Jean Painlevé's cinematic wildlife, 1924-1946

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Content JEAN PAINLEVÉ’S CINEMATIC WILDLIFE, 1924-1946
by
James Leo Cahill
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CRITICAL STUDIES)
August 2010
Copyright 2010 James Leo Cahill
ii
EPIGRAPH
I no longer know if I’m looking with my naked eye at a starry sky or at a drop of water
through a microscope.
—Blaise Cendrars, “Profound Today,” 1917
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Akira Mizuta Lippit directed this dissertation with incredible generosity, patience, and
integrity. I am privileged to have had the opportunity to study with such an inspiring
scholar. His guidance, wit, wisdom, and faith in my abilities throughout this long process
have nourished my thinking and pushed me to be a better scholar. Through his example, I
have literally learned how to read and write with fresh ears and eyes, and have been
continually inspired to find joy in these pursuits. His support has been essential, and I
thank humbly thank him for these many gifts.
Michael Renov has been equally generous with his enthusiasm for this project and
his wealth of knowledge and insight on nonfiction cinema. His documentary seminar and
scholarship continue to fuel my desire to pursue research in nonfiction and documentary
media. Under extraordinary circumstances, Vanessa Schwartz graciously joined my
dissertation committee at a rather late date, and gamely offered her critiques as if she had
been there all along. Future iterations of this project will doubtlessly bear traces of her
incisive critiques and demands for the best. I thank my dissertation committee for the
manners in which they have already improved what this project will become.
Special mention is also owed to the dearly missed Anne Friedberg. Anne was a
great teacher and scholar, an ingenious mentor, and an incredibly warm person. I cherish
the time spent in her seminars as well as our conversations during office hours. Very
early into this project she intrigued me with her stories of sitting next to Jean Painlevé at
a FIAF luncheon in 1979, and offered great council on the value of returning to early film
iv
theory and engaging in historically minded research. Her support and bureaucratic
imagination helped make my travels to France to work in the archives possible.
One of the greatest pleasures of writing my dissertation was the opportunity to
conduct research at Les Documents Cinématographiques in Paris. I am particularly
indebted to Madame Brigitte Berg, as well as to Henri and the staff at 38 avenue de
Ternes, who welcomed me into the archives and the world of Painlevé, and were
extraordinarily generous and patient with me. I also wish to thank Daniel Demellier at
l’Institut Pasteur, Paris, and Hermine Cognie at the Archives Française du Film, Bois
d’Arcy. On a more personal level, Martine and Jean-Michel Colarossi, Mariola Ruleta,
Mark Hayward, and Jean-Claude Lebensztejn offered hospitality, friendship, and
guidance during my time in France.
I am grateful to the staff of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art
(RGALI) in Moscow for help locating Painlevé’s correspondences with Eisenstein.
Closer to home Ruth Wallach, the Slavic Languages and Literature specialist at the USC
Library, the staff of the Museum of Modern Art library, the New York State Archives
Cultural Education Room in Albany, and the anonymous staff of USC’s interlibrary loan
and document delivery services provided great assistance to my research.
During my time in graduate school I have had the fortune of studying with and
encountering a number of extraordinary scholars—to many to mention—who have left
their imprint on my work, but more so, have instructed me in the pleasures and rewards
of the classroom. I owe special thanks to David E. James, Fatimah Tobing Rony, Fred
Moten, Rick Jewel, Vikki Callahan, Ken Hillis, Carol Mavor, and Sam Weber for these
v
lessons. I have also had benefit of studying alongside some extraordinary colleagues, a
number of who have become close friends. René Thoreau Bruckner, Heidi Cooley,
Carlos Kase, Paul Reinsch, and Greg Seigel were particularly generous with their
conversation, council, friendship, and collaboration during these years. I also am grateful
to Nathan Blake, Kristin Fuhs, Oliver Gaycken, Daniel Herbert, Brian Jacobson, Dong
Hoon Kim, Lee Laskin, Nam Lee, Tiffany Lee, and Ioana Uricaru for their conversation
and camaraderie.
My father John D. Cahill has patiently supported my doctoral research. Along
with my siblings John, Sara, Elizabeth, and Mary, he has offered immeasurable material
and moral support. My in-laws Rachel, Amanda, and Rob, and my nephews and nieces
Anna, Leo, Noah, John, Claire, and Fiona, have all brightened my days and helped
maintain my sense of humor. I am grateful to have spent the past couple of years in their
company in New York.
I reserve the greatest thanks for my wife, Mufridah Nolan. Her friendship and
support, her adventurous spirit, her patience, her amazing sense of humor, and her love
have helped to sustain my better nature and sanity throughout this process. All my efforts
are dedicated to her.
Finally, my mother Elizabeth Stock Cahill—a Montessori teacher—helped to
cultivate my curiosity for the world. A box of shark teeth that she collected as a child and
kept in her desk sparked my own childhood reveries of the deep and the past, and these
have resurfaced in my scholarly interests. I deeply wish I could have shared all that I
have discovered and learned with her. Hélas… il y a encore tant à faire.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Epigraph ii
Acknowledgments iii
List of Figures viii
Abstract xiv
Preface xv
Introduction 1
A History of Documentary Imagined Through the Young Painlevé 2
A Wild Life 5
The Painlevé Effect 14
Regarding The Young Painlevé (Critically) 18
Defining Documentary 30
Wild Realism 50
Chapter 1
Science, Surrealism, and the Cinema, 1924-1926 56
Autumn, 1924 56
The Life Sciences: Painlevé’s Scientific Formation 61
Life in Motion: A Brief Résumé of Film in the Laboratory 69
Surréalisme and the Poetry of Comparative Anatomy 89
Experiments with Cinema 108
Chapter 2
Painlevé’s First Films, 1926-1928 124
“The Republic has no need for Ignoramuses” 124
“The cinema is not serious”: L’Œuf de l’épinoche,
de la fécondation à l’éclosion (1927/1929) 136
“A More Exact Poetry”: Painlevé’s early theatrical
documentaries, 1928 144
Animal Photogénie 166
Chapter 3
Passionate Zoology: Notes on L’Hippocampe, 1929-1935 172
Epistemania 172
The Sound and the Theory 174
Anthropomorphism, or Painlevé’s Cinema of Attraction 189
Passionate Zoology: Toussenel, Fabre, Painlevé 198
vii
Comme dans une boisson: Amour flou 205
Chapter 4
Forgetting Lessons: Realist Education, Documentary, and Painlevé’s Cinematic
Gay Science, 1935-1938 221
For the total abolition of secondary education 221
Aesthetics of Education Reform, A Brief Detour into a Long View 231
Seeing Things 244
Projections: Illuminating and Animating Things 259
Cinémile 265
Painlevé and the Association pour la Documentation Photographique
et Cinématographique dans les Sciences 280
Lectures on Cinematographic Technique: Lessons from Painlevé 290
Unlearning through the Cinema 299
Forgetting Lessons 308
Forgetting Philosophy 314
A Cinematic Gay Science 323
Conclusion
Cinematic Wildlife, 1939-1946 333
Hors-seine 336
Bibliography 338
Appendices
“Drame néo-zoologique” 369
Association pour la documentation photographique et 370
cinématographique dans les sciences, 1933 screening list
Lectures on Cinematographic Technique (Translation of Figure 66) 372
viii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Jean Painlevé (black) and André Raymond (white) filming 1
with their microcinematographic apparatus.
Figure 2. Frame capture from Hyas et Sténorinques, crustacés marins 29
(1929/1931).
Figure 3. Frame capture from Le Vampire (1939-1945). 48
Figure 4. A mosquito potentially spreading malaria and other maladies 48
as it feasts. Frame capture from Le Vampire (1939-1945).
Figure 5. Ticks secreting an infectious fluid from their thighs as they 49
become swollen with blood. Frame Capture from Le Vampire
(1939-1945).
Figure 6. The anthropomorphic economy: “Negro mask inspired perhaps 49
by this Cameroon cricket.” Frame capture from Le Vampire
(1939-1945).
Figure 7. Cover of the sole issue of Ivan Goll’s Surréalisme (1924). 60
Figure 8. Illustration accompanying Parat and Painlevé’s “Observation 68
vitale d’une cellule glandulaire en activité. Nature et rôle de
l’appareil réticulaire interne de Golgi et de l’appareil de
Holmgren.”
Figure 9. Dr. Eugène-Louis Doyen, surgeon-cinéaste, at work performing 73
knee surgery, 1898. Reproduced from Doyen, Traité de
therapeutique et chirurgicale et de technique opératoire, Tome
1 (Paris: A. Maloine, 1908).
Figure 10. Frame capture from Lucien Bull, Vol de la Grosse Mouche 78
Bleu (1904-1905, Ref. B2). This footage of the flight of a
large bluebottle fly includes key elements of the mise-en-scène
of scientific films: a metronome to measure duration and a ruler
to establish scale. These images were likely filmed at 1,200
frames per second.
ix
Figure 11. Photograms depicting syphilis spirochetes in mouse blood and 81
trypanosomes in rat blood. Reproduced from Isabelle Do
O’Gomes, “L’Œuvre de Jean Comandon,” in Le Cinéma et la
Science, ed. Alexis Martinet (Paris: CNRS, 1994).
Figure 12. Advertisement for Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Cinéa-Ciné 112
Pour Tous, no. 75 (15 December 1926): 4. Source: Bibliothèque
Nationale de France.
Figure 13. What difference does a double on a belvedere make? Frame 135
capture of “Josephine Baker’s double” performing the black
bottom before Jean Painlevé (dress as Hamlet) and an
appreciative audience sitting on Yorick’s tomb.
Figure 14. Frame capture of Antonin Artaud as a bishop in the 4
th
vignette 135
from Mathusalem (1927).
Figure 15. The canalicular passage in the chorion membrane of a stickle- 138
back egg shown under high magnification. Frame capture from
L’Œuf de l’épinoche (1927).
Figure 16. Self-scrambled eggs: Time-lapse cinematography reveals the 139
violent churching of the internal contractions of stickleback eggs.
Frame capture from L’Œuf de l’épinoche (1927).
Figure 17. Circulation in the embryo: the heart is the light grey tube-shaped 139
mass just left of center below the embryonic equator. Frame
capture from L’Œuf de l’épinoche (1927).
Figure 18. The vitelline vascular network of a newly hatched stickleback 140
shown in high magnification cuts to a shot that reveals (for the
first time) part of the developed stickleback. Frame capture from
L’Œuf d’épinoche (1927).
Figure 19. Frame capture from L’Œuf d’épinoche (1927). 140
Figure 20. Title card (left): “Observe the canaliculi of the zona radiata 142
(dark strirations).” Frame captures from L’Œuf de l’épinoche
(1927).
Figure 21. Title card (right): “Observe the protoplasmic contraction of 142
the walls of the extraembryonic coeloms.” Frame capture
from L’Œuf de l’épinoche (1927).
x
Figure 22. Advertisement for the Studio Diamant and the début of Jean 146
Painlevé’s La Pieuvre, here given almost equal billing with
Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Abwege (Crisis, aka, The Devious Path,
1928). From La Semaine à Paris, no. 343, 21-28 December 1928,
87. Source: Bibliothèque National de France.
Figure 23. Advertisement for the Studio Diamant and Bernard-L’ermite 146
(1929), playing alongside André Sauvage’s poetic documentary
Les Iles de Paris, a prewar film, and Kinugasa’s Juji-Ro (Cross-
roads). From La Semaine à Paris, 15-22 February 1929, 85.
Source: Bibliothèque National de France.
Figure 24. An octopus slinks off screen right in the opening shot of the 152
prologue to La Pieuvre (1928).
Figure 25. The second shot continues the motion initiated by the first shot, 152
with this octopus moving towards screen right, but this time in
a tidal pool. La Pieuvre (1928).
Figure 26. An octopus slides off a windowsill in the third shot of the 153
prologue to La Pieuvre (1928).
Figure 27. An octopus crawls over a doll in the fourth shot of the prologue 153
to La Pieuvre (1928).
Figure 28. An octopus crawls through the crotch of a tree in the fifth shot 154
of the prologue to La Pieuvre (1928).
Figure 29. A memento mori image of an octopus on a human skull in an 154
aquarium, reminiscent of the iconic images of a toad on a skull
in Toad’s Frolic (Charles Urban Trading Company, 1903), in the
sixth shot of the prologue to La Pieuvre (1928).
Figure 30. Transition from shot six, of the memento mori image, to shot 155
seven (a polarized image of the sea shore), in the prologue to
La Pieuvre.
Figure 31. Transition from shot seven shot (a polarized image of the sea 155
shore) in the prologue to La Pieuvre.
Figure 32. Shot eight (the seashore at Perros-Guirec), concluding the 155
prologue to La Pieuvre.
xi
Figure 33. Filmic sadism: the fusion of “l’amour” (love) and “la mort” 160
(death) in La Pieuvre (1928).
Figure 34. The death throes of an octopus in La Pieuvre (1928). 160
Figure 35. A fisherman gathering octopuses sticks his thumbs through 161
his catch in La Pieuvre (1928).
Figure 36. Automatic behavior: the severed tentacle of an octopus 161
wriggles and uses its suction cups in La Pieuvre (1928).
Figure 37. Close up of a sand urchin in Les Oursins (1929). 164
Figure 38. Dissection of a sand urchin in Les Oursins (1929). 164
Figure 39. Jitterbug: shot of a daphnia in La Daphnie (1929). 170
Figure 40. “The Revenge.” Cartoon by Goujon from Bulletin du Club 171
de L’Écran, ca. 1936.
Figure 41. Fireworks or a Loïe Fuller dance? Frame capture from Hyas 184
et Sténorinques, crustacés marins (1929/1931).
Figure 42. Frame capture of overhead shot of a sea anemone on top of 184
hermit crab’s shell, appearing to shimmy to Maurice Jaubert’s
1931 score. Le Bernard-L’ermite (1929/1931).
Figure 43. Frame capture of a football match in Bernard-L’ermite (1929/ 185
1931).
Figure 44. Frame capture from Bernard-L’ermite (1929/1931). 185
Figure 45. Frame capture of rapidly vibrating cilia of sea urchin pedicels, 188
magnified to 150,000 times the original size when projected on
a standard movie screen. Les Oursins (1929).
Figure 46. Frame capture of the multiple rhythms in La Daphnie (1929). 188
Left: The twitching eye muscles and rotating eye (the black blob),
the circulation of blood (the globules are visible on the edge of
the daphnia’s head on the left side of the image), and the quivering
antennae (the lateral, dark grey blur in the foreground, running
diagonally on the right side of the image).
xii
Figure 47. Frame capture of the multiple rhythms in La Daphnie (1929): 188
Right: close-up of the eye muscles, set against blood circulation.
Figure 48. Frame capture from La Vie d’une plante à fleurs (1926-1929). 190
Figure 49. Frame caption from Crabes et Cravettes (1930/1931). This 193
image also appeared in Documents 6 (1929).
Figure 50. “L’Hippocampe” poem by Jean Painlevé, 1935. 204
Figure 51. Frame capture of a bisected seahorse from L’Hippocampe 211
(1935).
Figure 52. Frame capture of a magnified seahorse eye from 211
L’Hippocampe (1935).
Figure 53. “Amour Flou.” Frame capture from L’Hippocampe (1935). 212
Figure 54. “Amour Flou” close-up. Frame capture from L’Hippocampe 212
(1935).
Figure 55. Underwater erotics. Frame capture from L’Hippocampe (1935). 213
Figure 56. Coupling seahorses. Frame capture from L’Hippocampe (1935). 213
Figure 57. Seahorse giving birth. Frame capture from L’Hippocampe 214
(1935).
Figure 58. Seahorse vivisection. Frame capture from L’Hippocampe 214
(1935).
Figure 59. Close-up of seahorse embryos. Frame capture from 215
L’Hippocampe (1935).
Figure 60. Juvenile seahorse. Frame capture from L’Hippocampe (1935). 215
Figure 61. See horses? Frame capture from L’Hippocampe (1935). 216
Figure 62. Painlevé signature ending. Frame capture from L’Hippocampe 216
(1935).
Figure 63. Detail from the 1833 quad-lingual edition of Jan Amos 250
Comenius’s Orbis pictus (1658).
xiii
Figure 64. Detail from the first program for object lessons published in 254
Félix Cadet, “Leçons de Choses,” in Dictionnaire de pédagogie
(1882-1883).
Figure 65. Detail from Paul Bert’s Lectures et Leçons de Choses (1887). 255
Figure 66. Poster advertising Painlevé’s “Lectures on Cinematographic 291
Technique” at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers,
Autumn 1937, courtesy of Les Documents Cinématographiques,
Paris. For English translation see Appendix C.
Figure 67. Frame capture of rock urchin locomotion from Les Oursins 304
(1929).
Figure 68. Frame capture of the “lost world” and strange eco-system of 330
the rock urchin, to which he has introduced a caprella. From
Les Oursins (1929).
Figure 69. Frame capture of increased magification of pedicels/ 330
pedicellariae—the worm-like organisms that clean and defend
the rock urchin. From Les Oursins (1929).
Figure 70. Frame capture from Le Vampire (1939-1945). 335
Frame 71. Frame capture from L’Assassins d’eau douce (1946). 335
Frame 72. “Faim.” Frame capture from L’Assassins d’eau douce (1946). 337
xiii
ABSTRACT
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.
xv
PREFACE
Throughout this text, unless noted otherwise, all translations from French are mine. In
approaching my translations, I have tried to remain as faithful as possible to the original
syntax, punctuation, and vocabulary of the authors, in order to emphasize the precise
idiom with which these authors expressed themselves, and the manner in which a shared
vocabulary constitutes the discourses in question. As an academic study, I have taken this
as my first priority, and thus my approach to translation differs at times from that of the
art of translation, which seeks a balance between the structure and meanings of original
text, and often rightly privileges “readability” in its new language. For these reasons, on a
number of occasions when translations were available, I have chosen to produce my own
translation or modify existent translations instead of using the more poetic and reader-
friendly versions available. In each instant I have done so, I have indicated where
alternative translations may be found or what I have modified. This has particularly been
the case for the set of texts by or on Painlevé available in English, which have been so
expertly rendered by Brigitte Berg and Jeanine Herman in their contributions to Science
is Fiction and by Wendy Anderson on the website of Les Documents
Cinématographiques at www.lesdocs.com. It is not my intention to infer that the existing
translations are imprecise. Rather I aim to draw out further resonances of original
language of these texts, to make present an additional set of meanings and implications
that emerge across translations. In all cases, responsibility for any errors in translation or
transcription belongs solely to the author.
xvi
Figures appear at the end of the chapter in which they are cited. All images of
Jean Painlevé and frame captures from his films are © by Les Documents
Cinématographiques.
1
Fig. 1. Jean Painlevé (black) and André Raymond (white) filming with their
microcinematographic apparatus.
2
INTRODUCTION
0.1 A History of Documentary Imagined Through the Young Painlevé
One thing I want to correct, which is stressed in existing literature on
documentary film mainly written by British and American authors, is their
erroneous emphasis on the origin and first developments of documentary film as
being British. You know as well as I, the importance and extent of the pioneer
work done in Europe—France, USSR, Holland, Belgium, etc. —Letter from Joris
Ivens to Jean Painlevé, 10 October 1946
1
Joris Ivens’s letter to Jean Painlevé appears to have gone without a written response, or at
least none has survived in Painlevé’s archives at Les Documents Cinématographiques or
the archives of the European Foundation Joris Ivens.
2
Yet Painlevé’s œuvre—spanning
from his scientific and literary debuts in 1924 to the inauguration of a life as the director
of some 200 films to the receipt of Ivens’s letter in the midst of the production of his long
delayed 1947 documentary L’Assassins d’eau douce/Fresh Water Assassins—offers one
of the strongest testimonies to precisely the sort of “pioneer work” in documentary Ivens
writes of in his letter. (Figure 1) Turning a critical regard upon Painlevé’s œuvre and its

