'Joyous Confusion': The Avant-Garde Painlevé

Painlevé Oursins 1954

The following text introduces my two-evening program Surreal Science:  The 'Popular' Documentaries of Jean Painlevé and appears in the 2012 Images and Views of Alternative Cinema festival program book.

‘Joyous Confusion’

The Avant-Garde Painlevé

Christopher Zimmerman

There is an infinite field of magnificent and continual joys that prevent us from completely elucidating the mystery or the miracle.

Jean Painlevé

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Theodor W. Adorno

Accidental Beauty

André Bazin, in his essay ‘Science Film: Accidental Beauty,’ expounds:  ‘for this is the miracle of the science film, its inexhaustible paradox.  At the far extreme of inquisitive, utilitarian research, in the most absolute proscription of aesthetic intentions, cinematic beauty develops as an additional, supernatural gift.’  Bazin had just experienced Jean Painlevé’s films screened at the Musée de l’homme as part of the International Association of Science Films conference.  On the surface, Bazin was calling attention to the neglected genre of the ‘science film’ in this 1947 article, but this ‘miracle,’ ‘inexhaustible paradox,’ and ‘supernatural gift’ of which he writes are really veiled reflections of Jean Painlevé’s works and life. 

French filmmaker-biologist-educator-inventor-surrealist Jean Painlevé forged a pioneering body of work of over two hundred films that simply elude classification—‘hybrids’ that are at once serious scientific investigations with pedagogical purpose and, at the same time, visually stunning avant-garde treasures.  ‘Surreal Science’ presents a selection of Painlevé’s science documentaries popularized for non-specialist audiences.  With these surrealist dreamscapes, Painlevé achieved the coveted avant-garde grail of blurring the boundaries between the fantastic and the real, between poetry and science, and between art and everyday life.

Submerged in Different Waters

Jean Painlevé avec caméra Debrie, Saint Raphaël, vers 1935

© les documents cinématographiques

To a significant extent, Jean Painlevé’s life (1902-1989) shadows the history of cinema in the 20^th century.  Son of mathematician and twice Prime Minister of France Paul Painlevé, he exhibited, from boyhood, the rebellious independence and conviction that would allow him to forge his unique, genre-defying body of work.  Following his father’s academic path, Painlevé graduated from the Sorbonne in 1924 with a degree in physics, chemistry, and biology and became one of the youngest researches ever to deliver a paper to the Académie des sciences.  However, sensing that his career path was already well marked in front of him, especially with such an influential and prominent father, Jean Painlevé gave up formal academic research and turned to film, racecar driving, and Surrealism.

To escape the conservative claustrophobia of university life, Painlevé would attend the ciné-clubs and avant-garde film screenings on the Parisian Left Bank.  Film was in fashion at the time, and Painlevé secured a minor role in The Unknown Woman of the Six-Day Race.  What interested Painlevé was not the film however, which was never finished, but the camera that was built by André Raymond.  By disengaging the camera’s crank, Raymond could achieve a time-lapse effect produced by one frame per crank turn (as opposed to the standard sixteen frames per second).  Raymond’s camera technique gave Painlevé the idea for his first film The Stickleback’s Egg: From Fertilization to Hatching.  A purely research film, The Stickleback’s Egg was screened in 1925 at the Académie des sciences and was met with skepticism, verging on hostility, from scientists who denied that cinema could be employed for serious scientific research.  This experience solidified Painlevé’s determination to press on and his conviction that film has enormous potential in aiding the advancement of scientific research and the dissemination of knowledge.  It was at this point that Painlevé decided to shift his focus towards making rigorous scientific exploration accessible to general audiences by ‘popularizing’ the science documentary.

In the 1920s, Jean Painlevé also found himself involved in artistic circles.  He would often play piano at the club Le jockey, frequented by artistic luminaries such as Man Ray, Alexander Calder, and Yvan Goll, and he quickly became a fellow traveler of the artistic avant-gardes in Paris—the Dadaists and Surrealists.  In 1924, he collaborated with Guillaume Apollinaire and Yvan Goll on the only issue of Surréalisme.  He provided footage of a starfish for Man Ray’s 1928 film L’étoile de mer and was the chief ‘ant-handler’ in Bunuel’s and Dali’s Un chien andalou.  Georges Bataille published Painlevé’s stills of crustaceans in his review Documents.  The surrealist movement was polarized, and Painlevé was ostracized from the André Breton camp because he provided five film sequences (Methusalem of 1927 featuring Antonin Artaud) to be projected on the background of a play by Yvan Goll (Breton’s rival) at the Michel Theater.  Painlevé also championed the work of other filmmakers, and he became close friends with Sergei Eisenstein and particularly with Jean Vigo.

