Tracing embodied knowledge in the history of science and medicine: expanding the role of film in historical research

Re-enactment methods and the recognition of tacit, sensory or embodied knowledge in medical and scientific histories

Since at least the 1960s, scholars like Thomas Settle, Stillman Drake and James MacLachlan have re-constructed, re-enacted or re-worked historic experiments to account for the role of bodies, tools and materials in the practice of science (Settle, 1961, pp 19–23; Drake, 1970, pp 483–500; MacLachlan, 1976, pp 173–85). By re-performing experiments alongside archival and textual studies, these early investigations acknowledged that ‘making’, ‘performing’ and ‘doing’ might yield insights about historical apparatus, applications of scientific method, the environmental context, as well as any associated archival material. Through re-enactments of various kinds, a historian might learn more about how an experimenter reached their conclusions as well as their unwritten, unacknowledged skills and practices (Staubermann, 2011). 

In 1995, Otto Sibum reworked James Joule’s experiment to determine the mechanical equivalent of heat. He wove his findings, along with a report of the difficulties he faced, into a comprehensive and sensitive history placing the knowledge of the senses at the centre. At the core of this history was the notion of ‘gestural knowledge’ – a concept leveraged to encapsulate the sense-based knowledge produced and passed on from professional to professional, from master to apprentice. Such gestural knowledge, he noted, was central to the ‘predominantly oral culture of brewing’, which was moreover a culture Joule (the son of a brewery owner) was steeped in. 

Gestural knowledge, by definition, could not be detected in archival work. On the contrary, Sibum convincingly and comprehensively argued the limitations of text by revealing the dimensions of Joule’s experimental practice clarified through reworking his experiment. First, and perhaps most obviously, was Joule’s bodily engagement. His rhythms and working patterns were not, and arguably could not have been, described in his notebooks. The skill of taking temperature, for instance, emerged not only to be of paramount importance to the experiment itself, but was also unexpectedly entangled with brewing and malting processes. This ineffable body of knowledge made it difficult for many of his contemporaries to reproduce his results. And so it proved with Sibum and his team, who noticed even their own body temperature would influence the reading on the super-sensitive thermometers. 

Second, by carrying out the experiment, Sibum and his team found that the notebooks were lacking in crucial information about the experiment and even the apparatus itself. Such a lack of detail was starkly apparent in Sibum’s account of visiting the Science Museum in London to take measurements from an existing model of Joule’s apparatus; though Joule’s notebooks were incredibly detailed and included illustrations, they did not provide sufficient information to inform the construction of his replica. It also became clear to Sibum that Joule’s original experiment involved an assistant, who was unnamed and unacknowledged in his notebooks (Sibum, 2020, p 280). Such considerations all became clear through physically engaging with Joule’s experiment, but there was, Sibum noted, ‘no literary trace’ of any of them. 

These early examples of attending to embodied knowledge in the history of science present a compelling argument for the necessity and effectiveness of re-enactment methods in general. They do, naturally, have their shortcomings. Alexander Cook suggested these include the limitations of analogy (‘We can never be Them’), focus (addressing a historical period while keeping in mind a modern audience), and emotional engagement (privileging ‘a visceral, emotional engagement with the past at the expense of a more analytical treatment’) (Cook, 2004, pp 489–490). All these criticisms, as Cook notes, can be overcome or countered – and in any case Cook specifically discussed television re-enactments, which are quite a different matter from those presented here. Mario Biagioli, too, noted that re-enactments are anachronistic and any responsible history resulting from them would be an ‘impossible archaeological feat because it is usually impossible to go back and find or operate the original instruments in their original settings and setup’ (Biagioli, 1995, p 73). But as Sibum – who has himself encountered scepticism from colleagues – reflected, ‘reworking past experiments by means of performance is not an attempt to find out “how it really was”’, but rather a way to ‘reveal dimensions of past practice of knowledge-making that are not captured in any literary record’ (Sibum, 2020, p 282).  

