Salute Your Shorts: Science Is Fiction - The Films of Jean Painleve

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

One of the big clichés in pretty much any sort of media criticism is to say that a work is “unclassifiable.” For the most part it’s a cop out that wastes words/time without actually telling you anything, and while it may not be quite as much of a cliché as using this-plus-this comparisons (“It’s like David Lynch meets Fellini”), it’s just as lazy.

That being said, Jean Painlevé’s output really is difficult to put in the context of film history.  His first movie, released in 1925, is by most standards a fairly ordinary technical film. There was some novelty about it at the time because film was considered too much of a mass entertainment object to be useful for scientific research. Oh, how times have changed.  Painlevé’s film, “Stickleback’s Egg,” was made for fellow scientists, and because of this, is a very dull 26 minutes. Even here though, there’s definitely something odd going on that separates it from the cheesy film strips we all saw back in middle school. His next research film is, despite its short length of four minutes, even less noteworthy. But through the combination of these films, Painlevé saw that while it may have been a while before scientists treated film with any degree of respect, or at least less ridicule, it could be used to educate and entertain the public on subjects that previously were relegated only to scientists. 

This began Painlevé’s lengthy career as a director, and by the time of his death in 1989 he had made over 200 films. Criterion has put out a DVD set that collects 23 of these shorts, which is one of the first times a major retrospective of his works has been done in America, where until recently he’s been virtually unknown. The set makes clear both that Painlevé’s films are worth seeing, and how a person who worked almost exclusively in science documentaries had as clear a vision as any feature director. 

Although Painlevé worked on many different subjects (and Criterion’s DVD is both an excellent selection and far from exhaustive), a topic that crops up in almost all of his films is sexuality. He created “The Seahorse” in 1933 not just because he thought it was a subject that would interest the public, but because seahorse males give birth. Painlevé’s gender politics were extremely progressive at the time, and he wished to illustrate a natural equality in a subtle way. In Painlevé’s “Ten Commandments” of filmmaking, he wrote that “2. You will refuse to direct a film if your convictions are not expressed,” and at first glance, as Scott MacDonald mused, “one might wonder how scientifically informed nature films can be said to express convictions.” Yet despite making an educating and entertaining film, Painlevé managed to express his belief in equality and do so without, as dictated by another of his rules, influencing the audience “by unfair means.”

Another of his most famous shorts is “ACERA, or The Witches’ Dance.” Previously he’d expressed his views that men and women can and should have equal roles, but with "ACERA," he one-upped himself. ACERA are hermaphroditic animals, which can not only act as male or female but can actually be both at the same time. His clips show long chains of ACERA in the act of mating, which was both a message of equality and of a certain type of sexual freedom.

While that part of "ACERA" is implicit, what made it famous is instead the “witches’ dance” that gave the film its name. Painlevé noted the oddly beautiful movements of ACERA and (while slightly altering things by detaching an appendage that anchored them) shot this in synchronization, creating a dancing movement. This type of anthropomorphism is an odd thing for a scientist to do, and something that many other nature documentarians would see as blasphemy, but Painlevé saw this as an important step for humans to empathize with animals and through empathy understand them.

It’s also is very pretty and utterly weird.  It’s this sort of scene that often has left Painlevé lumped in with the surrealists. He was friends with many in the movement, and before taking over his own camerawork used Luis Buñuel’s cinematographer for “Las Hurdes,” Eli Lotar, on some of his own early work. It’s also common rumor that he was the “chief ant handler” for Un Chien Andalou, and he worked with a surrealist magazine for a brief period. This movement’s influence can be seen throughout Painlevé’s works, especially in his efforts to defamiliarize subjects—i.e. make them weird. Painlevé speeds up and slows down time and almost exclusively uses close-ups and extreme angles and lenses to make his images as striking as possible. His love for filming underseas creatures also reflects this love of the bizzarre, but almost all of his films look like they take place within alien worlds, and even commonplace things like pigeons are edited into abstraction or put into a new context such as playing a game of soccer.

But that’s only part of Painlevé’s works, since despite his love for cinema’s ability for abstraction he was in fact interested in “recording reality.” One of Painlevé’s closest friends was the brilliant Jean Vigo, one of the creators of the film movement often called “poetic realism.” Alongside Jean Renoir, Julien Duvivier and Marcel Carné, Vigo was a proponent of long takes, realistic performances and on-location mise-en-scene. His cinema was in revolt against contrivances of Hollywood, and despite only directing two features (and four films total), Vigo’s influence on Painlevé is also very evident. The stress here is on realism, and if stylistically Painlevé’s films bear little resemblance to L’atalante, in their adherence to showing reality they’re in the same spirit. This was the Painlevé who said to “abandon every special effect that is not justified,” and searched for beauty in only what he could find that already existed.

Even with these touchstones, though, many of Painlevé’s works don’t fit in. His films are very informed by the Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s (he in fact smuggled Eisenstein into Paris at one point), and his films “The Vampire” and “Shrimp Stories” are inspired by the German Expressionists and American slapstick, respectively. But however much he draws on these influences, Painlevé’s projects generally just remain pure Painlevé. In his most beautiful film, “Liquid Crystals,” Painlevé uses documentary footage to create a world of pure abstract color and geometry. Its images seem reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey in some respects, and of the experimental ‘60s formalists in others, but really it’s a film with no predecessors.  While “Liquid Crystals” is edited perfectly to a score, it’s a statement of pure visuality. In a literal sense the film is still a nature documentary, but what’s onscreen is completely avant-garde. 

This level of avant-garde strangeness is most easily appreciated by turning off the video’s subtitles and putting on the score Yo La Tengo did for eight of the films. Listening to the band's music combined with Painlevé's images is a sublime experience, where the beauty and poetry of Painlevé’s works really shines through without all the distraction of being told what things are. It’s the kind of thing that can be appreciated by anyone, regardless of their interest in this odd branch of filmmaking. 

Addendum: While this article has focused on Painlevé’s non-fiction, especially those focused on nature, Painlevé did direct one fictional film during his lifetime. Inspired by studies of movement in film, Painlevé directed a claymation adaptation of Bluebeard that’s more traditionally surrealist than the rest of his works. It’s also extremely violent, though it doesn’t add too much to Painlevé’s oeuvre, besides showing us that if he’d wanted to he could’ve been very good, and very disturbing, at directing claymation instead of documentaries.