Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) is universally acknowledged as the first person describing protozoa and bacteria using his self made microscopes. His seventeenth-century observations and depictions of ‘little animalcules’ were food for imagination in later centuries, in particular from the late nineteenth century. Those swarming bacteria, fiddling around under the microscope – we have all seen those images somewhere on a screen at some moment. In my article I show how the image of Leeuwenhoek as the father of bacteriology was cultivated through a particular medium: that of film.

During my curatorial work at Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, where we display some of Leeuwenhoek’s original self made microscopes, I stumbled upon the film ‘Antony van Leeuwenhoek’ from 1924. What was the interest of director Cornelis Mol in reconstructing Leeuwenhoek’s discoveries on screen? And how did this film influence the way people remember Van Leeuwenhoek? It was fascinating to see how director Mol had tried to re-visualize what Leeuwenhoek would have seen at the time by using Leeuwenhoek’s original seventeenth century lenses in some scenes. As my article discusses, I demonstrate how the production and experience of the film mirrored the seventeenth-century process of experimentation, playing with optics, and visualizing an entirely new and unknown world. Unlike other biographical science films of the 1920s, the film Antony van Leeuwenhoek featured abstract depictions of time and movement that allowed the audience to connect the history of science with microcinematography, contributing to the memory of Van Leeuwenhoek’s work as the origins of bacteriology in the process.

This year, the meaning of this 1924 film gains a new dimension. In 2023 the Dutch commemorate and celebrate the work of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek with workshops in schools, tours, exhibitions (Unimaginable), and academic symposia (Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and his impact on the history of microscopy). And even more timely, the historical research project Visualising the Unknown investigates the visual representation of the micro-world in the seventeenth century by reconstructing Leeuwenhoek’s observations using modern state of the art microcinematography by microphotographer Wim van Egmond. Again, just like the history I tell in my article, new moving images will influence the historical framing of science. Film forms a powerful lens on the past, but it is worthwhile to also take the lens itself seriously.

Image caption: Still Volvox from ‘Antony van Leeuwenhoek’ (1924). Collection Eye Filmmuseum.

Van Leeuwenhoek – the film: remaking memory in Dutch science cinema 1925–c.1960