Film as Experiment in Animation: Are Films Experiments on Human Beings?

The article discusses the notion of “experiment” and relates it—via Immanuel Kant's concept of liveliness, which is a central topos of aesthetic experience—to “animation” in film, insofar as both refer to “life sciences.” Drawing on the example of Sergei Eisenstein's poetics of “plasmaticness” in his book on Disney, the article analyzes the transfer of a metaphor from life sciences to an aesthetic of cinema based on animation.