[Scott MacDonal on Jean Painlevé]: While he was committed to his academic work, Painlevé’s influences ranged far beyond the classroom and the laboratory. When he felt ostracized by his politically conservative fellow students at the special schools he attended, he regularly escaped to the Left Bank’s Saint-Michel theater, where he enjoyed the films of Mack Sennett, Georges Méliès, and Émile Cohl, and to the Jardin des Plantes, where he helped the keeper look after animals.