Vegetal Gestures: Cinema and the Knowledge of Life in Weimar Germany

Halfway through Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's classic vampire film Nosferatu (1922), the gripping narrative is brought to an abrupt halt by a visit to the laboratory of Professor Bulwer. The audience plays voyeur as the Paracelsian doctor inducts his pupils into the "mysterious essence of nature" with a lesson on carnivorous plants. Murnau here inserts footage taken by his friend, the science cinematographer Ulrich K. T. Schulz, of a Dionaea muscipula--otherwise known as the Venus flytrap. Since antiquity, vegetal life has occupied an ambiguous position in classifications of nature, vacillating between life and death, organic and inorganic, animal and mineral. Throughout the history of Western philosophy it crops up again and again as a threshold and a limit to knowledge. "Soulless yet living," writes the philosopher Michael Marder, "the plant seems to muddle conceptual distinctions and to defy all indexes for discerning different classes of beings in keeping with the metaphysical logic of 'either/or'".