Science if Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painleve

Short nature documentaries from 1928-1982

Rating: n/r

I dealt with some ridicule for watching these over several days, but I'm not sure why because it's the sort of thing that's usually parked in my alley. Painleve came from an avant-garde background (apparently the surrealists and other avant-garde filmmakers would borrow his footage for their own projects), and these movies were shown in avant-garde theaters and cine clubs in Paris. Painleve uses close-ups, magnification, microscopic views, slow speed, fast speed, and a variety of other tricks to show things that you either don't know exist or wouldn't ever expect to witness. And it's all with a background of weird experimental electronic music, people banging on pots and pans (literally), or jazzy scores. Most of the footage is of underwater creatures--alien beings--and the black and white shots reminded me a lot of the Harry Smith Heaven and Earth Magic I watched last year. Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd could have performed in front of the short about liquid crystals, a kaleidoscopic series of images that also reminded me of some of Stan Brakhage's work. Undulating sea urchins, anguished male seahorses birthing twitching seahorse babies with bulging eyes, close-ups of yolk sacs, more yolk sacs than you can shake a stick at even, an orgy of slithering octopii with a breathless old pervert narrating, jerking agitated shrimp running from Groucho Marx, the perversely beautiful acera ballet and another hermaphroditic orgy, vampire bats lurching grotesquely around to hot jazz and sucking at a guinea pig, serial mollusk killers, tumbling brittle stars and feather stars with stalks and suckers waving constantly, single-cell worms heavily magnified, burrowing sea urchins, an octopus molesting a human skull. It's mesmerizing and educational, but you really won't want to take your focus off the visuals and read the subtitles much. Painleve gets clever at times, juxtaposing footage of seahorses with scenes of race horses and doing the same with the vampire bats and clips from Nosferatu or frequently ending the shorts with animated creatures spelling FIN, and I really liked that more playful quality. Not all of this stuff was golden. The "math" movies weren't worth watching (except for the one on the 4th dimension which taught me that 4th dimensional beings can see all our organs at once and extract our bones without breaking the skin), and the 1920's silent shorts were repetitive and dull compared to the later films about the same animals. The "research films," one about eggs and one called "Experimental Treatment of a Hemorrhage in a Dog," were also really dull, and a stop-animated cartoon called "Bluebeard" was ugly and didn't really fit in. My advice, if you like this sort of thing, would be to watch the 8 or so films scored by Yo La Tengo, ignore the narrator, and enjoy the otherworldly visuals.