October 5: Jean Painlevé V -- Films for Le Palais de la Découvert

For this group of films, Lou and read several articles related to Painlevé and efforts to define the documentary.

• Science Film: Accidental Beauty (Andre Bazin, 1947) -- An interesting article by Bazin written on the occasion of Painlevé showing a series of films.  Ever erudite, Bazin categorizes some films as actual scientific discovery (time lapse shows how yeast reproduces) and surgical (preserving expert surgical techniques for future doctors).  His most interesting comments are about how beauty emerges from Painlevé's work when the filmmaker is simply recording data and, by chance, beauty is created.  This is a point where Surrealism and Painlevé's work intersect.
• Castration of the Documentary (Painlevé, 1953) -- Using the 1947 World Union of Documentary Filmmakers definition as his standard, Painlevé laments the lack of originality and commitment in his contemporary documentaries.  He wants a documentary to "consciously increase human knowledge...expose problems and offer solutions." He sees his contemporaries as timid in the face of their audience and worried mostly about making profit.  He believes filmmakers focus on pleasing images rather than energy, art, creativity, challenge and dedication to the subject.  He'd hate the Travel Channel though I think he'd like Ken Burns, who always offers his perspective on his subject.
• The Ten Commandments (Painlevé, 1948) -- This little list could be an outline for the ideas in the later "Castration of the Documentary": Be dedicated, don't use cinema tricks, don't persuade unfairly, don't bore, and report reality honestly.  
• Scientific Film (Painlevé, 1955) -- Interesting article about examples of using filmmaking for research. It covers examples like time-lapse, high speed, ultraviolet/infrared film and endoscopic filming.  He also gives industrial research done with film including analyzing harbors and steel production.  These he calls "scientific film," meaning that filming is a research technique.
• Painlevé Reveals the Invisible (Hélène Hazéra and Dominique Leglu, 1986) -- In this interesting interview for Libération, Painlevé tells gives backgound to his life and work, including the ultimate fate of the vampire in his film and amusing stories like the one about André Breton.  

FILMS FOR LE PALAIS DE LA DÉCOUVERTE

★★★★ The Fourth Dimension (La quatrième dimension), 1936 --  This is vintage, creative Painlevé, a science film unlike any I ever saw in school.  Explaining the fourth dimension, he makes the point that it would depass our comprehension by having hands emerge from walls to pinch a subject's ears and showing an x-ray view of a body with all the organs working.  He shows a 2-D flat world of mice shadows that look surrealist, and he plays with the population by inserting an animated mouse.  Adding time to the mouse-world, he slides an orange through the 2-D plan and shows how it would look to them at different moments; he compares this to how we view atoms, speculating that atoms might be strings that we see only moment by moment.  And finally suggests that a human at any moment might just be the temporal manifestation of a fixed, unchangeable being.  La quatrième dimension is crammed with stimulating images and speculation.  This is the type of film Painlevé calls for in the essays Lou and I read before we watched these.

The Struggle for Survival (Images mathématiques de la lutte pour la vie), 1937 -- Not a riviting short about animal population dynamics and statistics.  Lots of graphs and lines with a few illustrative images of species like barnacles and mussels.  My 21st cetnury takeaway is that human populations can't expand indefinitely.

Voyage to the Sky (Voyage dans le ciel), 1937 -- The imagination that Painlevé praises comes into play here again.  After a straightforward graph showing how to calculate celestial distances, the camera goes on a tour of the universe.  The Martian seasons are interesting, but the view from the planet orbiting a sun in a star cluster is thrilling with stars so bright that they're visible during the day and give the night a glow.  This is the creativity he praises in his writing.

Similarities between Length and Speed (Similitudes des longeurs et des vitesses), 1937 -- Towards the end, this short starts to resemble Images mathématiques with its avalanche of formulae, but the first part with shrinking and growing men is fun.