1
Joris Ivens to Jean Painlevé, October 10, 1946, pages 2-3, Correspondences, fonds Jean Painlevé, Les
Documents Cinématographiques, Paris. From here on references to materials held in Painlevé’s archives
will be referred to by dossier title and FJP (fonds Jean Painlevé).
Ivens’s remarks are made in reference to a book he was writing under contract with the New York
publisher Harcourt, Brace, and Company. The text, The Camera and I, eventually appeared in 1969 under
the East German imprint Seven Seas Books and International Publishers in New York.
2
Although Painlevé and Ivens wrote each other on occasion throughout the 1930s and 1940s, their
correspondences were troubled by the lack of a common language. Ivens’s French was limited and Painlevé
had difficulty with English, raising the question of the extent to which he understood the content of this
letter. No trace of a response exists among Painlevé’s correspondences. Likewise, none is listed amongst
Joris Ivens’s correspondences held at the European Foundation Joris Ivens, as compiled in Kees Bakkar,
Inventory of the Joris Ivens Archives (Nijmegen, Netherlands: European Foundation Joris Ivens/Municipal
Archives Nijmegen, 1999).
3
historical conditions of possibility, this dissertation offers an extended, if belated,
response to Ivens’s letter. It takes up Ivens’s prescient call to correct the Anglophonic
biases of the existing literature on documentary film and to also rethink what a
documentary film was, is, and in a sense can be—the history of a documentary to come.
Painlevé’s films, considered alongside his writing, research, and film advocacy and
programming, help bring into relief the diversity of contemporaneous documentary film
practices dismissed or occluded by the architects of the documentary tradition,
particularly as fashioned by John Grierson and Paul Rotha during the 1930s.
3
Viewed through the optic of the young Jean Painlevé, whose work is
contemporaneous with that consecrated by Grierson and Rotha but eschews a staid veneer
of maturity for an energetic—almost adolescent—vitality, a very different history of
documentary media appears. Such a history is informed by the aesthetic experiments and
debates of the international avant-garde as it circulated in interwar Paris; scientific
research and laboratory cultures in physiology, biology, ethology, and comparative
anatomy; educational reforms and the national adaptation of a realist educational
curriculum and educational uses of film; efforts at scientific popularization
4
; popular

3
John Grierson, “First Principals of Documentary,” published in the Winter 1932, Spring 1933, and Spring
1934 issues of Cinema Quarterly and revised and republished in Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth
Hardy (1946; repr., New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971); and Paul Rotha in collaboration with Sinclair
Road and Richard Griffith, Documentary Film (1936; repr., London: Faber and Faber, 1963).
4
One may also adapt here Oliver Gaycken’s decision to translate films de vulgarisation scientifique as
scientific vernacularization films. A longer history of the use of the term in France—Bruno Beguet cites
Auguste Comte as one of the first to frequently make use of the term scientific vulgarization in a positive
light—has softened the connotations of vulgarization’s root word vulgar. But even among scientific
vulgarizers there were expressions of discomfort. Pierre Thévenard, a doctor and scientific filmmaker at the
Pasteur Institute, and his collaborator Guy Tassel, state a preference for the term “scientific diffusion
films.” The polyvalence of diffusion, alas, falls upon the same difficulties, suggesting both a spreading out
4
exhibition and cinema-going practices during the interwar period and its attendant cinema
culture; and a deep suspicion of state cooptation. Taking regard of the practices and
theorizations of documentary of Painlevé and his contemporaries challenge the
limitations imposed upon the form by its self-appointed founders in Great Britain. Such
an approach reveals historiographic aporias in how documentary has been understood.
Even when the documentary tradition is treated with critical regard, the primary
definition of documentary and the practices it authorizes and suppresses are all too often
granted to and circumscribed by Grierson’s or Rotha’s perspectives.
5

but also a watering-down of information. Gaycken chooses vernacularization instead of popularization as a
translation of vulgarisation for its resonances with Miriam Bratu Hanson’s concept of Hollywood cinema
as a vernacular modernism. He cites her essay “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical cinema as
vernacular modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6 (April 1999): 60, where Hanson explains: “I am referring
to this kind of modernism as ‘vernacular’ (and avoiding the ideologically overdetermined term ‘popular’)
because the term vernacular combines the dimension of the quotidian, of everyday usage, with connotations
of discourse, idiom, and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity, and translatability.” See Gaycken, “‘A
Drama United Them in a Fight to the Death’: some remarks on the flourishing of a cinema of scientific
vernacularization in France, 1909-1914,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, vol. 22, no. 3
(2002): 371; Gaycken, “Devices of Curiosity: Cinema and the Scientific Vernacular” (Dissertation,
University of Chicago, 2005), 13; Bruno Beguet, “La Vulgarisation scientifique au XIXe siècle,” in La
Science pour tous, ed. Bruno Beguet (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1994), 5; and
Dr. Pierre Thévenard and Guy Tassel, Le Cinéma Scientifique Français, preface by Jean Painlevé (Paris:
La Jeune Parque, 1948), 87.
5
A number of landmark critical accounts of documentary nevertheless tend to slip into the historiographic
perspective of Grierson and Rotha. See, for example, Lewis Jacobs, The Documentary Tradition: From
Nanook to Woodstock (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1971); Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of
the Non-Fiction Film, 2
nd
ed. (1974; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Derek Bousé,
Wildlife Films (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Bill Nichols, Representing Reality
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2001); Nichols, “Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde,” Critical
Inquiry, 27 (Summer 2001): 580-610; and Brian Winston, Claiming the Real II: Documentary: Grierson
and Beyond (London: BFI, 2008).
In the French context, the historian Georges Sadoul also falls into this grouping. He ends his
overview of the “avant-garde in France and the world” by noting “Between 1930 and 1940 the
documentary avant-garde would spread into numerous countries and it was in Great Britain that it was best
organized, thanks to Grierson, his intelligence, and his sense of organization.” Sadoul, Histoire du Cinéma
(Paris: Flammarion, 1962), 210. Although Sadoul is quite strong in laying out an international
understanding of documentary, its relationship to the avant-garde, and giving particular attention to the
influence of the Soviet School (especially Dziga Vertov), he takes much of what Grierson claims about the
importance of the innovations of the British school at face value (such as “deliver[ing] documentarians
5
The turn to Painlevé it is not intended as a simple displacement of one heroic
account of documentary for another. Nor is it intended to serve any projects of national
chauvinism. To do so would be to betray the international spirit of early documentary,
particularly as these filmmaking practices developed in the cinema before the integration
of sound (introduced in 1927 and dominant by 1930). Painlevé’s films emerge from and
in the first instant address a very precise context. Part of what this dissertation aims to
capture is the manner in which the particular culture of interwar Paris animates his early
work. An examination of the contexts from which Painlevé’s work emerges reveals a
rather intricate history of practices for producing images and accounts of the real that
coincides with the emergence of the cinematic apparatus and its rapport with the
phenomenal world. The stakes of such a project, however, extend beyond recuperative
and corrective historiographic interventions, to examine a theorization of a filmic realism
that exerts a critical pressure upon its own epistemological assumptions and is attendant
to the potentially disorienting, destabilizing, and marvelous effects of filmic perception.
0.2 A Wild Life
Jean Marie Léon Painlevé was born 20 November 1902 to Julie Marie Marguerite Petit
de Villeneuve and Paul Painlevé of Paris, who had married the previous November.
6
Jean

from the tyranny of impressionist method”) and replicates Grierson’s claims to the culminating realization
of documentary in Great Britain under his tutelage and discipline. See Sadoul, Histoire du Cinéma, 310-
315; quotation on 311 (emphasis in original).
6
Biographical information on Painlevé comes from Brigitte Berg, “Contradictory Forces: Jean Painlevé,
1902-1989,” in Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé, ed. Andy Masaki Belows and Marina
McDougall with Brigitte Berg (San Francisco: Brico and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 3-48, esp. 3-
9; Roxanne Hamery, Jean Painlevé, le cinéma au cœur de la vie (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes,
6
arrived into a world of incredible privilege, benefiting from his mother’s standing among
the “petite noblesse” and his father’s status as part of the intellectual and Republican
elite. Marguerite Petit de Villeneuve, known by the pet name Gaette, came from a
wealthy Parisian family with considerable real-estate holdings, and was niece of the
academic painter Georges Clairin. His father, Paul Painlevé, came from a petit bourgeois
family (his father was a typographer turned ink manufacturer), distinguished himself as a
mathematician—elected the youngest member of the Academy of Sciences in
1900—based upon his differential equations and work in fluid mechanics, which were
essential to the physics of aviation. Politicized as a young professor by the Dreyfus
Affair, Paul Painlevé began his second career as a politician when Jean was a young boy.
He was elected to the office of deputy of the 5
th
arrondissement of Paris in 1910 and, as a
member of the socialist party during World War One, Minister of Education, Minister of
War, President of the Chamber of Deputies in 1917 and 1924-1925, and France’s first
Minister of Aviation in 1930.
Six weeks after Jean’s birth, Gaette died from puerperal fever. Paul, who never
remarried, moved in with his sister Marie Lamy, a widow with three children of her own
(the siblings would live together until Paul Painlevé’s death in October 1933). Despite the
tragic circumstances surrounding his birth, and the fact that his increasingly famous

