September 25: Jean Painlevé II -- Popular Films (Part 2)

Lou and I continued our PainlevéFest with a couple of longer articles and the rest of what Criterion calls his “Popular Films.”

The first article, “Contradictory Forces” by Brigitte Berg, is a biography, and it fleshes out many of the generalizations we saw in the first set of readings.  Painlevé was an indifferent student who didn’t care for education by lecture -- a bias that would incline him to use film for teaching, I’d think – and he had an appreciation for the sea and for cinema from an early age.  He and life partner Geneviève Hamon were deeply involved with contemporary cinema and left-wing political causes, though they didn’t officially join any movements.  I was particularly interested in Painlevé’s close association with Jean Vigo.  Berg describes Painlevé’s involvement with the development of scuba equipment, so it makes sense not only that Painlevé would go on to work with underwater photography but that Vigo, too, would have underwater scenes in Taris as well as L’Atalante.  It was part of the gestalt of the era.  Starting in the immediate prewar period, though, Berg’s biography loses steam.  She lists a series of organizations that Painlevé tried to create or served in, but there’s not a lot of insight into Painlevé’s work in that detail.  This organizational involvement recalls Painlevé’s father’s political career and shows the filmmaker as something of a renaissance man.

The shorter essay, Ralph Rugoff’s “Fluid Mechanics,” was a fun read that took me back to graduate school while putting a finger on an important aspect of Painlevé’s work: how it can make a viewer feel vaguely uncomfortable.  Rugoff uses Freud’s description of the uncanny as his pretext.  If Freud says the uncanny is the normal made strange, then we can see Painlevé as making human seem eerie.  Shrimp experience tragedy in Painlevé, but they have several kinds of strange legs that make mechanical movements.  Acera dance to attract attention, but they’re hermaphroditic, breed in clusters and look like monsters.  Seahorses struggle for dignity, but the males bear the children.  Rugoff sees Painlevé as making anthropomorphic observations about animals, but unlike Disney's familiarizing the unfamiliar, Painlevé’s anthropomorphism leads us to question the very things we think of as human.  It’s an interesting take on Painlevé’s work and identifies the element of disturbance that I sense in many Painlevé films.  I don’t completely accept Rugoff’s concluding opposition of Western culture/stasis/knowledge to nature/movement/knowledge, but there’s no denying Painlevé’s work is full of motion.  Les amours de la pieuvre particularly comes to mind.  But rather than a critique of Western epistemology, perhaps Painlevé recognized that movement is key to a movie.

★★★★★ The Vampire (Le Vampire), 1945 – Postwar Allied aesthetics didn’t have a lot of good to say about the Germans, and this film fits that context well.  Germans were seen as corrupt, perverse, and distorted in postwar cinema, and Le Vampire clearly links these qualities to Germany.  Nature, the film says at the beginning, has its monstrosities, and the parasitic creature at the center of the film hobbles like a cripple and lives on the blood of its vital victims.  If the German Expressionist titles and the images of Nosferatu weren’t enough to establish the Teutonic quality of the bat, the famous salute toward the end of the film would clinch the deal.  As the bat nibbles on the nose of guinea pig to start a flow of blood, I found myself cringing.  Rugoff would say that my discomfort comes from facing the human in metaphorical form and recognizing its unnaturalness, recognizing that such perversion is part of humanity.  To the soundtrack of Duke Ellington’s “Echoes of the Jungle.”  

★★★★★ Freshwater Assassins (Les Assassins d’eau douce), 1947 – Les Assassins looks like another response to the human brutality the Second World War had unleashed.  Here we see organic perversions like breathing organs at the rear of an animal while its jaw is an actual part of its digestive system.  Brutality abounds in this world though there are flashes of the humanity we know – a vulnerable worm bleeds as it’s consumed, a mollusk “sings” at its escape.  At the same time, the predatory creatures themselves can even get locked into fights to the death with each other, sometimes ganging up on a single victim.  The humanity we see here, Rugoff would point out, is disquieting if not terrible.  And again, to a driving jazz score.

★★★ Sea Ballerinas (Les Danseuses de la mer), 1956 – With its intellectual score, Les Danseuses draws a parallel between contemporary dance and the beauty of natural motion. 

★★★★ Diatoms (Diatomées), 1968 – It must have been in the air in 1968 because, with their abstract visuals and electronic sound, the early parts of Diatomées look and sound like parts of the ending of Kubrick’s contemporary 2001.  Diatomées then goes on into Brakhage territory with its abstract beauty and fans of diatoms.  The film is a real delight of cinematic sound and imagery. 

★★★ Pigeons in the Square (Les Pigeons du square), 1982 – As Berg points out, even on his deathbed, Painlevé was making film.  While Les Pigeons is not the master at the height of his game, Painlevé’s last film hews true to his belief that film can teach and popularize science.  He takes the completely banal animal of a pigeon and demonstrates how much we can learn about it merely by looking at it discerningly.  This last Painlevé film almost redeems the animals for me.