“Deficit model” designates an outlook on the public understanding and communication of science that emphasizes scientific illiteracy and the need to educate the public. Though criticized, it is still widespread, especially among scientists. Its persistence is due not only to factors ranging from scientists’ training to policy design, but also to the continuance of realism as an aesthetic criterion. This article examines the link between realism and the deficit model through discussions of neurology and psychiatry in fiction film, as well as through debates about historical movies and the cinematic adaptation of literature. It shows that different values and criteria tend to dominate the realist stance in different domains: accuracy for movies concerning neurology and psychiatry, authenticity for the historical film, and fidelity for adaptations of literature. Finally, contrary to the deficit model, it argues that the cinema is better characterized by a surplus of meaning than by informational shortcomings.

Science in film, and usual equivalents such as science on film or science on screen, refer to the cinematographic representation, staging, and enactment of actors, information, and processes involved in any aspect or dimension of science and its history. Of course, boundaries are blurry, and films shot as research tools or documentation also display science on screen. Nonetheless, they generally count as scientific film, and science in and on film or screen tend to designate productions whose purpose is entertainment and education. Moreover, these two purposes are often combined, and inherently concern empirical, methodological, and conceptual challenges associated with popularization, science communication, and the public understanding of science. It is in these areas that the notion of the deficit model emerged to designate a point of view and a mode of understanding, as well as a set of practical and theoretical problems about the relationship between science and the public.

In Vienna, the close of the First World War and the period of the peace negotiations in Paris saw an enormous boom of ethnic-geographic research approaches and ethnic map-making. This process continued with the appointment of the Viennese geographer Hugo Hassinger (1877–1952) to the chair of human geography at the University of Vienna in 1931 and intensified with the establishment of the South East German Research Association and the National Socialist takeover in March 1938. But did the initiatives to create ethnic maps originate with politicians and authorities, or did they come from the scientists themselves? This article argues that scientists embarked upon ethnic geographies on their own initiative. Although political institutions used scientists and their resources for their own, political ends (ethnographic maps served as an important source for the National Socialists in their operations for ethnic consolidation), scientists also mobilized resources from the political sphere for career and disciplinary purposes.

A recently blossoming historiographical literature recognizes that physical anthropologists allied with scholars of diverse aspects of society and history to racially classify European peoples over a period of about a hundred years. They created three successive race classification coalitions – ethnology, from around 1840; anthropology, from the 1850s; and interwar raciology – each of which successively disintegrated. The present genealogical study argues that representing these coalitions as ‘transdisciplinary’ can enrich our understanding of challenges to disciplinary specialization. This is especially the case for the less well-studied nineteenth century, when disciplines and challenges to disciplinary specialization were both gradually emerging. Like Marxism or structuralism, race classification was a holistic interpretive framework, which, at its most ambitious, aimed to structure the human sciences as a whole. It resisted the organization of academia and knowledge into disciplines with separate organizational institutions and research practices. However, the ‘transdisciplinarity’ of this nationalistic project also bridged emerging borderlines between science and politics. I ascribe race classification's simultaneous longevity and instability to its complex and intricately entwined processes of political and interdisciplinary coalition building. Race classification's politically useful conclusions helped secure public support for institutionalizing the coalition's component disciplines. Institutionalization in turn stimulated disciplines to professionalize. They emphasized disciplinary boundaries and insisted on apolitical science, thus ultimately undermining the ‘transdisciplinary’ project.