Jean Painlevé lors du tournage de L’hippocampe, vers 1931

© les documents cinématographiques

Swimming in these very different waters of scientific research and the artistic avant-garde, Painlevé’s experiences allowed him to navigate a path devoted to serious rational inquiry as well as to the creative expression of ideas.  With an interest in the aesthetic aggressiveness of the avant-garde and particularly in the Surrealists’ shock tactics, the liberties taken in his films completely revolutionized the genre of the science film and expanded the possibilities of what the documentary could be.  This is the ‘supernatural gift’, of which Bazin writes, that Painlevé offers to the history of cinema.

The Documentary and the Science Film

Jean Painlevé maintained that ‘the documentary is cinema at its purest.’  With the exception of a few films scattered throughout his body of over two hundred works—most notably, his 1938 animated short Blue Beard based on an opéra-bouffe by Maurice Jaubert—he exclusively made short documentaries.  Painlevé promulgated the definition formulated in 1947 by the World Union of Documentary Filmmakers that states that the documentary is:

any film that documents real phenomena or their honest and justified reconstruction in order to consciously increase human knowledge through rational or emotional means and to expose problems and offer solutions from an economic, social, or cultural point of view.’ 

What stands out here is that the documentary serves the broader, humanistic purpose of increasing human knowledge, and it takes on a certain ‘activism’ in attempting to improve the human condition—an aspect of the documentary that engaged Painlevé’s anarchist tendencies and fueled his political commitments.  For Painlevé, this definition of the documentary was to serve as something of a normative and guiding principle in his work and writings. 

Painlevé's Oursins--1954

If science films are considered at all when thinking about the history of cinema, they are typically relegated to a remote, specialized domain of the documentary film.  In his essay ‘Scientific Film’, Painlevé explains that ‘the term science film refers to two different branches of cinema, each with its own mode of production and distribution:  the popular film and the research film.’  Research films are typically highly technical affairs made for a small group of specialists.  The popular science film, on the other hand, tends to oversimplify the processes and behavior of its subjects in an attempt to appeal to a general audience.  Painlevé made both research films for scientific specialists as well as popular science films, which, resisting such facile oversimplification, draw attention to unusual and often overlooked creatures and phenomena found in the natural world.

For Painlevé, film is a powerful educational tool.  Yet, just as film can draw attention and interest to a particular subject matter, ‘it can gloss over details and suppress curiosity by fostering the dangerous illusion that one has understood, when in fact, one has not.’ (‘Scientific Film’, 1947).  The task that Painlevé set himself was how to present serious scientific investigation and an educational experience, while, at the same time, appealing to an audience of laymen.   In an interview that appeared in Libération in 1986, Painlevé explains:

Because audiences are different.  This raises the issue of “vulgarization,” or, to use the English word, which I prefer, “popularization.”  A film dealing with scientific subjects always risks being too sophisticated for one audience and too superficial for another.  The scientist knows his subject matter and is protective of it.  But an ordinary moviegoer can’t always rise to that level, which is perfectly understandable.  So with my films, I made one version for scientists, a second for universities, and a third, which was shorter and set to music, for general audiences.  You must sort out your audiences.  But the real question is:  is it your right to do this or is it your obligation?’

The eleven films presented in the two programs of ‘Surreal Science’—‘Revealing the Invisible’ and ‘Querying the Conventional’—are remarkable examples of the ‘third version’, i.e. science documentaries popularized for general audiences. 

Indeed, these films are shorter in duration, but Painlevé utilizes an entire ‘toolbox’ of strategies to facilitate accessibility of otherwise rather dry and specialized information.  Such strategies include:  the innovative use of music (from the experimental music of Pierre Henry to the more mainstream music of Bizet, Chopin, and Darius Milhaud to the American Big Band jazz of Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, and Jimmy Lunceford), seemingly choreographed movement and dance, constructed dramatic sequences, humor, and inter-titles and spoken narration.  Yet, these strategies are not gimmicks.  Painlevé’s genius is found in the fact that his ‘popular’ films are integrated works that open the world of science to us.  Nothing is ‘watered down’ (no pun intended).   This is to say that these films, in highly nuanced ways, are more than merely accessible science documentaries; science is infused with the poetic thus creating a unique ‘hybrid’ film form—an unsettling alchemy of serious science, the macabre, whimsy, the uncanny, perversion, humor, and otherness. 

