September 16: Jean Painlevé I -- Popular Films (Part 1)

Lou and I decided we’d do our own survey of shorts by Jean Painlevé.  We’re combining the films from the Criterion, three-DVD set called Science is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé with readings from the Bellows and McDougall collection of essays called Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé. 

The first set of essays we read—including Scott MacDonald’s in the DVD booklet—mostly make the point that film genres as we know them today hadn’t solidified when Painlevé began with film.  Added to that openness was the hugely experimental period that Painlevé began his filmmaking in--the 20s and 30s--and the fact that that he was very involved in contemporary aesthetics and leftist political activity.  The result of all these factors is that Painlevé’s films combine elements that we expect to find distinct in today’s film world.  His science movies have artistic elements and elements of his personal taste along with their scientific content.  Marina McDougall uses the word "hybridize" to describe describe Painlevé's assimilative working style.  The essays also stress that Painlevé wanted to use film to popularize science, although scientists of the pre-War era didn't embrace that idea.  

The Bellows and McDougall anthology has photograms of many of the short films, often with a comment by Painlevé.  It's not clear to me whether Painlevé himself did these photograms or whether the editors did.  Whichever, they're nice to have.

And these first eight films are impressive.

★★★★ Hyas and Stenorhynchus (Hyas et sténorinques), 1927 -- An early film in the set, there are moments of real beauty here.  All the characteristics in the readings are clear.  Although Hyas is grounded in science as the film explains the crabs decorate themselves with local flora, Painlevé's myriad associations quickly personalize this scientific content as the narrator compares his subjects to fashion, arm wrestling and Japanese warriors.  With the Chopin soundtrack in the background, aesthetic considerations quickly come into play with the back- and side-lit worm plums.  Then the film concludes with an impressive fireworks show, biological but narratively impressive, too.

★★★ Sea Urchins (Oursins), 1954 -- This is one of my favorites of the evening.  The biology here is interesting since there is so much variation in the types of stems coming out of an urchin.  And Painlevé again characterizes his organism with reference to other, familiar objects like Greek columns and jaws.  In his description, the urchin becomes a community rather than an individual organism as he describes the collaborations of the various types of spines in creating a whole.  His choice of music underlines this communal theme.  Early on, we hear the soundtrack to an experimental film with electronic noise, but the visual rhythm of the stems is soon joined by a samba.  As the film ends, layers of rhythms stack up, suggesting the communities of parts at work in the urchin, ending with some overall rhythm coming out of the actions of all these communities working together.  The urchin is a metaphor for a leftist understanding of society.

★★★ How Some Jellyfish are Born (Comment naissent des méduses), 1960 -- Not my favorite film but still interesting.  In the biology of various jellyfish, we again see individuals absorbed into community.  What looks like a plant is actually a collection of jellyfish working together.  Biology and ideology work together again in this science documentary.

★★★★ Liquid Crystals (Cristaux liquides),1978 -- Lou and I both went to Stan Brakhage to find a way to respond to this abstract film.  Colors and shapes shift throughout this film in a ways suggestive of a kaleidoscope, but the forms of this shifting lack the symmetry you would expect.  The shapes and colors morph into other shapes and colors, all the while a modern score plays in the background.  And it's science.  This is a deeply satisfying, seven-minute short, unique in the films Lou and I watched tonight.

★★★★ The Sea Horse (L’Hippocampe), 1933 -- Rightly one of the most praised of Painlevé's films, the witty and sympathetic L’Hippocampe presents the sea  horse with great dignity.  Providing ample biology, Painlevé describes the sea  horse as an enlightened liberal, the male taking upon himself most of the burden of childbirth and equalizing gender roles in doing so.  An ideal with its origin in views of the Left.   L’Hippocampe concludes with some wit, the seahorse in the foreground wtih a steeplechase back projected.

★★★★★ The Love Life of the Octopus (Les amours de la pieuvre), 1967 -- This is my favorite film of the evening. Its electronic soundtrack in the background, the film starts with a dramatic narration as we watch an ocopus crawling through shallow water.  The drama is laced with biological information about the animal's eyes, beak, skin and behavior.  When the film turns to mating, the dramatic tone gives a cinematic reason for the male's behavior in arching his fertile tentacle delicately over to the female while staying safely away.  My favorite part of the film is the section dealing with the maturing of the eggs as we see rapid cellular tortion within the egg before the embryo is fully formed and a constant spinning motion ensues later that suggests the sltihering behavior of the adults we've seen so much of by that point.  These simple, silhoutte images with the soundtrack feel like a dada gesture thirty years after the movement's heyday, as does the shift to black at the end as the soundtrack continues for some few seconds.  This film joins science and aesthetics seamlessly.

★★★ Shrimp Stories (Histoires de Crevettes), 1964 --  Histoires de Crevettes has an unpromising start with some of the silly Franco humor that the Anglo world makes fun of.  There's even a bad reference to the Marx Brothers.  But as the film moves below the waterline and we learn of the biology of these creatures, comedy yeilds to drama and we find out about the functions of the various legs the shrimp has and of the animal's struggle for survival.  Drama becomes tragedy as we watch a shrimp molt only to be cannibalized by the other shrimp before its new shell can harden.  The closing image of the empty molted shell highlit by a single-source light is an effective contrast to the corny opening of this film, an aesthetically-pleasing conclusion to this description of shrimp biology.

★★★★★ Acera, or The Witches' Dance (Acera ou le bal des sorcières), 1972 -- This film is beautiful, challenging, intelligent and surprising.  We start with perhaps the ugliest animal of any of the films, a lump of slimy tissue with a shell at one end.  Painlevé's camera soon tranforms these mollusks into monstrous-looking creatues with aimless, sluggish movement while the narration fills us in on their biology.  Suddenly, the single-source light comes into strong play, the mollusks' open the flaps of flesh that make them look like monsters, and the monsters become graceful dancers pirouetting up into the water.  The beast has become a beauty, and we have learned of their biology as this unfolds.  This suprising flash of beauty doesn't end the film though because Acera has one more trick.  We soon see the mollusks again as lumps of flesh lying together mating, one indifferently nuzzling in mud while the other pursues the issue at had.  The hermaphroditic creatures, though, don't have to mate in pairs, and the camera quickly undermines our societal view of correct sexual behavior by having three Acera together, the one in the middle servicing both its mates in two sexually different roles.  And if that's not scandal enough, we're soon looking at a chain of five with the middle three doing the same.  This film has as much challenge as it does beauty and biology.