Science is Fiction.
Collection of short films, 1925-1986
Archives Jean Painlevé, ©2017
Painlevé managed to create scandal in both the scientific and cinematographic worlds with a cinema designed to both entertain and educate. He endowed seahorses, vampire bats and skeleton shrimps with human traits – erotic, comical, and savage. As a maverick scientific documentary filmmaker, one of the first to plunge underwater with a camera in order to bring the subaquatic world to the screen, Painlevé captured the throes of a male seahorse giving
birth, the geometric choreography of crystal formation, and the mating habits of hermaphrodite molluscs. All his aquatic specimens, from octopus to sea urchin, were found off the coast of Brittany, where the French artist had a studio. His lyrical and instructive animal behaviour films set to avant-garde music were much admired by Surrealist contemporaries such as Antonin Artaud, Luis Buñuel, and Jean Vigo.
Artist's bio
Jean Painlevé (1902 – 1989, Paris, France) was a photographer, filmmaker and jewellery designer. Over six decades, between 1925 and 1986, Painlevé shot more than two hundred films on a wide range of subjects but with a prevailing interest in marine life. In the process, he developed an extraordinary inventiveness in his use of technology as well as in his exploration of the documentary style. Painlevé singlehandedly established a unique kind of filmmaking, the scientific-poetic cinema.