At the very least, re-enactment methods have clearly been valued as a way to attend to that which is difficult to put into words – Latour’s fleeting, performative ‘half’ of history. They offer an effective way to engage with the non-linguistic dimension of the history of science – the movement and gesture of historical actors, their engagement with their apparatus and its environment, the visual and aural aspects of an historical performance – which is necessary because the practice of science is not itself confined to linguistics. As Cook noted in relation to re-enactments – they help us to ‘consider the material, environmental and cultural constraints under which all lives are lived’ (Cook, 2004, p 491). 

Historians of science and medicine have continued to recreate, reconstruct, rework and re-enact experiments into the twenty-first century (Usselman, Rocke, Reinhardt and Foulser, 2005; Tweeney, 2006, pp 97–121; Kneebone and Woods, 2014). As historians have continued to emphasise the significance of making and performing, framing history as having two ‘halves’ seems to have gathered momentum. In her study of knowledge production in German piano-making between 1880 and 1930, Sonja Petersen employs two distinct categories of knowledge. She uses Douglas Harper’s concept of ‘working knowledge⁠’ in reference to what she describes as ‘a bodily bounded knowledge based on skills, that resists formal description and which is only accessible through observation and imitation’ (Petersen, 2019, pp 58–80). This may be thought of as the tacit and embodied knowledge referenced in earlier studies, and the gestural knowledge of Sibum. Petersen then contrasts this ‘working knowledge’ with ‘formalised knowledge’, which, as she describes, ‘is used to capture knowledge that can be written down and thus made accessible to literate audiences’ (Petersen, 2019). She mobilises the distinction to express an aspect of the industrialisation of piano-making: although the piano-maker Kurt Grotrian wanted to codify his ‘working knowledge’, she notes, it could not be ‘completely formalised’. As Sibum found in relation to Joule’s notebooks, text and illustration were not enough (in Sibum’s study, too, a context of industrialisation was at play, in his instance the brewing industry’s industrialisation in 1830s England). The process of industrialisation was not a transformation, she notes, from ‘working’ to ‘formalised’ knowledge, but involved a ‘specific combination’ of the two (Petersen, 2019). 

With a similar emphasis on distinguishing between two mutually exclusive kinds of knowledge, Harald Høgseth focuses on the marks left by tools in archaeological remains to write about the ‘language of craftsmanship’ (Høgseth, 2013). Working backwards, as it were, from these ‘signatures’, he has ingeniously reconstructed and re-performed iron age craft practices. He uses a palette of methods to do this, from casting the marks in silicon, taking photographs, videos, and using 3D scanners. From these images and artefacts, the experimental archaeologist reconstructs ‘the processes behind artefacts, tool marks, working patterns and actions’. By studying images and artefacts, a craftsperson is able to recreate the actions it took to produce the original mark. This recreation is then sometimes filmed, and Høgseth has even developed a system of notation based on dance notation systems. ‘The notation system makes it possible for us to analyse and transcribe how craftspeople dance with their tools’, he wrote, emphasising the importance of rhythm and movement patterns (Høgseth, 2013, p 101). 

Pamela Smith yokes two concepts in the title of her project, Making and Knowing. The title pithily expresses the notion that the production of knowledge cannot be disentangled from practices and processes of making. Smith’s work fuses the history of science with the history of art, recognising the scientific knowledge historically produced through artisanal making. She employs reconstruction and hands-on making to learn about the investigatory methods of natural historians, reconstructing pigments and resins from an anonymous French manuscript in order to engage with the historical ambiguity between craft workshops and scientific laboratories (Smith, 2004; Smith and Schmidt, 2008; Bol, 2014; Principe and Newman, 2005). In a similar spirit, Marjolijn Bol investigates how the imitation of precious gems were used ‘as artful substitutes for real precious stones’, studied for what they revealed about the natural world (Bol, 2014, p 110). Part of Bol’s method is to ‘substantiate’ her investigations ‘with historical constructions of imitation gems to provide insights into what these “fakes” might have looked like’ (Bol, 2014, p 109). In this way, she emphasises the role of the body in producing and expressing knowledge of historical significance, as well as the role that her own body and senses played in her research. 