2008), esp. 21-27; Jean Painlevé interviewed by Philippe Ensault, “La Vie de Jean Painlevé,” 1982,
unpublished transcript held in “Radio et Télévision” dossier, FJP; Jean Painlevé interviewed by Hélène
Hazéra and Dominique Leglu, “Jean Painlevé, qui fait voir l’invisible,” Liberation, 15-16 November, 1986,
translated into English by Jenette Herman as “Jean Painlevé Reveals the Invisible,” in Science is Fiction,
170-179; interviews with Jean Painlevé in the television series produced by Denis Derrien and Hélène
Hazéra, Jean Painlevé au fil de ses films (1988); and Anne-Laure Anizan, “Paul Painlevé (1863-1933): Un
scientifique en politique,” (Dissertation, Science Po, 2006), esp. 113-114, and 807-808.
7
father’s work often kept him from home, Jean seems to have enjoyed a happy childhood.
He spent his summers with his maternal grandmother at the seashore in Brittany, where
he became enamored with the sea, frequently, as Brigitte Berg notes, bringing creatures
found at the beach back home with him to live in his bathtub. At an early age he became
an impassioned photographer, taking pictures of nature scenes and whatever struck him
as “curious” with a 4x4 cm box camera and then a Kodak Brownie number zero. During
this same time he fell in love with the movies. He and his nanny frequented the Saint-
Michel cinema, taking in fantasies by Georges Méliès, the animated films of Emile Cohl,
serials by Louis Feuillade, and the American comedies of Mack Sennett and Charlie
Chaplin.
The Russian director Sergei Eisenstein wrote of Painlevé: “It would be difficult to
find a more radically inclined young man…. The enterprising and indefatigable Jean
Painlevé contrived to take part in everything that had the slightest whiff of social protest
and disorder.”
7
Painlevé’s insolent spirit of rebellion, his wild streak, remained
undiminished throughout his life. As an adolescent he was a bit of an outcast. He
frequently played hooky from school, preferring to spend his time in the zoological park
at the Jardins des Plantes. Along with several classmates (including the film critic
Georges Altman) Painlevé co-founded a short-lived communist student organization.
Painlevé rarely aligned himself with any official political platforms. He harbored
anarchist sympathies, inspired by the injustice he felt watching a newsreel on the 1912
death of the anarchist gangster Jules Bonnot, which he saw as a child at the fairgrounds at

7
Sergei Eisenstein, Immoral Memories, trans. Hebert Marshall (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 100.
8
Chartres, and nourished by his friendship with the bohemian family of Augustin and
Henriette Hamon.
8
In response to his son’s agitations, such as protesting France’s
colonial presence in Morocco and the Rif war (Jean appeared at a demonstration with a
“Free Abd el-Krim” banner), Paul Painlevé remarked “I prefer that to having a son with
the soul of a notary public.”
9
Despite his penchant for cutting classes and rebelling against his schoolmasters,
Jean Painlevé passed his baccalaureate and gained entrance to the Sorbonne, where he
studied medicine and then comparative anatomy and history. As part of his formation in
the life sciences, he studied marine biology at the Biological Station at Roscoff in
Brittany. During a research trip there, his classmate Maryvonne Hamon, a native of the
region, introduced Painlevé to her younger sister Geneviève “Ginette” Hamon.
10
The two
quickly became inseparable, and while they rejected the institution of marriage (they
declared themselves advocates of free love), they remained companions up until Hamon’s
death in 1987. From Painlevé’s entrance into documentaries with La Pieuvre/The
Octopus in 1928, Ginette was Painlevé’s primary collaborator, working alongside him on
nearly all of his theatrical films. Beginning in 1960 with Comment Naissent des
Méduses/How some Jellyfish are born, Hamon received equal billing as co-creator of the

8
Augustin Hamon was a sociologist and together with his spouse Henriette Hamon, translated George
Bernard Shaw into French. Both Augustin and Henriette shared anarchists beliefs.
9
Brigitte Berg, “Contradictory Forces,” 6, 46. Jean seems to have worn down his father in this respect. As
he explained in an interview: “When my father reproached me for my convictions, I had the habit of
responding: ‘I prefer this to having respectable ideas [des idées de notable].’ Painlevé interviewed by
Ensault, “La Vie de Jean Painlevé,” 3.
10
Ginette and Maryvonne’s sister Vivienne Hamon worked at the Pasteur Institute.
9
theatrical documentaries. Further research is still necessary to create a fuller picture of
Hamon and to better understand the extent of her contribution to the entire Painlevéan
œuvre (and the extent to which that name can remain accurate, or needs modification).
She appears in the present project as a structuring absence. As Roxane Hamery notes in
her recent study of Painlevé, Hamon’s discretion—what we might call a genius in
dissemblance—makes it difficult to describe with full precise her place in the œuvre.
11
Painlevé took full advantage of his privileged upbringing to participate in the
marvels of the modern machine age, the thrills and dangers of speed and the sporting life
that marked the generations that came of age in the wake of World War One. He raced
cars and flew airplanes. He started scuba diving when the technology was still in its
experimental stages. A great lover of jazz, he frequented clubs where jazz was performed
and even played piano at Le Jockey in Montparnasse, the cultural center of les années
folles (the mad years or roaring twenties). His sense of adventure extended into his
aesthetic sensibilities. In the 1920s he published surreal poetry in Ivan Goll’s sole issue
of Surréalisme, performed in avant-garde theater, and even tried his hand as a film actor.
He traversed, while never being singularly affiliated with, the avant-garde film
movements of the 1920s as well as surrealism and its dissident formations, befriending
such fellow travelers as Jean Vigo, Jacques-André Boiffard, Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander
Calder, and Philippe Hausmann, and collaborating in different with many other notables,
including Antonin Artaud, Georges Franju, Michel Simon, Germaine Dulac, Jean Renoir,
Henri Storck, and others.

11
Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 17.
10
During the 1930s, despite his aversion to official political organizations, Painlevé
became increasingly active in anti-fascist struggles.
12
He participated in the Common
Front—the precursor to the Popular Front—from its founding in 1934, as well as the
Comité mondial contre la guerre et le fascisme (The world committee against war and
fascism), which monitored the rise of fascism in Austria. In 1936 he traveled with the
Ligue mondiale des droits de l’Homme et les Amis de la nation polonaise (World League
of Human Rights and Friends of the Polish Nation) to observe the conditions in Berezasa-
Kartowska. He worked with Jean Gabin, René Clair, and Michel Simon on the Comité
d’aide pour les enfants du cinéma français (French Cinema Committee for Children’s
Aid), which created a home for destitute children in Andernos. He served as secretary for
the Association des amis de la République française (Association of Friends of the
French Republic) created to fight against xenophobia, and used his family name to help
refugees from the Spanish Civil War and the spread of fascism gain passage into
France.
13
The Nazi’s rewarded his efforts by placing a price on his head, and Painlevé
spent the war years largely on the move, evading the fascists and working with the
Resistance (after the war he rarely spoke of his time as “the man in brown”—an allusion

12
Berg, “Contradictory Forces,” 31-34; Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 106-107; Painlevé interviewed by
Ensault, “La Vie de Jean Painlevé,” 24-26; and Painlevé interviewed by Hazéra and Leglu, “Jean Painlevé
Reveals the Invisible,” 178, and “Jean Painlevé, Qui Fait Voir l’Invisible,” 22.
13
Painlevé’s personal correspondences, held in the FJP, contain numerous letters regarding his personal
efforts to help refugees gain papers to enter and stay in France, including many foreign workers in cinema,
such as Jean Vigo’s cinematographer Boris Kaufmann.
11
to the handle his Nazi pursuers gave him, explaining in his 1986 interview with
Libération that he witnessed many disgusting things).
14
Painlevé dedicated considerable energy into the creation of independent
institutions to support the production and diffusion of scientific, educational, and
documentary films. He formed his own production and distribution companies—La
Cinégraphie Documentaire and the Institut de cinématographie scientifique (Institute of
Scientific Cinema, ICS)—as well as the Association pour la documentation
photographique et cinématographique dans les sciences (ADPCS) which held annual
conferences to bring together scientists, filmmakers and educators. During the war
Painlevé helped found what would become the Institut des Hautes Études
Cinématographiques (Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies, IDHEC) with
Marcel L’Herbier, Jean Lods, Léon Moussinac, and Maurice Cloche. Part of their aim
was to help young people from being conscripted into forced labor by the occupying
forces. Towards the end of the war he co-formed the Comité de libération du cinéma
français (Committee for the Liberation of French Cinema, CLCF) and filmed some of the
first footage of the battles for the liberation of Paris.
Upon liberation the CLCF appointed Painlevé director of French Cinema. He held
the office for 9 months, when Charles de Gaulle, who had began to route communists and
fellow travelers from government positions, replaced Painlevé with a functionary, Michel

14
For more on his wartime activities, see G. G. “De 1940 à 1944, «l’homme brun» fut pourchassé nuit et
jour par la Gestapo,” L’Illustré, 20 November 1947, 10.
12
Fourré-Carmeray.
15
His dismissal caused outcries throughout the film industry, resulting
in a one-day strike among film, radio, and theater professionals. Painlevé, however,
helped support a non-commercial film culture and a venue for short films (court métrage)
as the president of the Fédération française des ciné-clubs (French Federation of Ciné-
Clubs, FFCC) between 1946-1956, and as the honorary president of the Fédération
internationale des ciné-clubs (International Federation of Ciné-Clubs, FICC) in 1947.
Painlevé, alongside Nicole Vedrès, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and others, was a
principle signatory of the “Déclaration du groupe des Trente”—a manifesto issued 20
December 1953 in defense of the short film, and against proposed shifts in exhibition
laws which would allow for the double feature at the expense of short films.
16
Although Painlevé’s work survived in the ciné-clubs and occasional television
broadcast, his postwar theatrical films rarely received extended theatrical runs in the
commercial cinemas (this despite his ever refined artistry, continued sense of
experimentation, and never dulled wit: all in full force in such films as Les amours de la
pieuvre/The Love Life of the Octopus from 1965 and Diatomées from 1974). The popular
success of his 1935 film L’Hippocampe/The Seahorse, which was distributed by Pathé-
Consortium, would never be repeated. He remained active in French cinema until the
mid-1980s, but his status and visibility as a public figure gradually diminished, in part

15
On Painlevé’s tenure as Director of French Cinema see Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 138-149.
16
“Déclaration du groupe des Trente,” La Cinématographie française, no. 1550, 9 January 1954. See also
Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, “Structures du court métrage française, 1945-1958,” and Arnaud Chapuy et Jean-
François Cornu, “Les producteurs du groupe des Trente, fondateurs d’une pré-Nouvelle Vague?” in Le
Court Métrage français de 1945 à 1968: De l’âge d’or aux contrebandiers, ed. Dominique Bluher and
François Thomas (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 29-58.
13
eclipsed by the rising stars of a new generation of young filmmakers schooled in the very
ciné-clubs Painlevé helped foster, and who refined their craft making short films.
17
A series of operations on his hips left Painlevé confined to a wheel chair,
requiring him to make his final film, Les Pigeons du square/The Pigeons of the Square
(1986), with the aid of a crew of former students from his film technique courses. During
the 1980s he worked on a series of aphoristic plays under the nom du plume Yann
O’Bara, including “Le théâtre de la dérision” (The theater of derision) and “La traversée
du mouroir” (Through the “mouroir”).
18
On 2 July 1989, at 86 years of age, Painlevé
died. The simple epitaph on the family tomb reads Jean Painlevé cinéaste.
19
In the obituary for Painlevé published in an insert in Cahiers du Cinéma, Jean-
Jacques Henry tried to explain the lack of attention given to Painlevé.
In a world that reassures itself with classifications, nominations, attributions,
divisions, and structure, Painlevé always provoked some irritation. His life was
unsettled, it always exceeded the context that one wished to assign to him. Too
much to say, too quickly, like a sort of response to everything... As for the silence
of Cahiers for almost forty years…of this we will not brag.
20

17
Interestingly, Painlevé and Hamon made a significant if often over-looked contribution to the history of
the French nouvelle vague. They lent their custom made shoulder-mounted camera harness, developed in
order to take smooth mobile footage on the rocky seashore (where no tracks could be laid or dollies used),
to Painlevé’s postwar camera operator Claude Beausoleil. In 1959 Beausoleil borrowed the apparatus and
used it as one of the additional camera operators on Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1959). See Berg,
“Contradictory Forces,” 41.
18
A mouroir is an old folks home or hospice—a place where the old and sickly go to die (mourir). The pun
on its similarity with miroir (mirror) suggests a secondary translation as “Reflections on dying.”
19
Hence the title of Richard Millet’s “Jean Painlevé cinéaste,” in Le cinéma et la science, ed. Alexis
Martinet (1994; repr. Paris: CNRS, 2002), 86-94.
20
Jean-Jacques Henry, “Jean Painlevé: voir d’abord,” Le Journal des Cahiers, no. 95, vi, insert in Cahiers
du Cinéma, no. 423 (September 1989).
14
Henry’s obituary, a belated apology of neglect, implicitly concedes that Painlevé’s work,
without affecting airs, is determined by an essentially fugitive quality. This quality makes
it difficult to neatly confine it within any single given context. Such an unruliness is a
product of both Painlevé’s own disciplinary promiscuity and epistemological
openness—a sensibility shared by a number of surrealists and dissident surrealists of the
interwar period—and a wild quality or series of effects compelled by his approach to
filmmaking and his use of the cinematic apparatus, connecting it to questions of the
ontology of cinema and its implication in life in all its diversity.
0.3 The Painlevé Effect
A project dedicated to a proper name—Jean Painlevé—invites potential
misunderstandings regarding method and approach that merit brief comment, particularly
with respect to the question of auteurist film scholarship and its responsibility to the
politique des auteurs (the politics or policy of authors).
21
Since its development as a
polemic in the mid-1950s, the auteurist approach has attracted widespread and sustained
critique. Focus on the film’s auteur—“someone who speaks in the first person,” as
Jacques Rivette defined it—risks potential reduction of complex relations of production

21
François Truffaut, “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 31 (January
1954): 15-29; André Bazin, “De la politique des auteurs,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 70 (April 1957): 2-11;
both reprinted in Peter Graham and Ginette Vincendeau, The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks
(London: BFI 2009), 39-63,130-148. Critics engaged in the film-as-art debates of the early 1920s were
already using auteur and cinéaste to refer to filmmakers.
15
to a single guiding volition, divination of individual intentionality, and propagation of an
ideology of patriarchal, bourgeois-individualism.
22
Working on a project about films produced in an artisanal manner without
consideration of the particularities of the life and thoughts of the principle agent, John
Caughie argues, “remove[s] the most accessible point at which the text is tied to its own
social and historical outside.”
23
This is certainly the case with Painlevé. The more
profoundly one engages the unique contours of his life, the more clearly networks of
social connections and historical circumstances come into view. In this case, opening up
questions regarding of cinema’s role in the theorization of the life sciences and of a
science of living—a cinematic gay science—developed from the critical epistemology
spurred by Painlevé’s adventures in filmmaking. The constellations of ideas that emerge
from this approach help rethink the early history of documentary with far greater clarity
and specificity and also lend theoretical insights to the medium. To reformulate a parody

