Cinematic Meteorology: Aesthetics and Epistemology of Weather Images
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Film Studies
First Advisor
Gerow, Aaron
Abstract
Weather and cinema have an ontological affinity. As an animated display of light and kinetic energy, weather is moving image at its purest. Characterized by unstable movement and protean appearance, weather phenomena evince a perceptual excessiveness that challenges both observation and visualization. Considering this problematic visuality of weather, I propose that scientific visualization of the atmosphere is a complex act of creation, which constitutes a product of aesthetics as much as that of epistemology. Identifying meteorological image-making as knowledge production, my research shows that to visualize invisible phenomena is not to record, but to forge. In other words, the scientific role of cinema is inseparable from its propensity for manipulation and its capacity to configure and form. Cinematic Meteorology: Aesthetics and Epistemology of Weather Images offers both a history of meteorological cinema and a theorization of meteorology as cinematic. I argue that scientific understanding of the atmosphere is cinematically constructed. This construction accentuates weather’s concurrent importance as a metaphor and testing ground for cinematic possibilities. Drawing on media archaeology and visual analysis, I trace an alternative genealogy of cinema that interconnects the animation of weather maps, stereoscopic cloud films, microscopic time-lapse of snow crystals, and the computer animation of climate models. Although excellent work has been done on scientific films, existing scholarship is often restricted to the purview of western scientists’ contributions and is concentrated on the use of cinema in medicine and biology—studies of tangible and living bodies. Challenging the tradition of privileging the body in film studies, I foreground an environmental perspective on the medium. Within a comparative framework, my archive-based case studies examine Japanese meteorologists Abe Masanao and Nakaya Ukichirō, Japanese-American meteorologists Tetsuya “Ted” Fujita and Akira Kasahara as well as their American colleagues’ engagement with cinema to open up a new subfield within Environmental Humanities that has vast research potential pertinent to climate change. My project destabilizes the divide between the science and the art of meteorological inquiry. While it is common to attribute the current climate crisis to a crisis of imagination due to the proliferation of abstract scientific data and facts, my research proves that at different historical moments meteorologists already approached the atmosphere as an aesthetic issue of distributing sensible forms and paid great attention to the affect of these forms. Delving into the artistic labor of meteorological image production, my project provides a way to analyze the alternative images that permeate everyday life (such as ubiquitous satellite visuals and time-lapse) in order to rethink climate change as an aesthetic problem that has profound socio-political consequences. While an aesthetic history of meteorological films remains a lacuna to be filled, film theory is full of meteorological motifs. André Bazin, Jean Epstein, and Gilles Deleuze, for instance, conceptualize the ontology and stylistics of film through an array of weather tropes. Parsing scientific writings on the medium and treating them as on par with film theory proper, this dialogue between science and art illuminates a meteorological thinking underpinning film theory while expanding the boundary of theory. By giving form to the unique meteorological approach to cinema, the age-old question of “what cinema is” can be posed anew. Each of my chapters centers on the aesthetic and epistemological questions raised by a type of meteorological image. Chapter 1 analyzes Abe Masanao’s stereoscopic cloud films alongside his discussion of tricks and magic to posit meteorological visualization as an art of forgery. Chapter 2 maps the lineage of mimetic experiments, from C.T.R. Wilson’s cloud chamber to Nakaya Ukichirō’s cinematically rendered artificial snow, in order to clarify the constant dialectic between nature and artifice in lab-produced atmospheric forms. Chapter 3 outlines tornado expert Ted Fujita’s research on severe storms, tracing the roots of meteorological cartography to the concept and praxis of animation and its implied animism. Unpacking Fujita’s distrust of the computer and preference for hand-drawn methods, I underscore embodiment in his animated meteorological practice. In the epilogue, I turn to the transnational history of US-Japan collaboration on numerical weather predication and coproduction of CGI renderings of climatic patterns to explore the central themes of my project—fabrication, fantasy, and animation—in relation to digital imaging. In this typology of weather images, I draw out the epistemological significance of investigating the artistry, artifice, and artefact involved in the distinct mode of meteorological filmmaking. In this way, my project connects the marginalized scientific film studies to the broader discourse on the relationship between media and the environment in the Anthropocene.
Recommended Citation
Peng, Hsin-Yuan, "Cinematic Meteorology: Aesthetics and Epistemology of Weather Images" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 974.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/974