Both Smith and Bol convincingly demonstrate an affiliation between ‘making’ and ‘knowing’, giving an insight into how the distinction between the two is far from clear cut. Such an insight is significant precisely because it thoroughly betrays the central role the body has historically played in producing scientific knowledge. Alongside others such as Sven Dupré’s ARTECHNE research group, including Jenny Boulboullé and Maartje Stols-Witlox’s work on art history reproduction and Thijs Hagendijk’s work on artistic manuals, these scholars also show that meaning is made and expressed in both linguistic and non-linguistic ways (Boulboullé and Stols-Witlox, 2020; Hagendijk, 2018). They make the point even more boldly, that making has in the past not only contributed to, but also constituted scientific thought. 

Having surveyed the work of these scholars employing re-enactment methods as a way of addressing embodied knowledge, we would like now to turn our attention to the role of film in this work.  

So far, we have suggested that re-enactment methods have a role in expanding our understanding of what historians might focus on, and that there is reason to take performative methods much further. In the second part of the article, we suggest that historians could look more closely at modes of scholarship that respect the integrity of embodied knowledge in film. Before we expand on what we mean by using film as a research methodology, and for whom we think this is relevant, we want to touch briefly on film as a mode of sharing research. 

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Film and the integrity of non-linguistic contributions to historical methods

Film is increasingly seen as an important way to connect audiences with research in academic and museum contexts. The historical surgical re-enactments of Roger Kneebone are an example of how film might contribute to research about medical history. Kneebone’s historical simulations – Simulation-Based Re-enactments (SBR), as he termed them – were one application of a variety he explored for surgical simulation equipment he previously developed for surgical training and related public engagement initiatives (Kneebone et al, 2010; Tang et al, 2013). By inviting still-living but retired surgeons to work with this technology to explore now-obsolete surgical procedures, it represented a possible new direction for historical re-enactment, which attempted to draw on still-living actors. His first re-enactment was staged inside a display in the Science Museum – a tableau depicting a ‘modern-day’ surgical operating theatre, assembled in 1983. He had enlisted the 84-year-old retired surgeon Harold Ellis and reunited him with two colleagues, also retired: anaesthetist Stanley Feldman and theatre sister Mary Neiland. This was the first time the surgical team (or ‘firm’) had come together for many years, and now they faced their first patient in decades: a highly accurate assemblage of pig anatomy and plastic. The re-enactment was of an open cholecystectomy (the removal of the gallbladder through an incision in the abdomen). Since laparoscopic (‘keyhole’) cholecystectomies are now the routine, the open version of the procedure is performed only in extremis, making it an operation of historical interest.  

Through performance, and crucially a recording of the performance, the team was able to glimpse, slow-down, expand, revisit and moreover, respect an historical aspect of surgical practice.  

In this instance, filmmaking was part of the research method, and the process of filmmaking central to the research process itself. However, in the study design the film component is seen as largely a logistical consideration, the filmmakers as technical help. A film crew were commissioned, Kneebone and Woods wrote, ‘to capture multiple views of the operations as they were taking place’, and to provide ‘close-up footage of operative techniques alongside capture of team communication and interaction’ (Kneebone and Woods, 2010, p 113). ‘Raw footage,’ they continued, ‘was edited and collated for initial analysis, creating relatively brief clips of each phase of the operation which could be used during individual and group review sessions with the participants.’

Filmmakers, it would seem, have the uncomplicated capacity to ‘capture’ material for someone else to later conduct research on. The term ‘capture’, still used in recent work about filmmaking and craft, neglects to encompass the potential for filmmaking itself to be part of the research process (Maubach, 2024). That is, we do not see filmmaking as distinct from the practice of research. In contrast, we believe that filmmaking and research can be so intertwined that they may be in some projects indistinguishable. 