22
Rivette’s definition is cited by Bazin, “La Politiques des auteurs,” 143. Peter Wollen’s Signs and
Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), lays out the critique of the auteur
approach as steeped in bourgeois individualism and the Romantic veneration of creative genius, but then
concludes with a development of auteur theory in order to examine the organizing iteration of a film.
Auteur theory addresses the series of signs organized by “Painlevé” as much by an individual named Jean
Painlevé. Wollen describes auteur theory as an unfinished project, both in terms of its relationship to the
object of analysis and as an intellectual endeavor. Gilberto Perez offers an incisive discussion of the limits
of the bourgeois-individualist ideological critique of auteur theory (as itself tied up in the expression of a
bourgeois ideology of historicism as well as an anti-individualist corporate ethos) in The Material Ghost:
Films and Their Medium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 3-9.
23
John Caughie, Theories of Authorship (London: Routledge, 1981), 3. More recently, Dana Polan has
eloquently reiterated this point: “Each life is its own symbolic response to the history it passes through.”
Dana Polan, “Questions of Method,” Cinema Journal, 49.1 (2009): 195.
16
of a well-known saying: a little biography turns one away from History, but a lot brings
one back to it.
24
Granted, the limitations of the auteur approach have been illuminated by the
cumulative impact of a number of iterations of poststructuralist thinking on the status of
the author, which often seek to disentangle if not completely separate the work from the
biography of its creator and direct inquiry toward different horizons.
25
To avoid reductive
or overly determinist readings, it is helpful to recall Arthur Rimbaud’s observation that
“je suis pensée… je est un autre” (I am thought… I is another) when evoking Rivette’s
definition of the auteurist film as one that is enunciated by a visual “I.”
26
A result of his
attempts to train himself to be a seer by pursuing “the unknown by a derangement of all
the senses,” Rimbaud’s insights regarding the “I,” rich with psychoanalytic and
performative dimensions, pluralize the creative agent and suggests an approach to the
concept of the auteur that need not be reductive to a single coherent subject.
27
Such an
understanding of the I helps clarify the tension within Painlevé’s films, which intermix

24
See Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Leavers (1957; repr., New York: Hill
and Wang, 1972), 112.
25
See Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (1968;
repr., New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142-146; Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in The Foucault
Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (1969; repr., New York: Pantheon, 1984), 101-120; and Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, foreword by Réda Bensmaïa (1975; repr.,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), especially 16-27.
26
Arthur Rimbaud, I Promised to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud, ed. and trans. Wyatt Mason
(New York: Modern Library, 2003), 28-30 (translation modified from “I is someone else”). Rimbaud
expresses this idea in a set of letters to his former teacher Georges Izambard and his friend Paul Demeny.
27
Ibid.
17
the importance of impersonal documents produced by a “mechanical eye” with deeply
personal touches.
Each film also has an existence autonomous of authorial intention and control and
irreducible to biographical explanations. At the scene of production, Painlevé consciously
aimed for a certain autonomy as part of the documentary practice he employed. This
autonomy is primarily expressed as a restraint born from the ideal of scientific and
mechanical objectivity. In his selection of shots and montage work, Painlevé took a rather
open approach to the excesses introduced by the nature of the filmic apparatus and the
nature of the wildlife as he filmed it, incorporating such material resistance into his films.
By relating Painlevé’s own thinking about his films with the manner in which they
circulated and were received by the public, critics, and other filmmakers (particularly
Painlevé’s former assistant Georges Franju) a fuller sense of the films emerges, one that
helps to account for the distinct deferred effects and afterlife of Painlevé’s work.
This dissertation examines Painlevé’s films not only in relation to their creator,
but also in relation to the “Painlevé effect”—the cumulative force of the filmmaker’s
actions, the films themselves, and the responses they produced. The Painlevé effect may
also be understood as proposing a specific theorization of the medium. The writing on
Painlevé’s film—by such critics as Émile Vuillermoz, Charles de Saint-Cyr, André
Bazin, and Georges Sadoul—frequently addresses the manner in which these films
collect together seemingly opposing properties and phenomena: sober scientific
objectivity and dream-like poetic expressiveness, nonfiction and fiction, calculation and
improvisation, materiality and immateriality, concreteness and abstraction,
18
familiarization and estrangement, tenderness and cruelty, hallucination and fact… The
Painlevé effect reveals film’s unique propensity to maintain the co-presence of these
markedly different and even contradictory properties without recourse to synthesis or
sublimation. Such is the remarkable scenario upon which Painlevé’s œuvre develops its
epistemological project and its claims for a filmic realism and nonfiction cinema.
0.4 Regarding The Young Painlevé (Critically)
Interest in Painlevé’s work is once again on the rise, and may very well speak to the
continued strength of the Painlevé effect. This resurgence has been largely supported by
the efforts of Brigitte (Birgitte) Berg, a former collaborator of Painlevé and present
director of his archives, Les Documents Cinématographiques, who among other projects,
has overseen the transfer of a number of his popular films onto VHS and DVD. Increased
circulation is allowing Painelvé’s films to once again find audiences outside of the rare
cinémathèque screening, to have their intended popularization effect. Related to this, the
past several decades have witnessed the accumulation of a small body of literature on
Painlevé.
The initial set of texts have primarily aimed at gathering basic information on
Painlevé and his œuvre, and compiling a filmography—a difficult task given Painlevé’s
less than rigorous accounting practices and the fact that the bulk of his work was research
films and other forms of non-theatrical cinema, which tend not to accumulate the same
paper trail as commercially released materials. Dominique Willoughby, Prosper Hillairet,
and Philippe Ensault’s catalog and filmography Les 200 films de Jean Painlevé, compiled
19
in honor of the filmmaker’s 80
th
birthday and featuring short introductory texts by
Willoughby and Hillairet and excerpts from Painlevé’s 1930 text “Le Cinéma au service
de la Science” and André Bazin’s pivotal review from 1947 “Béauté du Hasard”/
“Accidental Beauty.”
28
After Painlevé’s death, Brigitte Berg organized an updated
catalogue and filmography including a time-line of his life, a number of valuable primary
documents and extracts from Painlevé’s archives, and an obituary text for Painlevé
written by Jean Rouch.
29
Parallel to these texts are late-in-life interviews with Painlevé
which have established the myth of Painlevé, notably his 1986 interview with Hélène
Hazéra and Dominique Leglu for Libération and the 1988 television series Painlevé au fil
de ses films by Denis Derrin and Hélène Hazéra, which provide indispensable documents
of Painlevé’s thinking and recollections towards the end of his life.
The second waves of texts on Painlevé have filled in biographical details
Painlevé’s life and in many ways set the stage for the theorization of his work. In 1994
Richard Millet published an overview of Painlevé’s work for the collection Le cinéma et
la science. Millet’s text emphasizes Painlevé’s engagement with scientific cinema and
diffusion, reserving any mention of surrealism for the final page, where he describes it as
a sensibility imprinted upon the entirety of Painlevé’s œuvre.
30
Monique Sicard takes a
complimentary—if opposite—approach in her brief, speculative chapter on Jean Painlevé

28
Domonique Willoughby, Prosper Hillairet, and Philippe Ensault, Les 200 films de Jean Painlevé (Paris:
Amis du ciné-MBXA, 1983).
29
Brigitte Berg, Jean Painlevé (Paris: Les Documents Cinématographiques, 1991).
30
Richard Millet, “Jean Painlevé cineaste,” 94.
20
in her book 1998 book La Fabrique du regard: images de science et appareils de vision
(XVe-XXe siècles).
31
Sicard sees Painlevé as primarily a provocateur, using science
primarily as a veneer for films imprinted with “a latent revolt.”
32
Taking an approach that
anticipates my own, Sicard sees the key to Painlevé’s work in his proximity to the
thinking of his one-time collaborator Antonin Artaud. Both Painlevé and Artaud, she
observes, tried to push beyond language in hopes of reaching forms of communication
that pursue truth (as opposed to knowledge) through “the spontaneity of wild life [la vie
sauvage].”
33
Published in the wake of a successful retrospective of Painlevé’s films at the San
Francisco Exploratorium, Andy Masaki Bellows and Marina McDougall’s collection
Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé, edited with Brigitte Berg, has served as a
primary introduction and reference for Painlevé’s work. In addition to providing a
filmography and bibliography, it features Berg’s biography, a short critical essay by the
art critic Ralph Rugoff, a set of translations of key texts by Painlevé, a translation of
Bazin’s “Accidental Beauty,” and reprints of a series of Painlevé’s photographs from
1929-1930 and photograms from numerous films.
34
From this collection, Brigitte Berg’s
“Contradictory Forces: Jean Painlevé, 1902-1989,” has served as an indispensable

31
Monique Sicard, “Regards sous-marin, Jean Painlevé (1907-1989) [sic]” in La Fabrique du regard:
images de science et appareils de vision (XVe-XXe siècle) (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998), 191-200. The brevity
of this text affords Sicard an enviable lightness of touch.
32
Ibid., 199.
33
Ibid., 197.
34
Bellows and McDougall with Berg, Science is Fiction.
21
resource and the primary biographical account of Painlevé (frequently cited by French
and English scholars). Berg, who worked closely with Painlevé in his later years and now
directs his archives, offers an erudite introduction to Painlevé’s life, work, and times.
35
The fact that Berg’s text has served as the main source for most of the recent writing on
Jean Painlevé is testament to the insight, clarity, and value of her work.
36
The third wave of work on Painlevé extends the contextualization and
theorization of Painlevé’s work and its relationship to nonfiction film. Keith Beattie’s
engaging “Natural Science Film: From Microcinema to IMAX,” while primarily based
upon secondary sources and not engaging with the original French materials, provides a
very insightful reading of Painlevé’s work and its engagement with the world of the
infinitely small as both a key reference point for the history of the ever expanding nature
film (in scale and scope) and as a viable alternative to the Griersonian documentary.
37
Oliver Gaycken, in a forthcoming essay titled “Surrealist Contagion: Le Vampire,” takes

35
Berg, “Contradictory Forces,” 2-47.
36
See Michael Richardson, Surrealism and Cinema (New York: Berg, 2006), 83-86; Scott MacDonald,
“Up Close and Political: Three Short Ruminations on Ideology in the Nature Film,” Film Quarterly, 59.3
(2006): 4-21; modestly revised and reprinted in MacDonald, Adventures in Perception: Cinema as
Exploration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 155-183; Jim Knox, “Sounding the Depths:
Jean Painlevé’s Sunken Cinema,” originally posted online in 2003 at Senses of Cinema:
http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/25/painleve.html; Martin Kemp, “Surrealism Bites Back,”
Nature 447 (24 May 2007): 382; and Sean Eva Hayward, “Enfolded Vision: Refracting The Love Life of
the Octopus,” Octopus: A journal of visual studies, vol. 1 (2005): 29-44. These texts all provide engaging
readings of Painlevé and his films. In terms of historical material, they primarily draw upon Berg’s essay
and tend to emphasize a retroactive reading of Painlevé’s entire œuvre through his quip, made quite late in
life that “science is fiction.”
In French scholarship, both Roxane Hamery and Florence Riou cite Berg’s text alongside
extensive archival research. See discussion of their work below.
37
Keith Beattie, Documentary Display: Re-Viewing Nonfiction Film and Video (New York: Wallflower,
2008). This text shares much with Scott MacDonald’s engaging reading of Painlevé.
22
a formidable step in situating Painlevé’s work within the intellectual contexts of the
dissident surrealist journal Documents through a rigorous engagement with primary
source materials and an imaginative set of associations that at times reduplicate the logics
of Documents—my own arguments overlap with his on a number of occasions, and it is
my pleasure to cite this text. Sam Rohdie’s “Four Essays: Painlevé; Jennings; Vigo;
Ford,” also offers an erudite, essayistic reading of Painlevé’s work, which is particularly
strong in its general observations of the interwar cinema and the role of the short film in
programming.
38
The recent publication of Roxane Hamery’s biography Jean Painlevé, le cinéma
au cœur de la vie marks a significant expansion of the historical research into the
filmmaker, filling a number of gaps in film history that has persisted for far too long, and
providing a rather daunting text to have to follow.
39
Hamery’s text contributes to an
efflorescence of recent studies that that make extensive use of archival materials in their
considerations of the relationship between individual filmmakers and the film culture of
the interwar period. These include Josette Ueberschlag’s book on the educational
filmmaker Jean Brérault, Valérie Vignaux’s work on the educational filmmaker and

38
Sam Rohdie, “Four Essays: Painlevé; Jennings; Vigo; Ford,” posted online in 2009 at Screening the Past:
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/25/four-essays-sam-rohdie.html. Raymond Durgnat’s scattered
comments on Painlevé in Franju (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), also merit mention for
their insight and originality, particularly in thinking the avant-garde French school of documentary on its
own terms. Durgnat’s short essay “Jean Painlevé,” in Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary,
eds. Kevin Macdonald and Mark Cousins (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 80-81, which originally
appeared in Film Dope (1994), offers an efficient introduction to Painlevé’s work, context, and stakes while
still managing to insert an odd and possibly apocryphal anecdote about a feminist scholar at an American
University trying to have Ourins (1958) banned as a misogynist film.
39
Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé. Hamery’s book is a revision of her dissertation “Jean Painlevé (1902-
1989): un cinéaste au service de la science” (Dissertation, University of Rennes 2, 2004).
23
promoter Jean Benoit-Lévy, Isabelle Marinone’s book on the documentarian André
Sauvage, and Florence Riou’s research on educational uses of film, which includes a
number of insightful studies of Painlevé’s work, particularly his contributions to the
International Exposition in 1937, as well as theoretical interventions into the question of
fiction in Painlevé’s documentary work.
40
Hamery’s book traces Painlevé’s career in four
stages: his early silent work, his growing success during the 1930s, his postwar
institutional activities, and his return to underwater films and gradual retreat from public
life. Her book is particularly strong in its summary of Painlevé’s key ideas, his
institutional activities, and her keen analyses of select films. Hamery’s meticulous
research and astute analysis extends to a valuable filmography and bibliography (aided by
Brigitte Berg) that significantly clarifies many of the disparities in dates and personnel (a
project to which I have aimed to offer further precision).
41