Jean Painlevé, Les amours de la pieuvre, photogramme, 1967

© les documents cinématographiques

It is around and through the concept of anthropomorphism that Painlevé develops this unsettling alchemy.  On the one hand, extreme anthropomorphism elevates the human to the center of the universe, giving us a naïve sense of mastery over everything.  On the other hand, a more tempered tendency to attribute human qualities, characteristics, and intentions to the animal kingdom and the natural world allows us to gain understanding of how we fit into the larger tapestry of life; it allows us to reach a position of empathy, if not sympathy, in relation to other species.   In his essay ‘Fluid Mechanics’, Ralph Rugoff explains that:

Painlevé’s films often proceed according to an alternating rhythm of seduction and repulsion as we are invited to identify with a particular aspect of a given creature, only to have it revealed a moment later just how monstrously different this other life form actually is.

Painlevé presents the behavior of animals in such a way that our concept of ‘what it is to be human’ is called into question.  Not only are these strange creatures very much like us, but reflecting upon their habits gives us a haunting sense of our own bizarre otherness.  The strange is rendered familiar, and the familiar is rendered strange.

A committed documentarian with a clear pedagogical vision, Painlevé focused on the natural world in order to increase human knowledge, but not simply human knowledge of the natural world.  One of Painlevé’s great contributions to the documentary was the expansion of what the science film could be.   We not only learn about unusual underwater creatures, for example, we also learn about ourselves and question what it is to be human.  Painlevé challenges our aesthetic and ethical assumptions; his work prompts us to reconsider how we relate to the world.  There is a subterranean philosophical trajectory in the experience of these films, in that, as we begin to reflect on the bizarre and beautiful natural world, we begin to question our own humanness, and in turn to question why we cling to the conventions, categories, and preconceptions that we do.  Above all, Painlevé’s ‘popular’ films expand the possibilities of the documentary by insisting on the necessary role of the imagination in the science film.

The Avant-Garde Painlevé

Not only was Painlevé marked aesthetically by his collaborations with the Surrealists, but his fierce determination to create these unique films outside of the mainstream film industry and studio system further aligned him politically with the avant-garde.  The very activity of making films for reasons other than profit and image is subversive and can be construed as a critique of the dominant apparatus of cinema, which is precisely a central thrust of avant-garde artistic theory and practice.  In addition, Painlevé’s extraordinary cinematography and strikingly beautiful images and their composition cultivate a certain aesthetic reflexivity or heightened artistic attunement.  His images from the natural world often approach stunning abstraction reminiscent of non-representational films found throughout the history of experimental cinema.   That being said, I would like to suggest that Painlevé’s ‘popular’ films go even a step further and are ‘avant-garde’ in the fullest sense.

Painlevé's Acera ou le bal des sorcières--1972

What is remarkable about Painlevé’s ‘popular’ films is that it is precisely the movement towards popularization that makes them truly avant-garde, which completely flies in the face of our notion of difficult avant-garde art.  Consumers of mainstream culture, when faced with an experience of an avant-garde work, often feel assaulted by or alienated or distanced from the aesthetic experience.  Nevertheless, avant-garde movements sought to dissolve the barrier separating art from everyday life.  Through a critique of the institution of art and its autonomous status, the artistic avant-garde attempted to shed the idea that art is an object independent of its social, political, and economic contexts in order to create situations in which artistic practice is woven into the fabric of life.

For the German literary theorist Peter Bürger, Dada and Surrealism were the quintessential avant-garde movements, in that they sought to reintegrate art into life, into everyday practice.  In his Theory of the Avant-Garde, Bürger writes that, ‘The avant-gardiste protest, whose aim it is to reintegrate art into the praxis of life, reveals the nexus between autonomy and the absence of any consequences.’  Built into this avant-gardiste protest is a critique of the status of art in bourgeois society.  Bürger traces the idea of art’s autonomy to 19^th-century European bourgeois culture.  He argues that there was a turn towards ‘Aestheticism’, through which art was extracted from the messiness of everyday life, of history, of barbarism and placed upon a pedestal of purity and universality, from which it could be admired by a class of elites seeking to justify its own power status through its admiration of the canonical works of solitary geniuses.  Bürger explains that:

The European avant-garde movements can be defined as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society.  What is negated is not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men.  When the avant-gardistes demand that art become practical once again, they do not mean that the contents of works of art should be socially significant.  The demand is not raised at the level of the contents of individual works.  Rather, it directs itself to the way art functions in society, a process that does as much to determine the effect that works have as does the particular content. (Theory of the Avant-Garde p. 49). 