This is an approach towards filmic research that is more common in other disciplines such as anthropology. Anthropologists Vannini and Vannini, for example, suggest that an artisanal approach to research methodologies sees film as one of the tools of a craft, which can attend to material, manual and aesthetic practice more closely (Vannini and Vannini, 2020). In one of their articles, they discuss the choice of their equipment and how these afford different ways of telling these details, and how making an ethnographic film implicates the researcher’s entire body in the framing of knowledge. We also see filmmakers, whether expert or novice, as making substantive contribution to the research: camera operators decided how to frame images while negotiating the limitations of equipment, space and being mindful of performance that could not be disturbed. A sound recordist decides where to place the microphones and what to record. When it came to making the recordings, filmmakers make a multitude of decisions in order to even arrive at the ‘raw footage’. As they make decisions, from what angles to use and what sound to privilege, to the rhythm and pace of the finished audio-visual piece.  

Filmmakers who work with historians on films also have research skills, but so too do historians working with film. Filmmaking, whether produced by collaborating filmmakers or by historians themselves picking up a video camera, should, we suggest, be considered an integral part of the research process, a more respected, and perhaps trained, part of historians’ methodological toolkit.  

By opting to use film as a research tool in the first place, a researcher takes seriously the suggestion that making, performance, skills and bodies themselves are important matters for historical research. The tools of filmmaking invite them to work with knowledge made manifest in media other than writing – useful, especially, in museums, where focus tends to be placed on objects and the people who interacted with them (for example, when addressing the role of communities in research (Lacdelli and Rees, 2022), or the preservation of skills and knowledge in heritage machinery operations (Carty and Hornsby, 2021), that is: bodies, skills and performance have a real role in the production and framing of knowledge, and seem to require a medium that respects this fundamental commitment. The question – and our provocation – is that if bodies matter, if skills matter, if performance matters to historical investigations, research in these areas needs also to be conducted and presented in film.

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Filmic ethnography

The shift in emphasis we are suggesting is inspired by that put forward by Lucien Taylor in 1996. Taylor, an anthropologist, suggested that his colleagues might go beyond using film ‘to convey “anthropological knowledge”’ in conventional ethnographic film, and instead conduct ethnography filmically’ (Taylor, 1996, p 86). Taylor builds his intervention from what he argues was a mistrust of film in anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. Visuality itself had become merely ancillary, illustrative rather than constitutive of anthropological knowledge (Taylor, 1996, p 66). Even in the 1990s he describes how eminent anthropologists were convinced that text transcended the particular and conveyed a comprehensive truth, that of the ‘ethnographic present’ (Taylor, 1996, p 67). Taylor, along the lines of Berger in Another Way of Seeing, discussed how language and imagery continually contaminate and inform each other. He was forwarding a particular kind of film, interested in the way that film records material in an ethnographic field. He saw film as both describing and depicting, ‘both a record “about” and a record “of” culture, even if the distinction could be articulated more accurately as one between discourse about and record of…every film is by definition both of these things at once’ (Taylor, 1996). 

One only needs to watch the most recent film of Taylor’s, made with Verena Paravel in the context of their work at the Sensory Ethnography Lab, to see what they are trying to achieve here. Called De Humani Corporis Fabrica, their project is a filmic anatomical atlas. It offers a visceral, sensorial depiction and description of bodies in varying states of health, decay, dissection, aliveness and animal form based on six years of filming in Paris hospitals. Film is their way of understanding the body, and the film they produce, an atlas like no other. Starting in the depths of the body and building, the basement, tracking the steps of a guard dog, and ending on the rooftops in a squalid display of surgical black humour and hysterical release from hospital work, the film layers bodies upon bodies, using footage from endoscopies, CT scans, hidden cameras, operating room scenes and half-obscured through window shots. These are the filmmakers’ observations, through and with film, crafted together for cinematic viewing. 