40
Josette Ueberschlag, Jean Brérault, l’instituteur cinéaste (1898-1973) (Saint-Étienne: Publications de
l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2007); Valérie Vignaux, Jean Benoit-Lévy ou le corps comme utopie: une
histoire du cinéma éducateur dans l’entre-deux guerres en France (Paris: Association Française de
Recherche sur L’Histoire du Cinéma, 2007); Isabelle Marinone, André Sauvage, un cinéaste oublié: De la
Traversée du Grépon à La Croisière jaune (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008); and Florence Riou, “Jean Painlevé:
de la science à la fiction scientifique,” Conserveries mémorielles, no. 6 “La partie fiction dans les images
documentaire,” available online at: http://cm.revues.org/350; and Riou, “Le Cinéma à L’Exposition
internationale de 1937: un media au service de la recherche scientifique,” 1895, no. 58 (2009): 31-55.
I regret to have discovered Riou’s work rather late into the writing of my dissertation as it merits
further consideration. Riou’s essay on Painlevé and the question of the relationship between documentary
and fiction resonates with another recently published text that uses Painlevé to speculate upon the fictional
element of documentary films: Gaëlle Lombard, “Jean Painlevé: essai sur l’imaginaire de la matière
vivante,” in Le Court Métrage français de 1945 à 1968 (2): Documentaire, fiction: allers-retours, ed.
Antony Fiant and Roxane Hamery (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008) 27-36.
Another text of some interest is Isabelle Marinone’s “Anarchisme et Cinéma: Panoramique sur une histoire
du 7ème art français virée au noir,” (Dissertation, Université Paris I, 2004), which includes the chapter
“Jean Painlevé: la science au service d’une nouvelle vision du monde” raising the question of the links
between Painlevé’s films and anarchist sensibilities, largely through Painlevé’s associations with the
Hamon family.
41
Earlier versions of Painlevé’s filmography can be forgiven for too often relying upon Painlevé’s memory
of events for their dating, such as Willoughby, Hillairet, and Ensault, Les 200 films de Jean Painlevé; and
24
There are obvious overlaps between the existing literature on Painlevé and mine.
This is particularly the case with the work of Berg, Hamery, and Riou, given that each of
us draws upon many of the same primary sources from Painlevé’s archival materials at
Les Documents Cinématographiques. My own project advances a different agenda from
this rich body of literature in several respects. First, great emphasis has been placed upon
Painlevé’s provocative aphorism “science is fiction.” For many commentators this phrase
offers the key to reading his œuvre. And yet this formulation, made rather late in life,
would appear to greatly diminish the seriousness and good faith with which he engaged
in scientific research and scientific cinema, particularly in the early part of his career.
Painlevé seems to have first publicly uttered this formulation in an interview in 1986:
“Science is a fiction. Making science-fiction is completely pointless.”
42
In absence of an
explanation of how Painlevé understands fiction, and what it means to be “a fiction”
(which suggests a plurality of possible fictions), it is worth noting that readings made
under this heading are primarily retroactive.
For the young Painlevé science may have been provisional and
hypothetical—what Nietzsche calls in the Gay Science a “regulative artifice,” a

the chronology chart assembled for the posthumous catalog Jean Painlevé, 8-9. Most of these errors, such
as dating L’œuf d’épinoche, de la fécondation à l’éclosion to 1925—it should be 1927, as Painlevé did not
meet the camera operator André Raymond until 1926—are corrected by Brigitte Berg’s filmography in
Science is Fiction, 180-189. Hamery’s filmography and bibliography use the release date of each film
(when it can be confirmed) as the principle date for each project. See Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 269-298.
42
Jean Painlevé interviewed by Philippe Jerome, “Jean Painlevé: Cinquante ans de cinéma scientifique:
«La science est une fiction»,” Patriote-Côte d’Azur, 28 November 1986, 16. See variations given in his
television interviews in Jean Painlevé au fil de ses films and the aphorisms of one of his alter egos, Yann
O’Bara, published in Berg, Jean Painlevé, 6.
25
“regulative fiction”
43
—and science can certainly be suffused with poetry, fantasy, and
phantasms. But science in his early films and writings is not fiction in the sense of being
an invention or fabrication of the mind. It is implicated in material reality. At the same
time, this is not to claim that his films and documentary practice separate themselves
from the fiction and the fictive. Painlevé’s documentary practice mobilized the interplay
of nonfiction and fictional filmmaking techniques and was certainly not a purist in his
approaches. For this reason, this dissertation gives greater attention than previous
publications to Painlevé’s scientific formation, including the first examination of the
content of his research presented at the Academy of Sciences and its relation to his
emerging aesthetic, as well as the broader context of the interwar romance between
scientific and aesthetic experimentation.
This dissertation focuses primarily on the films produced by the “young Painlevé”
between 1924-1946. Given that Painlevé produced 200 films and lived to be 86, the
decision to focus on the incredibly rich early period merits explanation. Young takes on
several connotations: it refers to Jean Painlevé’s youthful age and precocious rise to
prominence (it covers his years from age 21 to 44), his position in the lineage of a famous
family name (and his struggles to escape the perpetual designation “son of Painlevé”), but

43
Friedrich Nietzsche, Le Gai Savoir (La Gaya Scienza), trans. Henri Albert (Paris: Société du Mercure de
France, 1901), sect. 344, 301; and The Gay Science, with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs,
trans. and commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), sect. 344, 280-81.
Here and elsewhere, I cite and work from the French translations of Nietzsche that were in
circulation during the period covered by this dissertation in order to remain as close as possible to the
particular idioms with which such ideas entered discourse. Although Nietzsche’s influence among French
readers waned considerably with the outbreak of World War One, the interwar period in France saw a
limited but influential sustenance of interest in Nietzsche in the work of André Gide, Georges Bataille,
Roger Caillois, and the German exile in Paris Walter Benjamin.
26
also the youthful energy and attitude that characterizes the films he made during this
period. This time period, from just after World War One until just after World War Two,
coincides with Painlevé’s wild years, characterized as previously noted, by his love for
speed, experimentation, adventure, and a rebellious spirit: years of uneasy maturation.
Painlevé’s post-liberation films did not abandon these qualities, but in the interwar period
these characteristics were most pronounced, had the largest public, and often intersected
directly with larger social and aesthetic movements.
These years also coincide with a period in the history of French cinema that
Dudley Andrew describes as marked by an industry undergoing a sort of “adolescence”
as the visual experimentation of the 1920s exemplified by impressionism and surrealism
receded as filmmakers and studios, out of economic necessity and creative enthusiasm,
turned their energies toward the transition to sound and the rethinking of the cinematic
narrative.
44
He identifies during this moment the emergence of a set of great “adolescent”
filmmakers (René Clair, Jean Vigo, and Jacques Prévert) characterized by their attempts
to work out a film practice that combined the experimentation of the twenties with a turn
toward the popular that marked the 1930s. Their works is characterized by an enthusiasm
for the “gymnastic possibilities of sound film,” a “liberty of feeling and movement” and
both “rage and tenderness.”
45
Painlevé certainly fits among such company, both through
his personal connections with all through filmmakers and through a shared sensibility as

44
Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 53-86.
45
Ibid., 55, 86.
27
notably for its energy and enthusiasm as its mercurialness and even awkward moments.
Painlevé’s work during this period was not quite formed but rather explicitly taking shape
and just as explicitly playing with its own plasticity. Furthermore, his primary area of
filmmaking—the documentary film—was itself still in formation. The documentary film
already had a long history and wide range of variable approaches, but had not yet
coalesced into anything as auspicious as a “Tradition.” The 1920s and early 1930s in are
marked by an incredible enthusiasm regarding the possibilities of cinema’s
epistemological and political potentials. Painlevé contributed a distinct if often
underappreciated series of interventions into these debates, which will not hold quite the
same valence after the Second World War and an increasing skepticism and caution
regarding the propagandistic powers of mass media. Painlevé, willingly or not, was at the
center of the French documentary movement of the 1930s, and used his name and fortune
to advocate both for the expansion and unsettling of the documentary film.
In addition, this dissertation gives greater attention to the theoretical implications
of Painlevé’s work for film theory. Painlevé œuvre intervenes into debates concerning the
ontology of the medium (the Painlevé effect), the parameters and potentials of cinematic
realism, and as this introduction elaborates, the development of documentary film.
Painlevé’s films engaged with what may be called a wild realism, which is to say, a mode
of realist representation that emphasizes rather than represses the unstable and ambiguous
qualities of the filmic image. For Painlevé filming wildlife made a pivotal impact upon
the shape and consequences of his mode of realism and the manner in which it imagines
cinema as vitally implicated in life itself. Painlevé’s work instructs viewers that film and
28
the institutions of cinema are not only crucial for the unflinching observation of life, but
are potentially revolutionary in their pedagogical capacities for imaging and
experimenting with new sciences of life and living.
At the margins of this argument on Painlevé’s timeliness, and perhaps slightly
counter to it, Painlevé’s films have a certain untimely [inactuel] quality. Painlevé’s
films—like many early motion studies and scientific films, where need to produce legible
images while controlling the excess datum recorded by the camera called for the use of
black fields which literally abstract the objects from their milieu—deploy a recurrent
mise-en-scène produced by the dark field of an ultramicroscope or the carefully lit
aquarium before a black backdrop (Figure 2).
46
At the level of the image, his films appear
to frequently encase their subjects in the sort of “ahistorical atmosphere” that Nietzsche
describes as the condition of possibility for invention, for the new, for life. “The
ahistorical is like an enveloping atmosphere, which alone can engender life, but which
disappears again with the destruction of this atmosphere.”
47

46
Thierry Lefebvre remarks upon the surprising productivity of the black backgrounds of many science
films, asking: “Do all beautiful stories begin with a black background/obscure depths?” (Les belles
histories débuteraient-elles toutes sur un fond d’obscurité? Lefebvre, “Film scientifique et grand public.
Une rencontre différée” in E J Marey: Actes du colloque du centenaire, ed. Dominique de Font-Réaulx,
Thierry Lefebvre, and Laurent Mannoni (Paris: Arcadia, 2006), 167.
This position is contrary to Philippe-Alain Michaud’s claim, from his brilliant essay on Jean
Comandon, that while Painlevé’s films are inseparable from the historical context of the avant-garde film
movements of the 1920s, Comandon’s films exists in a productively unhistorical atmosphere. While
Painlevé’s films certainly carry the imprint of their times, as this dissertation goes to lengths to establish,
many of his works also exceed them, appearing slightly out of joint with their present and ours. Michaud
“Croissance des Végétaux (1929): La Melencolia de Jean Comandon,” 1895, no. 18, special issue: Images
du Réel: La Non-Fiction en France (1890-1930), ed. Thierry Lefebvre (1995): 272.
47
Friedrich Nietzsche, “De L’Utilité et de L’Inconvénient des Études Historiques pour la Vie (1874)” in
Considerations Inactuelles, trans. Henri Albert (Paris: Société de Mercure de France, 1907), 130;
Nietzsche, “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” in Unfashionable Observations, vol. 2 of The
Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
29
Fig. 2. Frame capture from Hyas et Sténorinques, crustacés marins (1929/1931).
Painlevé’s film appear—like the strange creatures they document—as odd hybrid
creations, somewhat improper, which is to say, out of joint, out of place, in between
categories, but also possessed of a slightly disturbing or displacing effect remarked upon
in many reviews of his work. To study Painlevé’s films is not only to put them into the
historical context of their origins, but also to see how they continue to disturb these
contexts, how they are original. This shifts attention from the creative treatment of
actuality to the creative force of the inactuel, of the productive possibility of inactualités,
by which I mean remainders and reminders of the past that seemingly continue to exert a
disruptive force to thought, seemingly unexhausted by the passage of time. The
untimeliness of the Painlevé work—“historical, to be sure, but it is not dated”—manifests

1995), 91. See also Tom Gunning’s use of untimely to refer to anachronistic but productive effects of
media to generate artistic creativity, but also to disrupt teleological or present-ist thinking. Tom Gunning,
“To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision,” Grey Room, 26 (2007): 94–127.
30
itself both as glimpses of documentary film’s forgotten histories and its unrealized or
abandoned potentials.
48
0.5 Defining Documentary
The question of documentary film’s origins and definition is marked by struggles over
priority, translation, and resistance to translation which have had a lasting effect on how
the history of the form has been written and institutionally understood, and related to this,
what are recognized as its tasks and possibilities as an expressive form. A growing
historical interest in early nonfiction film since the celebration of cinema’s centennial in
1995 has helped, as Paula Amad notes, “put to rest the tired notion that documentary film
was brought to life in three stages following its conception at the turn of the century with
the Lumière brothers, its gestation around 1921-22 with Robert Flaherty and Dziga
Vertov, and finally its delivery in 1926 by John Grierson, under the name of ‘creative
treatment of actuality.’”
49
Such work has revealed the incredible diversity of nonfiction

48
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf, intro. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg
(New York: Routledge, 1994), 4.
49
Paula Amad, “Cinema’s ‘sanctuary’: From pre-documentary to documentary film in Albert Kahn’s
Archives de la Planète (1908-1931),” Film History, 13 (2001): 139. Amad’s prose appears to collapse
Grierson’s use of the term “documentary value” from his 8 February 1926 review of Flaherty’s Moana in
the New York Sun with his second installment of his “First Principles of Documentary” essays, published
in Cinema Quarterly in Spring 1933, but her point is nevertheless made.
The interest in early nonfiction cinemas benefited considerably from the research presented in
Sylvie Tremblay, ed., 100 Anées Lumière: rétrospective de l'œuvre documentaire des grands cinéastes
français de Louis Lumière jusqu'à nos jours, (Paris: Intermédia, 1991); Thierry Lefebvre, ed., 1895,
Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma, 18: Images du Réel: La Non-Fiction en France
(1890-1930) (1995); Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk, eds., Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early
Nonfiction Films (Amsterdam: Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997); F. de la Bretèque, ed., Cahiers du
Cinémathèque, 66: Les Actualités filmées françaises (1997); and Alexis Martinet, ed., Le Cinéma et la
Science (1994; repr., Paris: CNRS, 2002). Festivals and conferences such as Cinéma du Réel (established
31
cinematic practices, including travelogues, newsreels, and actualités (what Tom Gunning
calls the “view aesthetic” characterized by explicit acts of looking
50
), popular science
films, wildlife films, educational, hygiene, and industrial films, and other non-theatrical
film practices, most notably for this study, scientific research films, but also much of the
avant-garde film production of the moment, including city symphonies, film poems, and
photogénie montage films.
51
The boundaries of these categories are often porous, and
while many of the films do not correspond to even the most expansive definitions of
documentary and require different conceptualization, it would be a mistake to entirely
abandon the use of the term documentary to refer to of this material, as to do so is to
simply reduplicate the exclusions made by Grierson and Rotha.
In his dissertation on the history of popular science films of the early twentieth
century, Oliver Gaycken calls for a fuller history of the film documentaire, cautioning
“documentary is not a term that should be ceded to a later period, primarily because the
term is in such extensive use at the time [the 1910s and 1920s].”
52
At the risk of

1978), Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (established 1982), Domitor (established 1985), and Visible Evidence
(established 1993) have provided important venues for fostering this research.
50
Tom Gunning “Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the ‘View Aesthetic’,” in Uncharted
Territory, 12.
51
This last categories includes such films as Henri Chomette’s Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse (1925) and
Cinq minutes de cinéma pur (1925); Jean Grémillon’s Photogénie mécanique (1924) and Gratuités (1927);
and Jean Epstein’s Photogénies (1925), as well as the compliation film Les Animaux photogéniques (ca.
1927), assembled by the Laboratoire du Vieux-Colombier. The latter of these may have been made to
accompany a lecture by the author Colette, reported by Émile Vuillermoz in Le Temps, 9 July 1927, under
the title “La Photogénie des bêtes.” With the exception of Chomette’s films, the balance of these are
presumed lost.
52
Oliver Alexander Gaycken, “Devices of Curiosity: Cinema and the Scientific Vernacular” (dissertation,
University of Chicago, 2005), 23-24.
32
prolonging the “Griersonian hangover,”
53
it is helpful to rehearse Grierson’s and Rotha’s
primary arguments. Despite their political and personal differences, both men construct
their complimentary definitions of documentary from the same sets of exclusions and the
same claim that documentary will be narrative or it will not be. Paying special attention
to what they repress helps illuminate practices lying in the shadows cast by the
formidable documentary tradition Grierson and Rotha worked to erect.
John Grierson’s famous polemic “First Principles of Documentary,” published in
three installments in Cinema Quarterly in 1932, 1933, and 1934, stakes part of its claims
on a historical rupture marked by the film-specific translation of the French term film
documentaire into the English term “documentary film.” Grierson begins with an
expressed dissatisfaction. “Documentary is a clumsy description, but let it stand. The
French who first used the term only meant travelogue.”
54
His French philology leaves
something to be desired, as film documentaire referred to a wide range of nonfiction film
practices beyond travelogues—though it is a recurrent trope in early documentary
literature in French to claim that the latest documentary is the one that breaks free from

