Although they operate on different scales and pursue different ambitions, both cinema and science attempt to construct meaning from a given reality – no matter whether that reality is fictional or not. Science itself, even in its most factual approach, cannot escape the expansive possibilities that fiction offers; its arguments, speculations, and hypotheses spring from the solid ground of axioms. When films take scientific research as their subject, they allow us, through close observation and immersion, to explore how its methods unfold – as can be seen in films like The Brain, Wider Than the Sky or Apple Cider Vinegar.
While these films are rooted in documentary form, often mirroring – whether consciously or unconsciously – the very approaches and sensibilities they seek to observe, cinema can also push beyond the ostensibly objective façade of science. Exemplified by works such as Chronovisor (the film, recently discovered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, triggered this thematic thread), Invention, and Stereo, this style of filmmaking demonstrates how science itself can be prone to fabulation, betraying its own certainties in order to reach a deeper truth, to venture further into discovery, and, in doing so, rewrite its own story.
Filmexplorer’s Science: Factual & Fictional selection brings together two approaches that treat science as a cinematic object, highlighting both their resonances and their points of divergence through narration, enunciation, and style.
