This presentation looks at a mid-century animated depictions of deep time - such as the formation of oil deposits - to explore animation’s ability to compose multiple rates of change within the same frame and to juxtapose different orders of time. If, as Heather Davis argues, plastic embodies polytemporality as matter, animation performs it as duration, making it a privileged representational form for discussions of deep time and the Anthropocene.

Scott Curtis studies the history of film, especially early and silent-era cinema. He is particularly interested in how experts in science, medicine, and education use motion picture technology as a research tool or teaching aid. His book on this topic, The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany (Columbia University Press, 2015), explores the collision between expert vision and moving images in science, medicine, education, and aesthetics. He has published extensively on the use of motion pictures in a variety of scientific fields, such as biology, physics, psychology, and medicine. He has also written on more traditional topics in film history, especially animation and early cinema. He has held posts as the medical photographer for Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene, Oregon; the research archivist for the Special Collections Department of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library; and a lecturer for the Cinema and Media Studies Division of the University of Southern California. He is also the founder of Block Cinema, former co-chair of Chicago Film Seminar, former President of Domitor, the international society for the study of early cinema, and former Director of the Communication Program at Northwestern University’s campus in Doha, Qatar.