Part of my critique of Bill Nichols, Brian Winston, and Derek Bousé (see note 4), among others, is
that even in their disagreements they are too obedient to the Griersonian definition of documentary
(particularly in terms of what it excludes), even as they level strong critiques at many of the films of the
Griersonian school and of Grierson’s policy and politics.
53
Kevin Macdonald and Mark Cousins, Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary (London:
Faber and Faber, 1996), xi.
54
John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” 145. I use the 1971 reprint of the 1966 edition as it
maintains some key phrases missing from the 1979 edition, most notably, “the creative treatment of
actuality.” For an edifying discussion of these edits, see Brian Winston, Claiming the Real II:
Documentary: Grierson and Beyond (London: BFI, 2008), 17. Of course the version of “First Principles”
published in any version of Grierson on Documentary is itself a revision and synthesis of the arguments put
forward over the three issues of Cinema Quarterly between winter 1932 and spring 1934. Thus on occasion
I will also refer to the essays as originally published in Cinema Quarterly.
33
this heritage.
55
Within the French context, a simple examination of some dictionaries
suggests a longer history and more varied understanding of the documentary as a form of
representation, that as Phil Rosen has shown through his genealogy of documentary’s
root word docere, tends to organize around two semantic clusters: to teach or to warn,
and evidence or proof. Paul-Émile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française cites
usage of term documentaire with regards to a mode of aesthetic representation from
1876: “Fromentin alone has painted Arab life with a documentary precision and a finesse
of ethnographic insight [pénétration]…”
56
Le Grand Robert de la langue française lists
“film documentaire” as first appearing in 1896, and cites André Gide’s reference to
Allégret filming the “‘documentary’ scenes” in his chapter on Voyage au Congo in his
Souvenirs as its exemplar, and with regards to film, dates the appearance of
“documentaire” as a noun to 1915.
57
Le Dictionnaire historique de la langue française
lists “documentaire” as:
[D]erived from document, has specifically become a business term (1877) in
credit expressions, traite documentaire [documentary bill]. It entered into the

55
For examples of French accounts of documentary being made upon their rupture from the simple
travelogue, see Edmond Epardaud, “À L’Assaut des Alpes avec le Ski,” Cinéa, no. 79 (17 November 1922):
2-3; and Jean Tedesco, “Au Vieux-Colombier: Le ‘Voyage au Congo’ d’André Gide et Marc Allégret,”
Cinéa-Ciné Pour Tous, nos. 87-88 (15 June-1 July 1927): 12-13. Epardaud valorizes À L’Assaut des Alpes
avec le Ski for its inclusion of drama. Tedesco sees the potential of the cinematic documentary in camera
technique and aesthetics. He will, elsewhere, evince a far wider understanding of documentary, such as in
his adventurous programming at the Vieux-Colombier, and in his long-standing interest in and support for
science films. As suggested by the two citations from Cinéa and Cinéa-Ciné Pour Tous, to name but one
source, the term documentary was in wide circulation through the 1920s.
56
Paul-Émile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française, Tome 2 (Versailles: Encyclopedia Britannica
France, 1997), 1789.
57
Le Grand Robert de la langue française: dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française,
Tome 2, ed. Paul Robert, (Paris: Le Robert, 2001), 1617. The 1915 citation supports Tom Gunning’s thesis
that it is the propaganda efforts of World War One that spur the transformation in documentary.
34
domain of cinema as the scène documentaire [documentary scene] (1906), then
film documentaire, substantivized by Documentaire n. m. (1915), in order to
designate a film without fiction, generally of medium of short length, abridged in
familiar language as docu (1967) or docucu (from cucul ‘ridicule’), these films
not having a very high reputation among the general public.
58
Beyond the simple trip to the dictionary, one finds in Boleslas Matuszewski’s now
famous plea for a cinema archive, “A New Source of History,” a key citation of film’s
“documentary interest” and the value of cinema for studying the past.
59
Granted,
Matuszewski’s use of documentary is much closer to the notion of document than later
usages. His enthusiasm for the evidentiary status of the new medium also tends to place
considerable faith in the flawless objectivity of lenses.
One of the most significant, and overlooked, uses of documentary with relation to
cinema came a year later from the surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen’s discussion of the
“documentary value” of films in his article “Le Cinématographe et l’Enseignement de la
Chirurgie,” published in the inaugural issue of Revue Critique de Médecine et de
Chirurgie.
60
Twenty-seven years prior to Grierson’s famous description of the
documentary value of Moana, Doyen wrote: “Surgical cinematography presents another
interest: films, which can be conserved for a very long time, possess an undeniable
documentary value and will henceforth serve the history of surgery.” Unless one counts

58
Le Dictionnaire historique de la langue française: contenant les mots français en usage et quelques
autres délaissés, avec leur origine proche et lointaine, Tome 1, ed. Alain Rey (Paris: Le Robert, 1998),
620.
59
Boleslas Matuszewski, “A New Source of History,” trans. Laura U. Marks and Diane Koszarski, Film
History, vol. 7, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 322 (originally published in 1898).
60
Eugène-Louis Doyen, “Le Cinématographe et l’Enseignement de la Chirurgie,” Revue Critique de
Médecine et de Chirurgie, 1 année, no. 1, 15 August 1899, 3.
35
the fantastic voyage of interior views of the human body solely as travelogues, a clear
and relatively wide-ranging thinking of the meaning and uses of documentary is already
in use in 1899.
In a text published in 1907 under the title “Les Vues cinématographiques,”
Georges Méliès writes of “animated documentary photographs (la photographie
documentaire animée)” in a manner quite close to what Tom Gunning describes and
Grierson had dismissed as the “views aesthetic.” He introduces animated documentary
photographs as focused on footage taken outdoors (e.g. outside of the studio), though he
also discusses scientific footage as technically fitting under this category as well,
particularly when it involves no intervention on the part of the filmmaker (of course, as
Painlevé goes to pains to explain, filming is an intervention). As if in anticipation of
Grierson, he dismisses this work as “easy” and a lesser form of filmmaking.
61
This survey of a range of uses of documentaire should at the very least suggest the
wide range of practices falling under the name that are not simply naïve and were the
subject of some debate well before Grierson. In 1928 the documentary filmmaker André
Sauvage, a contemporary of Painlevé well known for his mountain climbing films as well
as his studies of Paris, offered this startling opinion on the difficulties of defining the
documentary. Sauvage, who would soon after resign from film in order to escape the
indignities of sponsorship, cogently identified some of the key stakes of the documentary
practices taken as taken up in Painlevé’s work:

61
Georges Méliès, “Cinematographic Views” trans. Stuart Liebman, in French Film Theory and Criticism:
1907-1939, vol. 1, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 37-38.
36
What do I think of the documentary? First of all, what is this word: documentary?
It reminds me of that appalling thing: the traite documentaire [the documentary
bill], of which I defy you to give me a definition…I do not understand the
classification one makes of films… It is in the ‘documentary’ that the true Cinema
is most often shown… The cinema is above all—condition sine qua non of its
existence—TRUE. It is the art of the real. Let’s agree on this last word. Understand
that I expect from the Cinema the most seductive madness... The director is
obliged to multiply himself, to ceaselessly forget and rediscover himself, to
prodigiously decenter himself.
62
Sauvage’s equation of the documentary with the traite documentaire (a bill) emphasizes
the manner in which even this form of filmmaking, often supposed to be at the margins of
the film industry and its typical systems of capitalization, is premised a debt. This debt,
however, is not just to the system of sponsorship, but a debt to the real, a debt to truth. It
is a debt, an obligation, that demands the director be willing to displace or decenter
himself or herself and become, in a word, eccentric in service of a seductive madness of
the cinema of the real.
Returning to Grierson’s polemical “First Principles of Documentary,” it should be
acknowledge that the text does not lack insight in its observation of a shift in nonfiction
film aesthetics. The article even contains a bit of humor and even an odd poetic passage,
for example Grierson’s Flaherty-inspired analogy of “the crazy walrus of international
capitalism” verges on the short of charmed nonsense of surrealist exquisite corpse word
games.
63
Grierson notes that documentary generally refers to films based upon “natural

62
Anonymous, “Les Cinéastes: Chez André Sauvage,” Cinéa-Ciné Pour Tous, no. 113 (15 July 1928): 19-
20.
63
John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” 149.
Should one be tempted to misread the “crazy walrus of international capitalism” as the expression
of a left-wing firebrand, it is useful to cite Peter Morris’s erudite study (and withering critique) of
Grierson’s intellectual foundation in the philosophies of idealism, neoconversativism, and Calvinism,
particularly his discussion of neoconservativism’s suspicion of international finance capital. Peter Morris,
37
materials” “shot on the spot.”
64
These include, in his terms, newsreels, various “interests”
(both discursive and dramatic), educational, wildlife, and science films, and picturesque
or exotic travelogues. He groups all of these modes of films together as documentary’s
“lower categories”—what Paul Rotha refers to along the same tautological lines in 1936
as “non-story cinema”—which are intended for exclusion from the use of the name
documentary.
65
Such films fail to dramatize their materials, “they describe, and even
expose, but in any aesthetic sense, only rarely reveal.”
66
Rotha, perhaps betraying his lack of exposure to them, writes of “Jean Painlevé’s
beautiful fish films” and other non-story work, that “They make no effort to approach
their subjects from a creative or even dramatic point of view, no attempt to govern the
selection of images by methods other than those of plain description, no endeavour to
express an argument or fulfill a special purpose.”
67
The so-called lower category
primarily presents footage of people, places, and processes through what Tom Gunning,
in his essay “Before the Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the View Aesthetic,”
describes the aesthetic logic of “views”; films characterized by an “explicit regard” and
“primal acts of viewing.” He cites it as the dominant form of nonfiction films prior to

“Rethinking Grierson: The Ideology of John Grierson,” in P. Veronneau, M. Dorland, and S. Feldman, eds.,
Dialogue: Canadian and Quebec Cinema (Montreal: Mediatexte, 1987), 26, 35.
64
Ibid., 145.
65
Ibid; and Paul Rotha, Documentary Film, 77.
66
Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” 146.
67
Rotha, Documentary Film, 77.
38
World War One, when nationalist impulses began to shape nonfiction materials into
explicit rhetorical appeals related to propaganda and war efforts.
68
Grierson reserves the term documentary exclusively for what he designates its
higher, rhetorical forms. From the same foundation in natural materials shot on the spot,
the higher categories make a passage “from the plain (or fancy) descriptions of natural
material, to arrangements, rearrangements, and creative shapings of it”—what he initially
described in his second installment in Cinema Quarterly as “Documentary, or the
creative treatment of actuality” which is “a new art with no such background in the story
and the stage as the studio product so glibly possesses.”
69
The higher form of
documentary is defined by its ascension to the realm of rhetoric and interpretation
through the sculpting or, as Gunning suggests, the repression of the latent semiotic
unruliness of the filmic image in its raw state.
70
This taming is primarily achieved through
narrative organization, though it should be noted that even the tidiest of narrative films
can only regulate and not completely exclude such potential excess.

68
Tom Gunning "Before Documentary," 12.
69
Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” 146; and Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,”
Cinema Quarterly (Spring 1933): 8. Of course Grierson is not completely against the creation of sets and
controlled filming environments; Drifters included scenes shot in a boat cabin constructed on dry land and
filmed its underwater scenes at an aquarium (you can see the filmmakers in the reflection of the glass in
some shots).
70
Tom Gunning, “Before Documentary,” 23; and Bill Nichols, “Documentary Film and the Modernist
Avant-Garde,” 582.
39
A second repression, identified by Bill Nichols, occurs with regards to the
relationship between the higher form of documentary and avant-garde films.
71
Grierson,
as is often noted, claimed documentary to be an “anti-aesthetic movement,” and his
writings later into the 1930s and 1940s expand upon the distrust with which he held
aesthetics and beauty.
72
Grierson cites Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphey’s Ballet
mécanique (1924), Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926) and Walter
Ruttman’s Berlin (1927) as significant but failed precedents to his conception of the
documentary, largely for their formalist excesses, which Nichols takes to be an
expression of Grierson’s distaste for formalism but also a suspicion of the political
potential of modernist avant-garde films, in their assaults upon the ideological
assumptions of realism and common sense.
73
The balance of raw material and narrative imposition is more skillfully handled,
in Grierson’s opinion, by Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926), Victor A. Turin’s Turksib
(1929), Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930), and of course, his own film Drifters (1929), which
made its premier at the London Film Society alongside Jean Epstein’s Fall of the House

71
Bill Nichols, “Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde,” 582. This essay merits attention for
its argument concerning the repressed proximity between modernist avant-garde and documentary cinemas,
but makes its own exclusions in its dismissal of wildlife and scientific cinema (largely on ideological
grounds) and its insistence that documentary is narrative. If Nichols considered the work of Painlevé in
making his argument, the text would be forced to make different conclusions.
72
In “The Course of Realism” Grierson describes the beauty of the lower category of documentary,
particularly science and wildlife films (he invokes the names Bruce Woolfe, Mary Field, and Percy Smith)
as inversely proportional to their social urgency, and in “The Documentary Idea: 1942” he introduces his
claim that documentary was from the start anti-aesthetic. Grierson, “The Course of Realism (1937),” and
“The Documentary Idea: 1942,” in Grierson on Documentary, 202, 249.
73
Nichols, “Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde,” 593-594.
40
of Usher and Eisenstein’s Potemkin.
74
Grierson describes most avant-garde films, in their
successes, as potentially dangerous (his word) for not putting their aesthetics in service of
“new persuasions.” He critiques the first two films for having been “too scrappy and had
not mastered the art of cutting sufficiently well to create the sense of ‘march’ necessary
to the genre.”
75
This lack of a sense of march, of marching orders, and a lack of new
persuasions with a social telos, a proper direction, is a fatal deficiency for Grierson. A
propagandist and bureaucrat at heart, Grierson’s higher form of documentary must serve
to educate viewers—and by educate Grierson intends not only rational argumentation but
affective persuasion, for education is “the process by which men are fitted to serve their
generation and bring it into the terms of order…the tasks of good citizenship…to the
highest purposes of community” and “the key to mobilization of men’s minds to right
ends or wrong ends…”
76
Documentary was, as Grierson was fond of saying, both his
pulpit and hammer.

