Jean Painlevé, Les Pieds dans L'eau @ Jeu de Paume

Jean Painlevé

I loved the Jean Painlevé exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, if only for its offer of the opportunity to see these strange films on the big screen. There are a number of short films, many of which will be unique and revelatory to viewers. True to their intentions, the films are educative on many levels. We learn about male sea horses giving birth, watch octopuses mate, examine various oils under microscopes (mainly kaleidoscopic drops exploding like fireworks), and marvel at the effect of light on sea urchins. Some of the documents of flowers and other natural phenomena, accelerated to show slow evolution and natural processes in minutes of film were also fascinating for their resonance with early experimental film and new objectivity photography.

Jean Painlevé, Étoile de mer, vers 1930

Also wonderful was the exploration of the cinema in these films. Painlevé was concerned to educate and convey information, but he was just as focussed on exploring the possibilities of the cinema which, in his time, had not yet been fully revealed. In images that in which sea creatures merge into their environment or flowers /plants bloom, and asteroids move around the sky, Painlevé uses natural events to explore the possibilities of the camera. The beauty of his manipulation of light and dark, the framing, the keen awareness of the cinema's ability to manipulate time and space were all quite breathtaking. Painlevé may have been trained as a scientist, but he also had a keen sense of the way that images work. 

Jean Painlevé, Buste d'hippocampe, vers 1931

More disappointing, however, was the exhibition's contextualization of Painlevé's experiments. The films are presented as objective documentary records of Painlevé's scientific experiments and research. Thus, there is little to no mention of the staging of the films. Because of the way that Painlevé filmed, namely, removing the manipulation of the pro-filmic, we watch sea horses in their life cycles as if Painlevé was underwater with them. The removal of the marine life from their natural habitat, their placement in tanks, the staging and manipulation of the animals, clearly compromised, or at least, contributed to the definition of the kind of documentary film that he was making. This isn't to detract from the splendour of his images, or the amount that we learn from watching the films. Rather, it speaks more my disappointment that there was not enough information on what these films were actually doing.

Jean Painlevé, Détail de la pâle d'une queue de crevette, 19229

Another, related, thing that is not acknowledged by the exhibition is the historical moment of the cinema in which he was making these films. Painlevé was filming at a time when the lines between fiction and documentary, between experimental and documentary were not yet fully drawn or defined. Theorists were still trying to come to terms with what the cinema was about in this moment, and Painlevé was one of the experimenters asking these questions. Thus, his contribution to the very important debates about the cinema is elided in this otherwise fascinating exhibition