By encouraging scholars to use film as an ethnographic tool, Taylor drew a distinction between, on the one hand, film that tells the story of a piece of research, and on the other, film that has a role in the research process. This role might consist of arresting ethnographic data, framing arguments, engaging with non-linguistic activities such as making, performing and the senses, or providing strategies to produce richer ethnographic accounts. Since then, anthropologists have used film to engage with a multitude of topics from the senses (Taylor now directs the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard) to almost any other topic that involves ethnographic fieldwork, publishing in journals like Multimodality & Society and Cultural Anthropology (Marks, 2000; Sobchack, 2004; [ref id="24"]MacDougall, 2006; Nakamura, 2013; Zhang, 2017). Such publications blur the distinction between ethnography and filmmaking (MacDougall, 2006; Sobchack, 2004; Marks, 2000; Zhang, 2017). 

As we have argued above, historians too deal with the senses, the visceral, the performative and film might be used by historians in a way inspired by Taylor and the Sensory Ethnography Lab. Scholars might access this ‘living’ aspect of history through animating, in various ways, Latour’s ‘brute remainders’. And, like Taylor, we might blur the lines between conducting research and sharing it. 

Historians already do produce film, we would argue, that constitutes historical research. In Waking Hours, for example, is a film produced by Sarah and Katrien Vanagt – a piece of historical research that uses film in conjunction with re-enactment methods to accommodate a non-linguistic dimension to the history of science (Vanagt and Vanagt, 2015). Like most of the examples already mentioned, this reconstruction is also based on a text, in this case one by the early-modern Dutch physicist Plemp. Their publication, however, is not another text, but a film that shows the reconstruction of Plemp’s experiment dissecting an ox eye and using it as a camera obscura. The historian’s familiarity with her materials – the ox eye, the scalpel and other apparatus – is immediately apparent. It is clear that Vanagt spent hours with them before the filming. Quality and direction of the light are also clearly important. Well-chosen camera angles reveal, for instance, a bowl of eggs in the background then its upside-down projection on the ox eye itself, uncovered deftly with a pull of the camera’s focus ring. From the sound of a scalpel planing off a layer of the eye to the squeak of a screw as the eye is secured in its vice, the filmmakers attend closely to the audio, too, evoking a soundscape, something of the sensorial dimension of an historical anatomical exploration of an ox’s eye. The experiment takes place in a kitchen, which is also significant – Plemp’s own dissections were themselves conducted in a domestic space. The result is that in many ways the film, as it were, speaks for itself; the research does not require a written component. 

In a blog post on the ARTECHNE project website (17 January 2017) Jenny Boulboullé praised Vanagt and Vanagt’s approach to using film as part of their research method, acknowledging the work as ‘a methodological exploration of hands-on doing and visually presenting research in a text-dominated discipline’. She notes the ‘material literacy’ clearly on display in the film.  

The work of sensory anthropologists such as Pink and Vannini and Vannini aligns very closely with that of multimodal anthropologies which are increasingly appearing in new formats in anthropology journals or conferences which allow space for storytelling through film and other media (e.g. American Anthropologist, the Displacements conference). This movement towards multimodal anthropologies has been described as being related to democratisation of media production, shift towards engagement and collaboration and dynamics of roles of anthropologists in the fields that they work, all of which could be said for humanities scholarship too (Collins, Durrington and Gill, 2017). Proponents of multimedia anthropologies demand a decentring of the hierarchies of scholarly production, with more egalitarian scholarly production that expands disciplinary boundaries and include forms of scholarship that have struggled to find a foothold.  

We suggest four specific ways that film might have a powerful role in research, to: a) trace the research process; b) enhance collaboration especially in group projects; c) analytically help researchers to amplify sensorial details, through the possibility to rewind, freeze and focus on embodied action; and d) as a means of sharing research instead of text. 

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Tracing the research process

Pamela Smith’s Making and Knowing project includes a small library of videos, as does Sven Dupré’s ARTECHNE project. We might see these videos – largely interviews or attempts to transmit research results – as happening after the research process. It’s possible to interpret them as having no part in the creation, framing or interpretation of research contribution. We might equally, however, see such videos as tracing a research process, evidencing the centrality of bodies, environments, objects and their interactions. 