74
Caroline Zéau, “Cinéaste ou propagandiste? John Grierson et «l’idée documentaire»,” 1895, no. 55 (June
2008): 55. A tireless self-promoter, Grierson assesses Drifters to be more technically accomplished in
terms of “rhythmic effects” than Potemkin. See “First Principles of Documentary,” 152.
75
Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” 152, 150.
76
Grierson, “Education and the New Order (1941),” in Grierson on Documentary, 261-262. It is in this
essay that Grierson claims, through his Calvinist roots, to be a “totalitarian for good,” as opposed to a
Stalinist or Hitlerian totalitarian for evil (269). For a thorough discussion of Grierson’s politics, and
particularly his Hegelian conception of the state, see Peter Morris, “Rethinking Grierson.” Morris quotes a
letter from Grierson to Zachariah Chafee, Jr., from 30 December 1947, in which he summarizes his basic
political philosophy:
My personal view is that such total planning by the state is an absolute good and not simply a
relative good… I do not myself think of the attitude I take as deriving from Marx—though this
undoubtedly will be suggested—but from Fichte and Hegel. My view of the State, as you know, is
that it is only through the State than the person and the will of the person can be greatly expressed.
(27)
41
Paul Rotha echoes Grierson’s perspective and anxiety of influence in his own
version of documentary’s origins, which also makes efforts to break from both the views
aesthetic and the continental avant-garde films.
The realist approach to actually existing material and themes springs, in the first
place, from the avant-garde filmmakers in France, who, hypnotized by the facile
tricks of the movie camera, produced for their own edification many short films
dealing with one or other aspect of Parisian or provincial French life. Seldom
profound, but often witty, these pastiches were inspired by nothing more serious
than kindergarten theory, their observations on the contemporary city scene being
limited to obvious comparisons between poor and rich, clean and dirty, with a
never-failing tendency towards the rhythmic movements of machinery and the
implications of garbage cans.
77
Rotha, as I discuss in chapter four, is surprisingly accurate in his description of French
realist filmmaking as owing a debt to “kindergarten theory” (in the form of leçons de
choses and other pedagogical methods of the realist education movement in France). But

Although it would be unfair to retroactively read his remarks from 1947 upon his theorization of
documentary in 1932-1934, and his remarks on education from 1941, Morris also draws out the bedrock of
these ideas in both Grierson’s education at the University of Edinburgh and his research on public opinion
and mass media with the Rockefeller foundation and University of Chicago, which drew together the
political philosophies of Kant, Hegel, Machiavelli, A. D. Lindsay, Graham Wallas, and Thomas Carlyle,
through Walter Lippmann (27-32).
Further comment on the political and bureaucratic foundations of Grierson’s understanding of
documentary can be found in Winston, Claiming the Real; Nichols, “Documentary and the Modernist
Avant-Garde”; and Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Rosen—updating an argument originally forwarded in the 1994
essay “Document and Documentary: On the Persistence of Historical Concepts,”—suggests,
In the end, the Griersonian conception of documentary film is a theory about the function and
duties of elites with respect to the mass of the population, not just as political leaders but as
‘educators’ who, among other things, are urged to work as productive agents of the media. (251)
Using Rosen’s insight to slightly complicate Brian Winston’s thesis that Griersonian documentary is
characterized by a “running away from social meaning” (42, original emphasis), we might see such films
not so much as retreating from social meaning but as conforming to Grierson’s particular vision of social
meaning as defined by and for the technocratic state—an aesthetics and politics of the technocratic sublime.
77
Paul Rotha, Documentary Film (1936; repr. London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 85 (my emphasis). To be
fair, the additions made to the text in postwar editions return to Painlevé’s work, and that of other French
documentary filmmakers, with a slightly more charitable eye (268-274).
42
more germane to present concerns is his reaffirmation of the Griersonian exclusions,
which include a sense of such films as fascinated with modes of movement improper to
documentary and subjects that are themselves improper, concerned with the implications
of garbage cans; quite literally the lower categories or lower strata of nonfiction film.
The allusion to lower categories has strong resonances with Painlevé’s materialist
practice of documentary that counters or even negates the idealist documentary put
forward by Grierson as well as the champions of the use of film within French realist
education (see chapter four). If Painlevé’s wild realism, as I argue, emphasizes
engagement with the material world, its theorization finds support and expansion in
another thinker of a challenging and insolent realism: George Bataille and his theory of
base materialism a mode of radical empiricism and transvaluation—the revaluation of
values (see the elaboration of wild realism in the next section of this chapter as well as
the further discussion of Bataille’s materialism in relation to Painlevé in chapter three).
78
The translation, transposition, and subsequent refinement of the documentary
through its ascension from documentaire’s lower to upper strata, attempts to effect—as
one would expect of a polemic—a dislocation of the documentary from its prior aesthetic,
ideological, and, to an extent, institutional contexts. As a manner of augmenting
Gunning’s and Nichols’s repression theses, I would like to call attention to the way
Grierson’s founding, foundational statement, intended to provide steady feet to a clumsy

78
Georges Bataille, “La Bas Matérialisme et La Gnose,” Documents, année 2, no. 1 (1930): 1-8; published
in English as “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed.
and introduced by Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1985), 45-52.
43
term in order to form a proper—in multiple senses of the word—documentary movement
(a gesture echoed by Rotha), is premised upon the repression of a certain kind of
improper movement in documentary films, an improper documentary movement:
Documentary is a clumsy description, but let it stand. The French who first
used the term only meant travelogue. It gave them a solid high-sounding
excuse for the shimmying (and otherwise discursive) exoticisms of the
Vieux Colombier. Meanwhile documentary has gone on its way. From
shimmying exoticisms it has gone on to include dramatic films like
Moana, Earth, and Turksib. And in time it will include other kinds as
different in form and intention from Moana, as Moana was from Voyage
au Congo.
79
Grierson makes it clear that “shimmying (and otherwise discursive) exoticisms” have no
place in the redefinition of documentary as a means for guiding and shaping public
opinion.
80
Grierson’s interdiction of the shimmy comes through a sly critique of the
fetishistic and exoticized aspects of French negrophilia and its relation to colonial
projects; a critique that might appear less rhetorically hollow were it not drafted from the
desk of the Empire Marketing Board.
81
Through a doubled reference to André Gide and

79
Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” 145.
80
One must avoid the temptation to make Grierson into a simple straw man. His distaste for shimmying is
not universal, but limited to its (to his mind) incongruous appearance in the documentary. For example,
whatever he thought of the shimmy, Grierson was not ontologically allergic to its sources. According to
interviews Jack C. Ellis conducted with Grierson, and with his American friend the abstract painter
Rudolph Weisenborn, his spouse Fritzie Weisenborn, and their son Gordon, Grierson and his friends
frequented Chicago’s “Negro cafés to listen to Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and others,” during his time
in the states from 1924-1927. Grierson appears to have sustained this appreciation for jazz and other forms
of popular music throughout his life. Jack C. Ellis, “The Young Grierson in America, 1924-1927,” Cinema
Journal, vol. 8, no. 1 (1968): 16.
81
The opening lines of “First Principles of Documentary,” appear in the initial 1932 version published in
Cinema Quarterly. Grierson was under the employ of the Empire Marketing Board until its dissolution in
late 1933.
44
Marc Allégret’s documentary Voyage au Congo (1926), co-produced by and premièred at
the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, Grierson distinguishes British imperial documentary
from French colonial documentaries—such as Croisière noire (Léon Poirier, 1925), Les
Mystères du Continent Noir (Maison d’Aubert, 1926), Chez les Mangeurs d’hommes
(André-Paul Antoine and Robert Lugeon, 1928), and Au Pays du Scalp (Marquis de
Wavrin with Alberto Cavalcanti, 1931)—which in large part devise their attraction from
the frisson of unruly primitive movements, tropical savagery, and naked native flesh.
82

82
The question of primitivism and negrophilia in France is the topic of numerous studies. For a gloss of
negrophilia amongst the Paris avant-garde, see Petrine Archer-Shaw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and
Black Culture in the 1920s (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000); James Clifford, “Negrophilia,” in A New
History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 901-
908. See also Ivan Goll’s “The Negroes are Conquering Europe (1926),” in Modernism and Music: An
Anthology of Sources, ed. Daniel Albright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 378-380, for an
enthusiastic, fetishistic reception to the perceived invigorating powers of jazz and black culture to Europe;
and Michel Leiris’ anthropological reflections on the machinic and animal allures of jazz for the postwar
generation in L’Âge d’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1939).
In Dudley Andrew’s essay on exoticism and colonial fascination in interwar France, he mentions
Léon Poirier—noted for his Citroën sponsored adventure documentaries La Croisière Noire (1924) and La
Croisière Jaune (1932) as well as his earlier contributions to French realism—is said to have found André
Gide and Marc Allégret’s Voyage au Congo literally obscene, in large part for what Andrew relays as
Gide’s “patronizing bemusement” and sense of superiority towards the cultures he encountered. Departing
from Andrew’s reading, one wonders if Poirier’s mixture of right wing and “Franciscan” sensibilities were
offended by Gide and Allégret’s focus on their subjects’ bodies—healthy and sick—and a rather
complicated economy of colonialist and critical exoticism, that if insufficient, did register a mounting
awareness of the injustices of colonialism. Dudley Andrew, “Praying Mantis: Enchantment and Violence in
French Cinema of the Exotic,” in Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film, ed. Matthew Bernstein and
Gaylyn Studlar (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 232-252, esp. 238.
Then again, perhaps in the same manner that no war movie that portrays the spectacle of war can
truly be anti-war, perhaps no colonial film that participates in the ethnographic gaze can truly be anti-
colonial. Jean Tedesco, who co-produced and exhibited Voyage au Congo (and who cannot exactly be
considered free of self-interest in this matter), advocates for the film’s importance as a continuation of the
Flaherty tradition of the poetic documentary in an essay he published in his film magazine Cinéa Ciné Pour
Tous. In a prescient set up to Grierson’s critique, Tedesco claims that the “documentary spirit” remains for
the most part, firmly planted in the illustrated lantern projection, but that films such as a Voyage au Congo
are truly cinematic for their attention to motion, and in particular, for the featured dances, which he
describes as “a certain mélange of burlesque and religious superstition.” Jean Tedesco, “Au Vieux-
Colombier: Le ‘Voyage au Congo’ d’André Gide et Marc Allégret,” 12-13.
For an engaging examination of Gide’s book of the same title that draws out a growing sense of
ambivalence regarding the French colonial project through Gide’s insomnia, see Russell West, “Sleepers
Wake: André Gide and disease in Travels in the Congo,” Pathologies of Travel, ed. Richard Wrigley and
George Revill (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 299-316.
45
Shimmying refers to the frenetic, quivering dance-step created within African
American jazz culture that, when executed skillfully, makes one’s chemise shake. Shortly
after it became a popular dance, mechanics appropriated it to describe shaky or wobbly
machine parts, such as loose automobile wheels.
83
Whether in reference to a highly
eroticized dance that seems to integrate the ultramodern and primitive (a coupling
embodied in the French imaginary by African Americans such as Josephine Baker), a
purely mechanical motion (syncopated by malfunction), a ballet mécanique that draws
together both senses, or a broader reading of the shimmy onto a entire host of frenetic,

On colonial documentaries of interwar France in general and the Croisière noire in particular, see
Peter J. Bloom, French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2008). On the broader category of colonial cinema, see Charles O’Brien, “The ‘Cinéma
colonial’ of 1930s France: Film Narration as Spatial Practice,” in Visions of the East, 207-231. For a
foundational critique of ethnographic cinema that covers much of the same period, see Fatimah Tobing
Rony’s The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1996).
For reviews of Les Mystères du Continent Noir see Anon., “Les Mystères du Continent Noir,”
Cinéa-Ciné Pour Tous, no. 66, 31 July 1926, 22; Anon., “Les Mystères du Continent Noir,” Spectacles,
vol. 4, no. 139, 27 August 1926, 6; Anon., “Les Mystères du Continent Noir: Les Plus Curieux des
Documentaires sur les Plus Primitives du Globe que l’on verra au Congrès d’Amiens,” Spectacles, vol. 4,
no. 179, 3 June 1927, 5.
On Chez les Mangeurs d’hommes, which was featured in the Colonial Exposition in Paris which
ran from 6 May through 15 November, 1931, see Anon., “Chez les Mangeurs d’hommes,” Spectacles, vol.
7, no. 2, 6 June 1930, 2; and Charles de Saint-Cyr, “Avec Chez les Mangeurs d’hommes (que donne le
caméo), la France porte à son actif le documentaire-roi,” La Semaine à Paris, no. 416, 16-23 May 1930, 9-
10. De Saint-Cyr describes the film’s production, and how the filmmakers lived for six months among
cannibals in the Amazon. He valorizes it as a true documentary, capturing “not life reconstituted: life
caught unaware, life itself. Ah! what is Nanouk, and what is Chang next to this; and what is Moana?” He
also praises the film for bringing a glimpse of primitive savagery back to civilization.
On Au Pays du Scalp, see Jean Painlevé’s enthusiastic review for this “true documentary” in “Sur
un film documentaire: Au Pays du Scalp,” Le Monde, no. 157, 6 June 1931, no pagination, held in the
Écrits dossier, FJP. Painlevé mentions that the structure of the film itself appears to be an “astonishing
farandole” (a traditional Niçois line dance) which he imagines to complete a triptych with the dance of the
“young sharks” in Chez les Mangeurs d’hommes and the sorcerers dance Voyage au Congo.
83
The Oxford English Dictionary dates the shimmy’s entrance into popular vocabulary in the USA around
1918, and its adaptation to mechanics by 1925. The Trésor de la langue Français describes the etymology
of shimmy as derived from an Americanization of chemise (this explanation is often apocryphally
attributed to the dancer and actress Gilda Gray, who shook her shoulders while singing). Shimmy entered
French popular language around 1920 in reference to the dance, and around 1925 as a mechanical
condition.
46
rhythmic motions (including as we will see, microscopic life), such movement causes a
disturbance that must be minimized in order to make films with sufficient march instead
of boogie.
84
It is key that Grierson locates the documentary practices he wishes to refute or
deem undeserving of the name in Jean Tedesco’s cinema in the Théâtre du Vieux-
Colombier. The Vieux-Colombier served as one of Paris’s first avant-garde film and
repertory cinemas and became a classroom and laboratory for aspiring filmmakers,
critics, and cultivated spectators. It provided a pivotal locus for emergent avant-garde and
documentary cinemas, and was known for its adventurous and eclectic programming,
which mixed what Tedesco deemed to be historically and aesthetically significant feature
films and documentaries (Robert Flaherty’s Moana ran exclusively there), with
experimental shorts, pre-war comedies and trick films, discarded newsreels and
actualités, and most significantly, scientific and wildlife films; including ones produced
in-house by the Laboratoire du Vieux-Colombier (the self-proclaimed smallest studio in
the world).
85
Grierson’s decision to pluralize the exoticisms of the Vieux-Colombier

