October 2: Jean Painlevé IV -- Silent Films: Popular and Research

Lou and I read several early, contemporary articles by and about Painlevé before going on to watch his films:

• Neo Zoological Drama (Painlevé, 1924) -- This one-page article in the journal Surrealismé clarifies for me how Painlevé fit in so easily with the Surrealists.  The article has a density of language that lifts the prose out of a communicative mode, but more importantly, Painlevé offers language we know -- "sweet," "dull color" -- juxtaposed with latin names and scientific vocabulary like "proboscis."  And in this language, a variety of creatures interact in vaguely-distinguishable but clearly unusual ways.  This very early article could be an abstract version of the scripts of many of his upcoming film like Comment naissent des méduses.
• Mysteries & Miracles of Nature (Painlevé, 1931) --This little article is very relevant to what we see in Painlevé's films.  His main idea here is that a casual observer could feel unsettled because of all the profound variety in world that doesn't fit into clear, simple patterns we're used to and comfortable with.  It's an idea similar to Rugoff's.  But unlike the serious epistemological questioning that Rugoff does, Painlevé celebrates the complication and uniqueness.  His examples and his language communicate joy and enthusiasm about realizing the world is bigger and more complicated than we might think...that god is dead, as Nietzsche might phrase it.  I see this same tone of excitement and wonder in his films.
• Institute in the Cellar (Léo Sauvage, 1935) -- A fun article that describes the underfunded, messy circumstances Painlevé worked under.  Sauvage portrays a basement work area with electrical wires everywhere, specimens in little bowls and equipment in the process of development.  Amid the messy excitement, Painlevé is at work with Geneviève Hamon at her microscope and André Raymond at his latest camera innovation.  Sauvage communicates this trio's excitement and pride in the discovery and creation happening in this dark little basement corner.  Today, there's a different look at 12, rue Armand-Moisant. I wonder if the former basement entrance is the door on the right of the building and if there's a cinema nearby.
• Feet in the Water (Painlevé, 1935) -- Painlevé would have been 32 at the time of writing this article, and he has the excitement of a cable TV host describing his travails in achieving his goal.  After Berg's description of how Painlevé loved cars, I got a chuckle out of his lengthy description of his car problems.  More related to his films, though, it was interesting to hear him talk about how the equipment, lighting and heat affected his work, especially how they affected the behavior of the animals he wanted to film.  After reading this, I've rethought that opening sequence of Les amours de la pieuvre, where the star of the film is in constant motion crossing the tidal flats.  Now I think that, rather than restlessly foraging, the octopus was probably trying to get away from Painlevé and Raymond and the animal's camouflage behavior was probably motivated by the same.  Which in itself raises an interesting question about film and science.
• A Clay Blue Beard (Patricia Hutchins, 1938) -- Sight and Sound article about Painlevé's stop-motion project.  Since stop-motion was far from unknown at this time (King Kong was 1933, after all), it looks like the point of interest here is Painlevé's camera innovation and the naturalistic movement René Bertrand brings to the project.

Painlevé's writing has so much energy, curiosity and enthusiasm...and intelligence.  Lou and I have decided we like this guy and would've enjoyed having a beer and talking with him.

EARLY POPULAR SILENT FILMS
The Octopus (La pieuvre), 1927 – Painlevé's 1967 film on the octopus is one my favorites, and this one is good, too.  Aiming to entertain and educate, this film covers a lot of the same ground as the later one.  Both talk about the eyelid and breathing syphon, and both show the image of water rippling because a hidden octopus is breathing.  This 1927 version goes a bit further in the direction of entertainment, though, when we see an octopus on a window, in a tree, and slithering over a skull.  These surrealist images aren't part of the 67 version.

Sea Urchins (Les oursins), 1928 --  This silent, too, introduces some details that Painlevé would return to in 1954.  Aesthetic elements like the beauty, and variety, of the urhin's quills are in both films as is their hypnotic motion.  In fact, many of the silent images are cleaner and better composed than those of the late films.  Les oursins is a little heavier on science than the later version is, though.  Here we get to see a dissection that reveals sand-filled intestines in the Sand Urchin, and we have some Art Nouveau lettering on a diagram of the Rock Urchin to help us identify the various stems.  

Daphnia (La daphnie), 1928 -- Less entertaining than the other two films, La daphnie excells at microscopic imaging.  Two of the most interesting shots are the one showing the muscles manipulating the daphnia's antennae and the one showing the muscles controling the daphnia's single eye.  Geneviève Hamon at work, I suspect.  In nature's way of confounding our expectation and standards, daphnia have only one eye, and they use their antennae for swimming.  These little monsters engage in their epic battle with the hydra in buccolic streams whose images open and end this film.  Tellingly, the stream is less inviting after we've learned what lives in its waters.

SILENT RESEARCH FILMS

The Stickleback's Egg (L’oeuf d'épinoche), 1928 -- Cinema-wise, L’oeuf d'épinoche is a major snooze with lots of biological vocabulary and pictures of cells and egg development.  It uses the predictable say-show-say-show structure many of us suffered through high school with.  I couldn't tell what the parts of the egg were, so I was pretty lost through most of this half hour.  But there is interesting biological info here: Lou and I both understood that the blood for the fetus migrates from the yoke to fetus, which has already developed a circulatory system and beating heart by the time the blood arrives.  And the twists and torsions inside the egg, which reminded me of information in the much later Les amours de la pieuvre, echoes the type of information Painlevé champions in "Mysteries & Miracles of Nature." As the microscope focus changed in this film, I could imagine Geneviève Hamon turning the knobs the way Léo Sauvage describes in his visit.

Experimental Treatment of a Hemorrhage in a Dog (Traitement éxperimental d'une hémorragie chez le chien), 1930 -- Before watching these films, Lou was talking about how abstracted life has become from biology, referring to how few people these days have killed and plucked  a chicken.  Such was not the case a hundred years ago when scientists performed vivisection on a dog, drained most of its blood and replaced it with a chemical composition.  This is science film, showing every aspect of the operation from cutting into the dog, finding an artery, draining the dog's blood out until it's legs stiffen, and then injecting the solution to restore the animal.  Later, we see the dog happy, and the scientist even holds the dog's incision up to the camera so we can see it's the same dog.  Traitement  is an empirical report on an animal experiment, though the subject matter certainly causes an unintended response in today's audience.

ANIMATION

Bluebeard (Barbe-bleu), 1938 -- While I'd guess that Painlevé's major contribution to to the stop-motion  Bluebeard is technological (as Patricia Hutchinson implies), the appeal here is that Charles Perrault's fairy tale doesn't pander to children and that the animation itself is creative and clever.  Contemporary American children wouldn't have been seeing an ambassador's head cut half off, leaving the mouth talking, and a clay spear go through the mouth of a warrior, out the back of the warrior's head, into the head of the soldier behind him and out that soldier's mouth.  There is a lot of such detail in the film, and knowing that René Bertrand's children did a lot of the work on the film, I wonder how many of these ideas were theirs.  The Busby Berkeley-style extravaganza of dancing dresses probably came from an adult though.