Paper short abstract:

Through film animated plants were an important contribution to the discussion of a vegetal soul. I analyse the aesthetic properties of early time lapse film, its media theoretical position within cinema, history of science and popular culture and show how the technic itself was perceived as organic.

Paper long abstract:

Do plants have a soul? In the 19th century Botanists, psychologists, philosophers and anthropologists fiercely discussed this question. With the invention of time lapse film in 1898 the vegetal movement could for the first time be experienced aesthetically in an overcoming of the different timeliness of human and plant, so that for many spectators it was the proof of a plant soul. It seemed the invisible agency would inscribe itself as a formative power like an acheiropoieton into the film.

With its immediateness and beauty, botanic time lapse was by the 1910s popularly staged for a mass audience. The big film distributors incorporated the plant growth sequences into older modes of representation of an ensouled plant as known from proto-filmic magical shows, fairy theatres and cinema of attractions.

I aim to discuss the aesthetic properties of the early time lapse film and its media theoretical position in cinema, history of science and popular culture. The time lapse technic merged animism with its conceptual sibling animation, long before the notion was introduced in film theory in the 1920s. French avant-garde filmmaker Germaine Dulac found the essence of cinema itself in the films of growing vegetals and considered the sentient plant a cinematographic form itself, since its organically grown body renders temporality visible. We could, along with Jean Epstein and Rudolf Arnheim in an inversion of the argument state that time lapse is a vitalist, organic form of film, which becomes itself a kind of natura naturans by creating - and not naturalistically depicting - images of reproducing life.