How to Capture a Sneeze...
Still from “Fred Ott’s Sneeze” (1894)
Thanks to the pandemic, picturing the sneeze has once again become a popular pursuit.
Some of the new images flying across the internet have been created by scientists to chart the effectiveness of masks or to document the force and power of this simple, involuntary expulsion of germs, mucus and the dreaded “droplets.” Some have been captured by enthusiasts, keen to repeat the “experiment” to see and personalise for themselves the satisfyingly disgusting spray of these droplets.
The Curious History of Filming the Sneeze, a new short film from the Healthy Scepticism project in collaboration with the Derek Jarman Lab for BBC Ideas, recombines these varied visual materials from different contexts to explore the unexpected trajectories of this image. Look for it also at the Healthy Scepticism Film Festival, 24-26 September!
It probably won’t come as a surprise that this collaboration between historians of science and filmmakers was conceived and produced as a “lockdown project”.
Our point of departure was the 1941 public health film “A-tish-oo” (which you can watch at the BFI or on the internet archive), which features (among other striking images) shots of Londoners sheltering from an air raid in the underground, all wearing face coverings. This film came to our attention at the same time as the wider conversation about masks in the COVID-19 pandemic was exploding around us: How useful are face masks? What materials and designs are most effective? Should they be compulsory? If so, where and when? In amongst this conversation, the image of a teenager from 1941 using more or less the exact same technology to protect against a flu infection, playing cards whilst sheltering from a much more present and visible threat, suggested an ignored historical depth to questions that felt new and unprecedented to us.
The leitmotiv of “A-tish-oo”, a propaganda film with the ultimate aim of reducing sickness absence on the home front, is the image of the sneeze. At one point we see a man sneezing in front of an elaborate camera setup; after showing a handful of sneezes in “real” time, we cut to a still image of the sneeze, frozen in time. This ordinary sneeze is revealed to be an explosion of droplets in all directions, completing the film’s metaphorical connection between these domestic explosions and the heavy artillery falling from the sky.
This image, captured using the pioneering techniques of Harold Edgerton’s stroboscopic photography, and put to use in a wartime propaganda film, provoked a series of questions about the proliferation of modern sneezing images that accompanied the news and discussion of the current pandemic.
In the course of our archival research into these images, we came to view modern sneezing images as a sort of “remake” of earlier attempts to capture the sneeze. From Edison’s recording of Fred Ott’s Sneeze, through to Harold Edgerton’s iconic stroboscopic images, each new image or clip of a sneezer frozen in time seems to owe a debt to those images before it, whilst gesturing towards the next iteration of images in higher resolution and finer granularity.
The challenge for us in bringing these materials together into a critical relationship with one another was the variety of the contexts for the production of these images. Many of these images are produced as the representation of experimental data, some are conceived of as tools for persuasion in public health campaigns, and others still are expressly produced as objects of fascination and entertainment.
The tensions between these various usages for similar images raises questions about the relationship between seeing and believing. As we explore these questions in the film, we consider the vital conversation that has historically taken place between science, technology and art, and the tense relationship between scientific data and public health action.
The team
Academic Consultants:
Caitjan Gainty is a historian of 20th century health and healthcare at King’s College, London and the PI of the Wellcome-funded Healthy Scepticism project, Caitjan works on topics ranging from health inequality and the history of pandemic to vaccine scepticism.
Jesse Olszynko-Gryn is a historian of science, technology and medicine at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. His first book, A Woman’s Right to Know: Pregnancy Testing in Twentieth-Century Britain, is under contract with MIT Press.
Producer:
Eddie Bolger is a producer at the Derek Jarman Lab. His documentary work to date includes various films in collaboration with academics on medical humanities topics.
Sources
The Curious History of Filming the Sneeze is a collage film, made almost entirely of archival footage of sneezes. Below is a list of the film sources used in the film in order of first appearance:
Video figure – Reproduced from: Giacomo Busco, Se Ro Yang, Joseph Seo, and Yassin A. Hassan, "Sneezing and asymptomatic virus transmission", Physics of Fluids 32, 073309 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0019090 with the permission of AIP Publishing.
Video figure – Reproduced with permission from Bourouiba L. “Turbulent Gas Clouds and Respiratory Pathogen Emissions: Potential Implications for Reducing Transmission of COVID-19”, JAMA. 2020;323(18):1837–1838. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.4756 © (2020) American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
Video figure – Reproduced from: Alexandre Fabregat, Ferran Gisbert, Anton Vernet, Som Dutta, Ketan Mittal, and Jordi Pallarès , "Direct numerical simulation of the turbulent flow generated during a violent expiratory event", Physics of Fluids 33, 035122 (2021) https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0042086 with the permission of AIP Publishing.
Archive footage – “Edison kinetoscopic record of a sneeze”, prod. Dickson, W. , Edison Manufacturing Co, USA, 1894.
Archive footage – “Dr. Wise on Influenza”, prod. Joseph Best, Local Government Board, UK, 1919. BFI National Archive.
Archive still – “Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases”, US Public Health Service, 1918.
Archive footage – “A-tish-oo”, dir. Max Munden, prod. Jay Lewis, Ministry of Information, UK, 1941. BFI National Archive.
Archive still – “Fred Barstow Sneezes”, Harold Edgerton/ MIT. Image courtesy of Palm Press Inc.
Archive still – “The Sneeze”, Harold Edgerton/ MIT, 1949. Image courtesy of Palm Press Inc.
Archive still – “Sneeze, ca 1940”, Harold Edgerton/ MIT. Image courtesy of Palm Press Inc.
Archive still – “The British public is not to be sneezed at”, Ministry of Health, © Imperial War Museum
Video figure – Reproduced from: Fujio Akagi, Isao Haraga, Shin-ichi Inage, and Kozaburo Akiyoshi, "Effect of sneezing on the flow around a face shield", Physics of Fluids 32, 127105 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0031150 with the permission of AIP Publishing.
Reproduced from: Matthew Staymates , "Flow visualization of an N95 respirator with and without an exhalation valve using schlieren imaging and light scattering", Physics of Fluids 32, 111703 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0031996 with the permission of AIP Publishing.
Archive footage – “Inside the Human Body: Hostile World”, prod. & dir. Rob Liddell, BBC, 2011.