Documentary Plasticity

This chapter considers a selection of moving images from embryology, a field whose prominent engagement with imaging has been the focus of recent scholarship. Plasticity emerges as a concrete media form that travels between scientific and other fields as well as a model for an expansive approach to media history that incorporates excluded imaging traditions and reveals previously unacknowledged kinships among imaging practices. The chapter provides an account of Hans Elias's early films, which parallel and occasionally intersect with the rise of the traditional documentary film movement. An excavation of Elias's films both expands and enriches documentary studies by underlining the overlaps between scientific visualization traditions, modern educational practice, and documentary film history. The kinship has traced between embryological imaging and traditional animation may seem far removed from animation's celebrated plasticity as it relates to the graphic traditions of stretch‐and‐squash cartoon bodies.