We suggest that filmmaking methods might enable us to usefully trace a research process; museums and historians such as those we have discussed above might expand the role of video production to include critically framing, arranging and interpreting non-linguistic contributions to history. For example, if Otto Sibum could have used video to record some of his reworking sessions, we would be left with a rich, multimodal, multimedia account of the assistant’s contribution to Joule’s experiment in the sense that he would have details of the sensory expertise of that unnamed man, could see and hear the apparatus, get a clearer impression of what it meant to measure temperature when the weather or one’s own body distorts the thermometer’s readings. Producing a film might be seen as a product of many experts – camera operators, editors, sound recordists, such as those described in relation to Kneebone and Woods’ SBR recordings – but it might also be as simple as a researcher documenting their interviews or interactions with their subjects on their phone. 

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Enhancing collaboration

In relation to Kneebone’s re-enactments, above, Paul Craddock and his team were commissioned to make an audio-visual recording of this live performance, the results of which gave an accidental, yet historically and analytically rich insight into a time, place and a way of working in surgery that no longer exists. In a quiet moment, on one of the wide shots, Neiland looked around at the audience, casually and as if distracted. She was meanwhile holding out a pair of scissors towards Ellis, who reached for them. His hands were already back inside the abdomen when he asked “Scissors please, sister.” The moment did not present itself as particularly noteworthy during the live simulation. It is doubtful anyone in the audience even noticed. It was only when reviewing the footage that the team even registered it. 

As mundane as it seemed, the observation was indicative of a way of working which has since disappeared. Ellis and his firm had once carried out this precise operation as a matter of routine. Neiland knew from experience that Ellis would need the scissors at this exact point, and furthermore knew which type he preferred out of the options arranged before her. This exchange would no longer happen in a modern European operating theatre: since the European Union’s Working Time Directive (2003), surgical teams have, in line with other workers, implemented shift patterns that necessarily brought new ways of working and relating to one another. Far from the depth of relationship Ellis and his team enjoyed, it is now most common for surgical teams to introduce themselves to one another just before an operation begins, literally shaking hands over their supine patient. Surgical teams simply no longer have the opportunity to operate together for long enough to learn one another’s working patterns and preferences. Thanks to the Working Time Directive, gone are some of the inhumane work conditions that dogged twentieth-century surgery, but gone also are such tight-knit clinical groups as Ellis’s.

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Amplify sensorial details

As Vivian Sobchack says ‘more than any other medium of human communication, the moving picture makes itself sensuously and sensibly manifest as the expression of experience by experience’ (Sobchack, 2004, p 80). Taylor, on a related point, refers to Hastrup’s observation that film offers ‘embodied “itineraries” through space, and tell perspectival stories, in a way that academic monographs rarely do’ (Taylor, 1996, p 77). And Kim Kullman suggests that videos and films ‘“amplify” rather than merely reproduce the sensuous and affective intensities that pulse through materials [that] can mobilise old and new audiences alike’ (Kullman, 2014, pp 95–120). 

In this attempt to ‘get beyond what people think’, as Sarah Pink and colleagues put it, anthropologists have produced highly developed approaches to creating video materials and performing fine-grained analysis of them (Pink, Sumartojo, Lipton and LaBond, 2017, p 374). Many of these scholars are attentive to the sensory qualities of practices which can be traced in film. 

