Championed by Antonin Artaud, Luis Buñuel, Jean Vigo, and Sergei Eisenstein, the unique body of work belonging to French scientist cum artist Jean Painlevé has always enjoyed a cult following. His personal credo, “science is fiction,” informed his scientific research as much as his art-making, and was perfectly simpatico with the Surrealist attempt to “obtain the marvelous” within “la vraie vie.” Painlevé’s numerous (he made close to two hundred films between 1925 and 1982) and eccentric studies of the subaquatic world reveal the fantastical habits of sea creatures, from the octopus to the seahorse; the latter became his signature image when he launched a limited edition line of seahorse jewelry sold in Paris boutiques. Painlevé was affiliated with the Surrealists, though he refused official entry into the circle, choosing to remain removed from Breton’s authoritarianism. Still, he filmed the image of the starfish for Man Ray and Robert Desnos’ L’Étoile de mer, and both he and Artaud appear in Methuselah, which includes five filmed sequences originally projected onto a background of white clouds in 1927 during a Surrealist play by Ivan Goll. The Fourth Dimension elaborates a Lewis Carroll-like universe, while The Vampire studies the killing habits of a species of South American bats, and alludes to the myth of Nosferatu. Painlevé’s deep knowledge of the animal kingdom informed his contribution to the narration of Georges Franju’s brilliant
and chilling documentary about a slaughterhouse, Le Sang des bêtes, “an everyday nightmare, at once atrocious and outlandishly beautiful” (Time Out).
Approx. total running time: 71 minutes