filmmaker whose work has set the standard for what a science film should be), and the arrangement of films according to their geographical provenance – are all examples of the activity of boundary work that the festival embodied.

More specifically, the organisers’ decision to present ‘art films’ as a distinct category clearly distinct from films considered ‘scientific’, the strategic use of categories such as ‘scientific’ or ‘educational’, and the disciplinary or function-based taxonomies adopted to categorise films were instances of reinforcing/contesting the boundaries between science and society. In this context of affirming new boundaries between content, actors and purposes, the films screened represented boundary objects able to set up the conditions for triggering and maintaining the relationships between actors and their otherwise separated social worlds.

Film performances and their evaluation processes were arranged symbolically and materially in order to emphasise their ability to act as boundary objects able to create occasions of interaction and exchange between multiple social worlds: between the world of science and that of cinema, between academic experts in different fields, between professors and students, the university and corporations, among the university, the Padova city local government and its inhabitants. This was operated thanks to a conscious use of public spaces such as the Ruzante Theatre and by means of opening screenings to a generic audience. As a result, the IFSEF was able to function as a boundary space in which different actors and their social worlds had the opportunity to build connections and interactions as well as to experience distances and differences.

The concepts of boundary object and boundary space enabled to foreground how a science film festival becomes an entity able to chart the ways in which technoscience is explored (the experiments made visible in some films), transmitted (to expert audiences and the lay public) and even transformed (the films and their format are generative of a multiplicity of meanings – a ‘surplus of meaning’ – that transform technoscience into a multi-media product) in specific contexts and historical moments. On these bases, the analysis of the IFSEF offers several insights into the relevance of science movies in understanding how the distinction between science and society is both constantly built and reframed.

First, despite the ‘didactic’ main aim explicitly declared in the IFSEF’s own denomination, it cannot be fully identified as an expression of the ‘deficit model’ perspective on science and society; on the contrary, it offers a clear example of new and emerging relationships between science and other social worlds that can be assembled in the context of boundary spaces open to negotiation and reinterpretation.

The IFSEF did not perform a neutral intermediation between science and society; it did not simply moved content from the former to the latter. In fact, it reconfigured scientific content, that is, it transformed this content, displacing it outside of the proper scientific realm in different contexts connected with aesthetic, educational, and mundane dimensions. Like more recent science film festivals, the IFSEF did not fill any gap or deficit; rather, it opened spaces of interaction, providing possibilities for ‘surplus of meaning’ and articulating film as boundary objects that offered the opportunity to perform identities that were not predefined and stabilised. This is primarily because its organisation approaches science films in their multiform character, as films are simultaneously part of the process of scientific work, tools used for teaching activities and aesthetic objects that are also evaluated for their formal qualities.

In this manner, the approach adopted by the IFSEF towards scientific films questions the common understanding of cinema mainly as a communicative tool, whose main aim is to simplify the complexities of scientific work for non-expert audiences. In this sense, the IFSEF gave us a glimpse of an alternative understanding of the role of science films in contemporary society, allowing an ex-post deconstruction of the established boundaries between science production, its communication, and its fruition by a wider audience.

Second, the case of the IFSEF also outlines that the aesthetic dimension of science films can be characterised by a partial autonomy from the codes and rules related to science production and scientists’ research work. In the analysis, we highlighted that within the IFSEF, science films were evaluated and awarded by considering their scientific content and other elements, including their aesthetic dimensions, outlining the intertwining between form and content in science communication and, consequently, questioning the artificial separation between the outcomes of science and the way in which they are presented and circulate within society.

A third crucial dimension relates to the roles of the audiences and their manner of involvement in the IFSEF. We discussed how, during its history, the IFSEF targeted an audience of a highly heterogeneous array of scientists, scholars, students, and film enthusiasts. Relatedly, we see that the common vision of today’s science movies as mostly targeting general audiences composed of non-expert citizens is at least reductive, thus opening an alternative understanding of the boundaries between scientists and non-expert audiences.

Finally, the hybrid qualities of many of the IFSEF's dimensions lead us to emphasise once again that the contemporary relationship between scientific work and science communication is based on the results of a historically rooted process of definition and constant reconfiguration of boundaries. Thus, the IFSEF case offers a distinctive opportunity to observe the historical path of the outcomes of the wider process of the separation of science from other social and cultural spheres, including art. In doing this, the case of the IFSEF also invites us to remember that the current boundaries between science and art, scientific content and its aesthetics and science production and communication are part of an ongoing process of reconfiguration and change.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Silvia Casini

Silvia Casini is Reader in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen. She investigates the aesthetic, epistemological and societal implications of data visualisation, as well as science films, their festivals and archives. She has published extensively in the field of art, science and technology studies (ASTS).

Paolo Magaudda

Paolo Magaudda is Associate Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Padova. His main research interests concern the relationship between culture, technology and society. His most recent monographs include the co-edited volumes ‘Platformed! How streaming, algorithms and artificial intelligence are shaping music cultures’ (Palgrave, 2024) and ‘Young People and the Smartphone. Everyday Life on the Small Screen’ (Palgrave, 2022).

Federico Neresini

Federico Neresini teaches Sociology of Innovation and Digital Sociology at the University of Padova. His research interests are focused on Science & Technology Studies. His last publication – co-edited with Crabu, Tosoni and Agodi – is “Refused Knowledge in the age of epistemic pluralism. Discourses, imaginaries, and practices on the border of science” (Palgrave, 2024).

Notes

1 See https://cineglobe.ch/whowhat-is-cineglobe/ (Accessed July 2023).