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Presenting research in a way other than text

One reason many of us – including many of the scholars mentioned in the re-enactment literature – must write, of course, is that words like ‘and’, ‘but’ and ‘therefore’ connect ideas clearly and much more efficiently than alternatives. It is the reason this present article is written, not filmed. And the scholars mentioned above have all produced work in writing that simply could not be done in other media, so our suggestion that scholars explore other media is in no way a criticism of existing scholarship. On the contrary, we have taken inspiration from their work, though it also presents good reason for others to embrace media and modes beyond writing. We must also acknowledge other reasons that scholars produce texts – for example, the institutional and cultural pressure to produce peer-reviewed articles, and the perception that making films requires expensive equipment and training. Deploying non-written media in a scholarly context is not always fitting, but there are occasions when it is clearly appropriate. Historians have, we suggest, used this medium already as a research tool, but this engagement has been somewhat limited to date. Anthropologists and social semioticians have engaged for some time now in the possibilities of film and other media in research, and we might learn from this work. 

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Conclusion

Drawing confidence from colleagues in anthropology, especially those directly engaging with multimodality, we would like to offer resistance to history’s privileging of text as method and output, and argue for a more ‘filmic humanities’. While museums expand beyond text with audio and objects we suggest film can do more than illustrate, but also reveal more of the research process too. While there are many other fields where similar discussions are taking place (e.g. craft research, artistic research, visual sociology and media studies, to name a few), here we have pointed to the specific contributions and lineages of scholarship in anthropology and multimodality which we find as areas which have articulated clearly the role of film in interpreting embodied practices.  

In anthropology, there are now opportunities to submit and peer-review work in a variety of formats not only to account for knowledge manifested in non-written modes, but to also embrace new research methods that rely on a range of modes. American Anthropology’s ‘Visual Anthropology’ section first embraced image and has recently evolved to encompass other modes, changing its name in 2017 to ‘Multimodal Anthropologies’ to accommodate an ever-increasing number of media. In comparison, historians have very few opportunities to submit or review work done and presented in multiple modes. Historians, acknowledging that film can help accommodate the non-written, non-spoken contributions to historical accounts as it already commonly does for anthropological ones, may consider attending to such possibilities in scholarship. That is, historians – especially those working with medical and scientific practices – can learn from our colleagues in anthropology and take film (and other media) seriously for their potential as another part of a rigorous research method. 

If we attend to what the medium affords rather than what imported traditions from cinema dictate, we might expect viewers to pause and play, even to jump around a video timeline. Readers do not always read from beginning to end. They are no more imprisoned by a publisher’s layout than viewers are by a filmmaker’s temporal order. 

Making notes, transcribing oral histories, archiving texts are all word-based methods which help historians to gather evidence, order, present, interpret and make arguments. We have shown, in this article, that for some historians textual methods are not enough. Sometimes the object of enquiry is non-linguistic – the senses, embodied or tacit knowledge, past performances, marks left on materials or artefacts by actions performed long ago. Sometimes there is a dearth of written sources, or the written sources in question present inadequate information, like the notebooks studied by Sibum and Petersen. In some cases, historians have developed re-enactment methods, such as those described in this article, to investigate past actions, materials, processes, performances. We expand on this toolkit to look at film. 

To embrace video should be far easier in the 2020s than it was in the 1990s. It is simply no longer the case that a film viewer is necessarily, as Taylor put it, ‘imprisoned in the temporal order of the film’ (Taylor, 1996, p 72). There are many further possibilities – Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, 360-degree film, and so on – we feel could be explored with a humanities research agenda more open to film. 

We position ourselves as part of a growing trend in history which attempts to dissolve clear boundaries between tacit and formal knowledge. On the one hand, to re-enact, rework or recreate past practices and processes is to recognise aspects of history that cannot be examined through textual engagement alone. Scholars engaging in such work show how hands-on research methods are appropriate ways to address historical practices of making and performing. In this way, they consciously acknowledge and push against some of the limitations of the history of science’s literary tradition.  

While there are many issues to using film – not least the expense, complexity when compared to writing, and the technical skill required to operate cameras – it is a far more accessible medium now than it ever has been. Historians can quite easily adopt filmmaking practices, in fact. There is no need to produce the sumptuous visuals of a cinematic or documentary piece. It can even be done on a smartphone. The world has changed since Lucien Taylor called for his fellow anthropologists to look at film in a new light.