So, for the avant-garde movements—particularly Dada and Surrealism—art is not a question of individual works sealed away in museums, rather what is significant is how art functions within society.  And for these reasons, art must be reintegrated into everyday life; it must become a matter of everyday practice—not something people admire, rather an activity that they do.

Painlevé's Cristaux Liquides--1978

The educational purpose of Painlevé’s ‘popular’ science films pierces the membrane that seals off art in its bourgeois sphere thus allowing aesthetic experience to flow into everyday life.  These films are just as easily at home being screened at an experimental festival like this one as they are in a classroom in which young students are learning about the natural sciences.  Science and art are not specialized disciplines; rather, they are tools for human inquiry.  There are a multitude of entry points into these films, and they respond to the avant-garde demand of reintegrating art into life praxis by creating the possibility of drastically different audiences having experiences at once educational, aesthetic, philosophical, and entertaining.  Not only do these films make science and scientific rationality accessible to general audiences, but they also expose audiences to creative expression and aesthetic experience and invite one’s imagination to enter a state of ‘free play’.  With great potential for social impact, his films move beyond ‘art for art’s sake’ in their educational function within society and culture and in their poetic elevation of the means of increasing human knowledge, exposing problems, and suggesting solutions—precisely what is at the heart of documentary filmmaking.

Revealing the Invisible    

Contrary to the vociferous scientists who protested his first film in 1925, Painlevé proved repeatedly that cinema can be a useful tool in serious scientific inquiry.  In fact, he spent so much time observing and filming the subjects of his documentaries—with tools that expanded human vision—that he made significant scientific discoveries that falsified previous research.  In addition to these discoveries made at the level of research, Painlevé and his collaborators (most notably Geneviève Hamon, the love of his life with whom he made all of his films) made significant contributions to the technical and technological aspects of filmmaking by developing equipment and techniques for filming underwater and microscopic life.

Painlevé's Acera ou le bal des sorcières--1972

From his underwater adventures to his use of microscopy and of time-lapse photography to the selection of unusual and overlooked creatures, Painlevé used film to reveal the invisible, to allow us to see that which we cannot, under normal circumstances, see.  In his essay ‘Scientific Film’, Painlevé explains that the most important facet of what film offers to the scientist is ‘the ability to view repeatedly the same phenomenon captured permanently, an enormous advantage, especially when the phenomenon is rare and therefore difficult or expensive to reproduce,’ and adds: ‘and recording the same phenomenon at different speeds sometimes prompts additional discoveries.’  To borrow a concept from Marshall McLuhan, cinema, in Painlevé’s hands, becomes an ‘extension’ of vision, an extension of the human perceptual system, an extension of human knowledge and the very capacity to relate to the world.

The six films in ‘Revealing the Invisible’ use specific, filmic methods to allow us to see what we normally cannot.  On a philosophical level, this expansion of vision can be seen as extending to the understanding and the imagination, to the process of expanding human knowledge—vision as insight.  Bookending this program are sets of two films—the first in each set being one of Painlevé’s first ‘popular’ films from 1927-1928 followed by the film he made decades later on the same subject—remakes if you will.  By viewing these early experiments in  ‘popularization’ juxtaposed with films taking up the same subjects and themes much later, we are afforded insight into the development of Painlevé’s filmic vision over his career. 

We begin with Les oursins (Sea Urchins) from 1928, in which Painlevé transformed microscopy from a solitary activity into an experience that can be shared, followed by his Oursins (Sea Urchins) from 1954—a return to the biology and behavior of the sea urchin—but this time in color.  Masterfully utilizing magnification, time-lapse, and close-up techniques, Sea Urchins explores anatomical details that evoke classical architecture and a veritable city-scape teeming at the creature’s surface. 

‘Revealing the Invisible’ concludes with Painlevé’s first film tribute to the ‘horrifying cephalopod’, La pieuvre (The Octopus) of 1927, followed by his Les amours de la pieuvre [The Love Life of the Octopus] of 1967 made four decades later.  Often drawn to organisms that humans typically find revolting, the octopus fascinated Painlevé ever since childhood.  In these two films, Painlevé uses microscopy to reveal how the octopus changes its skin color in different emotional states and takes advantage of film’s ability to condense duration and accelerates ‘motion’ by fourteen hundred times to reveal the strange phases of torsion, rotation, and embryonic formation in the development of the octopus egg.  An evocative narration coupled with Pierre Henry’s electronic score contribute to making The Love Life of the Octopus—a project that took Painlevé ten years to complete—a veritable masterpiece.

