Surreal Science: The ‘Popular’ Documentaries of Jean Painlevé

For the last two nights, audiences at Theatro Ena in Nicosia, Cyprus were delightfully submerged in the stunning, fantastic, beautiful, educational, surrealistic nature documentaries of Jean Painlevé.  Here are my programs and synopses of the films that we presented at Images and Views of Alternative Cinema.  Special thanks to Brigitte Berg and Marie Jager of Les documents cinématographiques for making this project possible.

Surreal Science:

The ‘Popular’ Documentaries of Jean Painlevé

2012 Images and Views of Alternative Cinema

Lefkosia, Cyprus

Curated and presented by

Christopher Zimmerman

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

© les documents cinématographiques

French filmmaker-biologist-educator-inventor-surrealist Jean Painlevé (1902-1989) 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.

Program 1:  Revealing the Invisible

Jean Painlevé, Les oursins, photographie, 1928

© les documents cinématographiques

Les oursins     [Sea Urchins]

1928    10 minutes     black & white, silent

When the screening of his first academic film The Stickleback’s Egg:  From Fertilization to Hatching (1925) outraged researchers at the Académie des sciences, Painlevé shifted his efforts to popularizing his documentaries to be shown at ciné-clubs and Parisian avant-garde movie theaters.  With Sea Urchins from 1928, Painlevé transformed microscopy from a solitary activity into an experience that an audience can share.  This examination of sand and rock urchins is an early example of Painlevé life-long preoccupation with revealing what cannot be experienced with the naked eye.

Oursins  [Sea Urchins]                                                           

1954    11 minutes     color, sound

            Music:  sound collage in homage to Edgar Varèse

A quarter of a century later, Painlevé returns to the biology and behavior of the sea urchin—this time in color.   Masterfully utilizing magnification, time-lapse, and close-up techniques, the 1954 Sea Urchins explores anatomical details that evoke classical architecture and a veritable city-scape teeming at the creature’s surface. 

Diatomées  [Diatoms]

            1968    17 minutes     color, sound

            Music:  Pierre Angles and Roger Lersy

Single-cell organisms—Diatoms—are the subject of Painlevé’s 1968 microscopic investigation.   The remains of these mysterious cells are vital to the creation of the earth’s crust and are an important element in the formation of petroleum.  Employing an inventive and often humorous narration, Painlevé demonstrates the power of cinema to reveal the beauty of an otherwise invisible world.

Cristaux liquides--1978

Cristaux liquides  [Liquid Crystals]

            1978    6 minutes       color, sound

            Music:  François de Roubaix

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.  He also made a fifty-minute film on liquid crystals for university study.

La pieuvre  [The Octopus]

            1927    13 minutes     black & white, silent

Often drawn to organisms that humans typically find revolting, Jean Painlevé was fascinated by the octopus ever since childhood.  His first film directed at a general audience, The Octopus from 1927 dives into the niche of this tentacled life-form with examinations of its methods of movement, breathing, releasing ink, with particular attention to its anthropomorphic eye and ability to change skin color.  This silent tribute to the ‘horrifying’ cephalopod—a truly pioneering documentary for its time—created a ‘hybrid’ film form meant to entertain as well as educate—an approach that Painlevé would cultivate throughout his creative life.

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

© les documents cinématographiques

Les amours de la pieuvre           [The Love Life of the Octopus]     

1967    14 minutes     color, sound

            Music:  Pierre Henry

Expanding on themes first explored four decades previously, The Love Life of the Octopus (1967) exhibits the mating rituals and reproduction of this ‘cephalopod, horrifying creature’.  Painlevé 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.

Program 2:  Querying the Conventional

Jean Painlevé, L’hippocampe, photographie, 1933

© les documents cinématographiques

L’hippocampe  [The Sea Horse]                   

1933    14 minutes     black & white, sound

            Music:  Darius Milhaud

With this cinematic investigation of sea horses, the only vertically oriented fish, 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.  The Sea Horse was his only film to break even financially, and Painlevé used the excess funds, oddly enough, to spawn a line of high-end fashion jewelry.

Le vampire  [The Vampire]

            1945    9 minutes       black & white, sound

His best-known and most overtly political film, The Vampire, made in 1945 just after WWII, profiles the Brazilian vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus).   Opening with a reference to Murnau’s Nosferatu, the film’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]

            
1947    24 minutes     black & white, sound

Music:  Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Baron Lee, Gene Krupa, and Jimmy Lunceford

Below the surface of a seemingly calm pond lurks a cutthroat society 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.  Freshwater Assassins received the prize for Best Film for Schoolchildren at the 1947 Brussels World Festival.

Les danseuses de la mer  1956 

Les danseuses de la mer            [Sea Ballerinas]

            1956    13 minutes     color, sound

            Music:  Pierre Conté

Exploiting color film brilliantly, the 1956 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 performance of ‘The Dance of the Feather Star’ directed by the ‘famous conductor Galathea’.

Jean Painlevé, Acéra ou le bal des sorcières, photographie, 1972

© les documents cinématographiques

 Acera ou le bal des sorcières  [Acera, or the Witches’ Dance]

            1972    13 minutes     color, sound

            Music:  Pierre Jansen

One of Painlevé’s most remarkable films, Acera, or the Witches’ Dance 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.

Synopses by Christopher Zimmerman © 2012

Jean Painlevé avec caméra Debrie, Saint Raphaël, vers 1935

© les documents cinématographiques

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

© les documents cinématographiques