Science Is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé

France

2009

315 Min

Color, Black and White

1.33:1

French

Currently 4.5/5 Stars.
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DIR Jean Painlevé

Synopsis

Jean Painlevé was a film director, critic, theorist, and animator, yet his interests and studies also extended to mathematics, medicine, and zoology. Amazingly, all these disparate strands came together in a groundbreaking, decades-spanning artistic career. Operating under the credo “Science is fiction,” Painlevé forged his own unique cinematic path, creating countless short films for both the viewing public and the scientific community. Moreover, he was also one of the first filmmakers to take his camera underwater. Surreal, otherworldly documents of marine life, these films transformed sea horses, octopi, and mollusks into delicate dancers in their own floating ballets. This anthology features twenty-three of Painlevé’s shorts in their original form, as well as Yo La Tengo’s ninety-minute original score The Sounds of Science, written in 2001 to accompany eight of the director’s films. —The Criterion Collection

Director

Jean Painlevé

Jean Painlevé (20 November 1902 – 2 July 1989) was a film director, actor, translator, animator, critic and theorist. He was the son of mathematician and twice prime-minister of France, Paul Painlevé.

Painlevé first came to the cinema as an actor, alongside Michel Simon, and also as assistant director in the René Sti unfinished film L’inconnue des six jours (The Unknown Woman of Six Days), 1926. (Later, he would appear as “chief ant handler” in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, 1928). Soon, he was shooting his own films, starting with L’œuf d’épinoche : de la fécondation à l’éclosion, 1927.

Painlevé sometimes scored the music and background sounds for his films, such as in Les Oursins, where the collage of noise is a homage to Edgar Varese.

In order to shoot scenes underwater, Painlevé encased his camera in a custom designed waterproof box, fitted with a glass plate which allowed the camera’s lens to reach through. Understandably… read more

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Jack Lehtonen

9Nov11

My introduction to these films came by beautiful circumstance. While in an art museum in London, I wandered into a dark room where they were screening several of these shorts. Painleve finds the magic in nature and science that I remembered from boyhood, poetry even. I was entranced instantly. Life viewed as spontaneous and miraculous, abstract and glorious.