Painlevé's Diatomées--1968

The two films presented at the center of this program—Diatomées [Diatoms] from 1968 and Cristaux liquides [Liquid Crystals] from 1978—demonstrate the power of cinema in revealing the beauty and mystery of the microscopic world.  It is as if Painlevé is using microscopy to paint abstract filmic canvases.   Diatoms are single-cell organisms, the remains of which are vital to the creation of the earth’s crust and important in the formation of petroleum.  When magnified 10,000 times, these cells create a mysterious sculptural landscape of their own.  Liquid Crystals represents Painlevé’s most abstract film whose stunning visual mystery is heightened by François de Roubaix’s haunting final experimental score.  Using a polarizing microscope, Painlevé paints an Abstract Expressionist canvas from the multicolored molecular effects of temperature and pressure modifications on liquids that obey principles of crystallization. 

Querying the Conventional

The first two of Jean Painlevé’s ‘Ten Commandments’ state:  ‘You will not make documentaries if you do not feel the subject,’ and ‘You will refuse to direct a film if your convictions are not expressed.’  Concerned with objectivity and scientific truth, science films are not typically regarded as vehicles for the expression of personal opinion and beliefs.  Nevertheless, Painlevé’s ‘popular’ films further problematize the expectations of the science documentary in that he is able to express, in quite subtle and nuanced ways, his subjective political, social, and ethical convictions. The subjects that he selects are often overlooked species whose behavior (at least anthropomorphically) challenges conventional societal norms, assumptions, and values.

Jean Painlevé, L’hippocampe, photographie, 1933

© les documents cinématographiques

‘Querying the Conventional’ chronologically presents five important films that demonstrate how Painlevé manages to question our inherited paths of thought and to open space in which to query our preconceptions and thus to reflect on what we value and why.  The program opens with Painlevé’s most famous film L’hippocampe [The Sea Horse], made in 1933 and one of the first films to be shot underwater.  With this cinematic investigation of sea horses, Painlevé questions conventional middle-class assumptions of the family and intimates a progressive gender politics—for it is the male who nourishes fertilized eggs deposited by the female in the pouch on his abdomen and who eventually gives birth to the babies.   Le vampire [The Vampire], made in 1945 just after WWII, profiles the Brazilian vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus).  His most overtly political film, Painlevé’s portrayal of this blood-sucking ‘brown pest’ that transmits disease alludes to Nazism, complete with the creature’s ‘Heil Hitler’ salute.

Les assassins d’eau douce [Freshwater Assassins] from 1947 investigates a cutthroat society below the surface of a seemingly calm pond in which dragonfly larvae, water beetles, water scorpions and the like live by the dictum:  ‘eat or be eaten’.  Painlevé brilliantly uses American big band jazz in counterpoint to the violently carnivorous images lending this film a macabre ambience and suggesting a critique of post-World War II European culture. 

Exploiting color film brilliantly, the 1956 Les danseuses de la mer [Sea Ballerinas] compares the locomotion and reproduction of two kinds of starfish:  brittle stars and feather stars.  Pierre Conté’s shimmering score complements the unexpected beauty of Painlevé’s sequence of the backs of brittle star crowns and the elegant and dance-like movements of the feather stars.  Playing with convention, the film closes with a jocular and whimsical performance of ‘The Dance of the Feather Star’ directed by the ‘famous conductor Galathea’.

‘Queryting the Conventional’ concludes with one of Painlevé’s most remarkable films, Acera, or the Witches’ Dance.  The 1972 Acera presents a balletic choreography of the Acera’s mating dance (with inserted images of dancer Michèle Nadal imitating the famous French dancer Loie Fuller).   Subtly questioning gender assumptions, Painlevé demonstrates that these hermaphroditic mollusks reproduce in chains in which the middle partners function as both male and female.

Closing the circle, it seems fitting for Jean Painlevé to have the last word.  In his 1931 essay ‘Mysteries and Miracles of Nature’, he writes:

Does the complete understanding of a natural phenomenon strip away its miraculous qualities?  It is certainly a risk.  But it should at least maintain all of its poetry, for poetry subverts reason and is never dulled by repetition.  Besides, a few gaps in our knowledge will always allow for a joyous confusion of the mysterious, the unknown, and the miraculous.’

Christopher Zimmerman © 2012

Jean Painlevé photographié par Geneviève Hamon, Port Blanc, vers 1925

© les documents cinématographiques