L'accéléré dans la théorie des années vingt : “Germination du blé... Cristallisation... Films documentaires et, surtout, films d’avant-garde”

The title of this article – a 1925 aphorism by Germaine Dulac – aims to show that personalities such as Jean Painlevé or Jan Cornelis Mol are just the result of an intimate and much older link between scientific cinematography and the avant-garde. Scientific film actually contributed to effectively building film theory in the 1920s: on one side it is systematically included in the screenings of film societies and ciné-clubs emerging in those years throughout Europe and, on the other side, it nourished the growing discourse on medium specificity due to the specific techniques it developed (slow motion and time-lapse, micro and radiocinematography). Throughout these pages we will deepen the contest of time-lapse to the theory of cinema of that time.