Jean Painlevé's cinematic wildlife, 1924-1946

Restricted until 17 Jul. 2012. This dissertation interrogates of the early œuvre of the French biological and wildlife filmmaker Jean Painlevé (1902-1989) and the interwar romance between scientific and aesthetic experiments in film. Painlevé’s filmmaking, critical writing, and institutional and pedagogical activism reveal practices and theoretical understandings of documentary quite different from the canonical “documentary tradition” and its Anglophonic biases. I situate works of the “young Painlevé,” who made 200-plus research, educational, and documentary films on microscopic organisms and underwater creatures, within the contexts of the use of film in laboratory research in physiology, histology, and embryology; debates over visual pedagogy in Third Republic France; and the activities of the numerous filmic avant-gardes and dissident surrealists in Paris. These provide the conditions of possibility for Painlevé’s films, but also serve as objects of his critical regard. Reading Painlevé’s films as deploying a “wild realism,” this study examines the ways in which his films negotiates often surprising, mutually influential conversations between positivist and surrealist projects, articulated by scientific and artistic interests in rendering the invisible visible, whether it be microscopic worlds or the optical unconscious. Through their cultivation of a critical ambivalence, Painlevé’s films model a cinema-specific epistemology and a complex ethos of engagement with concrete and conceptual forms of difference.