James Sibley Watson has many claims to fame. Born into wealth, he became a generous patron of the arts. In the 1920s he co-owned and co-edited one of the most important modernist literary magazines, “The Dial”. Having acquired a 35mm camera to shoot home movies, he soon made two seminal works of the so-called First American Film Avant-Garde, The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Lot in Sodom (1933), both co-directed with Melville Webber. In his spare time, he photographed and occasionally directed stunningly beautiful and critically acclaimed industrial films, such as The Eyes of Science (1930) and Highlights and Shadows (1938). Trained as a medical doctor, in the 1940s, he teamed up with radiologists from the University of Rochester and, for more than twenty years, worked on X-ray cinematography. Intended for research only, the films were at times charmingly eccentric. Watson’s “models” played musical instruments or even put on make-up impenetrable to X-rays, which turned a skeleton into a lovely woman. Every now and then, the avant-garde filmmaker took over the scientist.

Peter Bagrov