84
Such dialogues between popular and modern dance and mechanics—and the resulting ballets
mécaniques—were quite frequent during the 1920s. For an engaging triangulation of the relationship
between dance, machines, and primitivism, see Felicia McCarren’s Dancing Machines: Choreographies of
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). On the connection
between dance, machine, and cinema, see Gunning, “Light, motion, cinema!”
85
My account of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier here and below comes from the three-part series of
articles by André G. Brunelin, “Au Temps du Vieux Colombier de Jean Tedesco,” Cinéma, no. 50 (1960):
85-96; Brunelin, “Au Temps du Vieux Colombier de Jean Tedesco (suite),” Cinéma, no. 51 (1960): 87-105;
and Brunelin, “Au Temps du Vieux Colombier de Jean Tedesco (suite et fin),” Cinéma, no. 52 (1961): 87-
96. See also Christophe Gautier’s indispensible La Passion du Cinéma: Cinéphiles, ciné-clubs et salles
specialisées à Paris de 1920 à 1929 (Paris: AFRHC, 1999)102-123; Noureddine Ghali, L’Avant-Garde
Cinématographiques en France Dans Les Années Vingt: Idées, Conceptions, Théories (Paris: Éditions Paris
Expérimental, 1995), 58-59; Jean-Jacques Meusy, “La Diffusion des Films de «Non-fiction» dans les
Établissements Parisiens,” 1895, no. 18: Images du Réel, La Non-Fiction en France (1890-1930) (1995):
47
expresses a more general distaste for a range of images in the grips of shimmying and
otherwise discursive exoticisms—and eroticisms—that seem destined to pull the idealist
higher functions of the rhetorical documentary back towards the lower categories, the
lower strata, a base materialism.
The œuvre of Jean Painlevé, as this dissertation argues, is nothing if not brimming
with a series of studies on pulsating, provocative, bizarre, cruel, ecstatic—and even
seductive—shimmying. Painlevé makes this point himself in the prologue to Le Vampire/
The Vampire, a documentary on the vampire bat (Desmodus rotondus). The film unfolds
as an essayistic exercise in zoological comparative anatomy and biology, reflecting upon
vampirism, purity and contagion, blood, exoticism, life, death, and fascism from a
perspective rooted in comparative anatomy. The film quite literally straddles the Second
World War: the footage was filmed in 1939 but not edited, sonorized, and released until
1945. The film opens with a montage of footage from Painlevé’s own films, a reflective
mid-career retrospective composed from both his theatrical films and research films, set
to the incredibly “catchy” soundtrack of Duke Ellington’s ironically syncopated funeral
march “Black and Tan Fantasy” (1927) and the swing of “Echoes of the Jungle” (1931).
The images—including footage and outtakes from Grillon du Cameroun (Cameroon
Cricket, 1939), Les Oursins/Sea Urchins (1929), L’Hippocampe/The Seahorse (1935), La
Pieuvre/The Octopus (1929), Hyas et Sténorinques, crustacés marins/Hyas and

169-199; and Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1984), 257-258. One of the best ways to track the activities of the Vieux-Colombier is
through the pages of Cinéa-Ciné Pour Tous, which Tedesco co-edited with Pierre Henry from 1923-1931,
when the magazine folded. See further discussion in the next chapter.
48
Stenorhynchus, marine crustacians (1929/1931), Tique (Tick, 1939)—appear to pulsate
and shimmy along to the music, expressing a nervous, frenzied agitation (see figures 3-6).
Even appropriated footage from F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens
(1922) inserted within the montage appears infected with rhythm, adding a modest swing
to the actor Max Schreck’s step.
Fig. 3. Frame capture from Le Vampire (1939-1945).
Fig. 4. A mosquito potentially spreading malaria and other maladies as it feasts.
Frame capture from Le Vampire (1939-1945).
49
Fig. 5. Ticks secreting an infectious fluid from their thighs as they become swollen with blood.
Frame Capture from Le Vampire (1939-1945)
Fig. 6. The anthropomorphic economy: “Masque négre imitait peut-être de ce grillon du Cameroun / Negro
mask inspired perhaps by this Cameroon cricket.” Frame capture from Le Vampire (1939-1945).
These documents, and their sequencing, literally infect and tear into each other,
but also engage in a voluptuous exchange between fact and fiction, document and
documentary (I return to Le Vampire in the conclusion). Painlevé’s films demonstrate
that in addition to popular culture and popular mechanics, the natural sciences took a
50
deep interest in a sort of shimmying—and movement in all its diversity of
manifestations—as a trace of life, its very signature. Examining Painlevé’s work in its
original contexts bring into focus a heterogeneous documentary cinema, both historical
and possible, that does not treat the higher and lower categories of documentary—to
sustain Grierson’s idiom a moment longer—as antipodal but rather plays upon the
productive tensions created by the imposition of such categorical distinctions that
characteristic of the Painlevé effect.
0.6 Wild Realism
Painlevé’s films are meticulously crafted, but represent nonetheless an alternate practice
and ethos of documentary film to that of the Griersonian documentary tradition (at least
as it has imposed itself upon the historiography of documentary and nonfiction cinemas).
Without conflating the practices of two very different filmmakers, Painlevé’s ethos may
be understood as an extension of both Jean Epstein’s epistemological enthusiasm for the
extrasensory capacities of the cinematic apparatus, and his articulation of a wild realism
intensified by his interest in the inhabitants and life on the rocky islands off the northern
Atlantic coast of France.
86
Epstein insists that films must be used as an extension, rather
than affirmation, of our perceptual senses:

86
Epstein and Painlevé do not seem to have had much contact with each other. Painlevé, however, was
certainly aware of the concept of photogénie and inherited from Epstein a deep interest in
magnification—taken in Painlevé’s case to its very limits. Both can also be understood as drawing upon
Apollinaire’s surrealism, at least initially. The two filmmakers were, however, both members of the
Syndicat des artisans d’art et du cinéma, which took as its aims “the assistance, improvement, and
campaigning for the documentary.” For a discussion of the Syndicat des artisans d’art et du cinéma, see
Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 185.
51
Until the present, the majority of directors have striven to enslave the lens, to
cheat with it in order to make it produce images closer to what we are habituated
to seeing. This creates banality. Whereas I myself am a partisan of using the lens
in a wild state so that it unveils for use these prodigious things that we have until
now been unaware of because our eyes could not reveal them to us.
87
Epstein, revealing his formation in medicine, yearns to discover a world of truths present
but invisible to human vision under most circumstances. Cinema presents, from his
perspective, not only a fecund instrument for expanding human knowledge but through
this very process the possibility of an ecstatic, anti-anthropocentric experience. He
writes:
Why not profit from one of the most rare qualities of the cinematographic eye,
that of being an eye outside of the eye, that of escaping from the tyrannical
egocentrism of our personal vision. Why oblige the sensitive emulsion to only
replicate the functions of our retina. Why not eagerly seize an almost unique
occasion for organizing a spectacle through relation to a center other than of our
own line of sight.
88
He will further extend this point in his short book Le Cinéma vu de l’Etna, noting that the
camera eye is free from the prejudices and morals that color human vision.
89
Instead of

On the epistemological enthusiasm of such filmmakers and film theorists as Jean Epstein, Sergei
Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and René Clair during the 1920s for the analytic qualities of cinema, see Annette
Michelson, “Reading Eisenstein Reading ‘Capital’,” October, 2 (1976): 26-38; Michelson, “Dr. Craze and
Mr. Clair,” October, 11, Essays in Honor of Jay Leyda (1979): 30-53; and Michelson “Introduction,” Kino-
Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. with an introduction by Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xv-lxi.
87
Jean Epstein quoted in YD, “L’Œil et l’objectif,” Comœdia, 20
th
year, no. 4844, 29 March 1926, 2e
(original emphasis). YD’s article, echoing the language to be taken up by Grierson and from the opposite
perspective Bataille, is concerned to limit the perceived dangers of such a laissez-faire film philosophy,
adding: “To demand for something in a wild state is to provoke the unbridling of all the inferior powers…”
88
Jean Epstein, “L’Objectif lui-même,” Cinéa Ciné Pour Tous, no. 53, 15 January 1926, 8 (original
emphasis).
89
Jean Epstein, Le Cinéma vu de l’Etna (1926) in Écrits sur le cinéma, 1921-1953, vol. 1: 1921-1947,
preface by Henri Langlois, introduction by Pierre Leprohon (Paris: Seghers, 1974), 136-137.
52
straining to “tame” the latent semiotic unruliness of the photographic or filmic document
through the imposition of a dramatic arc, the Painlevéan practice—to the extent it takes
up Epstein’s call for an anti-anthropocentric wild realism—is more open to maintaining
the document’s ambiguity, to respecting the resistance of the document to becoming fully
subordinate to the desires of the documentary and documentarian.
The document functions here, in a manner very similar to that experimented with
by Georges Bataille and his collaborators in the pages of the journal Documents, which
ran contemporaneous to Painlevé’s first burst of theatrical filmmaking in 1928-1929, and
to which Painlevé contributed—through his classmate and friend Jacques-André Boiffard
and his occasional collaborator Eli Lotar—several photograms destined for his films
Crabes and Cravettes (1930, 1931).
90
The art historian Georges Didi-Huberman describes
the task of the visual document in Documents as that of “instruments of effraction” set
against any sort of iconographic harmony. Such images contain an aggressive attitude,
crystallized for Didi-Huberman by Painlevé and Lotar’s 1929 photograph of a lobster
claw, jutting out from against an abstract black background as if set to take a bite out of
its beholder.
91
In Didi-Huberman’s reading of Bataille the visual document can exert a
disruptive pressure upon representational systems—introduce an element of wildness.

90
Images from Painlevé’s Crabes and from Cravettes, both filmed in 1929 with Eli Lotar, and released first
in 1930 as individual silent films and then together in 1931 as a sonarized film appear next to Eli Lotar’s
famous images of the abattoir in the dictionary section of Documents, no. 6 (1929) republished in
Documents, Tome 1 (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1991), 331.
91
Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe, ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris:
Éditions Macula, 1995), 61. In an interview featured in the television program Jean Painlevé au fils de ses
films (Denis Derrien and Hélène Hazéra, 1988), Painlevé joked that while Lotar saw the lobster claw as a
portrait of a witch, he saw it as predicting the rise of Charles de Gaulle.
53
The ‘document,’ in the Bataillian sense, would thus be a means for the image and
the imaginary relation to reach their proper limits. Now, the ‘document’ is not a
dream vision: it is a vision of the real. It is a mouth too concrete to make a ‘good
figure’ or ‘pretty face’ [‘bonne figure’], a toe insufficiently idealized to seduce
‘upwards’ [‘hautement’]. The document seeks, in a certain presentation or visual
construction, to produce in the image a ‘material insubordination,’ a symptom
capable of shattering the screen (the repressive apparatus) of representation.
92
In this reading, the document’s task is to engage with the real in such a manner as to
cultivate a potential for material insubordination, a threshold at which representation
begins to break apart and break into other registers.
Painlevé’s œuvre exhibits moments where the visual document produces the very
sort of “material insubordination” explored in Documents. His films may be viewed as
collections of such documents set in motion. This dissertation puts forward an
examination of a documentary practice committed to so-called plain and fancy
description (e.g. the primitive stare of the Lumière camera vs. a scientific document), to
the act of documenting, but also to the art of description and the art of documenting as
modes of discovery and exploration rooted, quite literally, in seeing things. His films
mobilize a photographic and cinematic realism unconcerned with reaffirming habituated
common sense, but rather intent upon expanding and transforming it, a practice that
sometimes required assaulting it. But for all of its cruelty and violence, this is

92
Ibid., 62-63. Didi-Huberman is here channeling his reading of Bataille through Lacan’s Bataillian reading
of Freud’s “Dream of Irma’s Injection” in La Seminaire, II (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 210. The reference to
“dream visions” and the “imaginary relation” which reaches its own limit, describes perceptual experiences
where the ego seems to become disorganized or dissolved. The subject under such circumstances finds him
or herself confronting what Lacan refers to as a quod: a “what-is-it?” that is beyond the ego, and that
ultimately (for Lacan) is a question of the experience of an unconscious subject, an experience of
identifying with or being informe.
54
documentary practice where cinema is not a hammer, but a microscope, and an invitation
to a voyage.
Understanding Painlevé’s documentary practices requires backing up to the
beginning, in order to clarify the movements Painlevé traced, and that this dissertation
traces through his work. Chapters one and two, “Science, Surrealism, and the Cinema,
1924-1926” and “Painlevé’s First Films, 1926-1928,” examine Painlevé’s documentary
practice as it emerged from the interwar romance of scientific and aesthetic
experimentation with film. Here I reconstruct key aspects of Painlevé’s scientific and
aesthetic education and his network of influences from both realms in order to better
depict his singularity as a filmmaker. After examining his research at the Sorbonne and
his participation in a marginalized debate over the definition of surrealism, I look to how
Painlevé’s exposure to scientific, documentary, and avant-garde film as a cinema-goer
informed his conception of documentary, and is in fact a pivotal if often under-studies
aspect of documentary film’s history. Chapter two explores how the various elements
converge in readings of his first cluster of films and begins to draw out the manner in
which Painlevé theorizes film’s wild capacities through its engagement with the science
of the surreal and the surrealism of science.
Chapter three, “Passionate Zoology: Notes on L’Hippocampe, 1929-1930” traces
the manner in which Painlevé’s thinking about medium specificity inform his emergent
documentary ethos concerned with the politics and erotics, albeit in a very circumscribed
sense, of documentary representation. Painlevé’s overdetermined epistemological
enthusiasm and ambiguous use of anthropomorphism produce rather fraught
55
documentary that suggest a subversive and more supple approach to the epistemological
truth claims of the documentary image. Through a close reading of his 1935 film
L’Hippocampe, which pays special attention to the sexual lives and reproductive cycles
of seahorses, it draws out the manner in which Painlevé’s use of the techniques of
scientific cinema reveal their limits and repressions.
Chapter four, “Forgetting Lessons: Realist Education, Documentary, and
Painlevé’s Cinematic Gay Science,” situates Painlevé’s film within the context of Third
Republic educational reforms. Through an examination of the development of the French
educational system’s aesthetic of educational realism, it explores the manner in which the
turn to visual pedagogy informed the emergence and reception of documentary film. This
is set against Painlevé’s brutal critique of the French educational system, and his attempts
to rethink the manner in which film should be used in educational settings. Painlevé’s
documentaries, in context of his educational advocacy, and efforts to teach public courses
in film technique at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, develop a conception
of a cinematic gay science, a science of living joyously based upon the development of a
critical epistemology of the senses.
The conclusion briefly considers Painlevé’s bloody war and postwar films—Le
Vampire, L’Assassin d’eau douce, and his contribution to Georges Franju’s Le sang des
bêtes—as the summary of his early period, pushing the wild potential of documentary
fully into the realm of a cinema of cruelty.
56
CHAPTER 1
SCIENCE, SURREALISM, AND THE CINEMA, 1924-1926
1.1 Autumn, 1924
In autumn 1924, Jean Painlevé, just shy of his 22
nd
birthday, began his public career with
two debuts, one scientific, the other Surrealist. His simultaneous formations in
comparative anatomy and histology at the Sorbonne and in Surrealism through his circle
of friends and associates in the Parisian avant-garde during the 1920s increasingly
overlapped and converged. The tensions between positivist and Surrealist methods and
between the observation of material and immaterial phenomena constitute the central
characteristic of Painlevé’s aesthetic sensibility. These twinned impulses, aimed at the
exploration of phenomena at the limits of everyday perception, informed Painlevé’s turn
to film as a technology of visual prosthesis, precision observation, and startling and
productive juxtapositions. Painlevé’s interest in juxtaposition found support in the
cinema-going and programming practices of such specialty cinemas as Jean Tedesco’s
Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, which also opened in fall 1924. The Théâtre du Vieux-
Colombier regularly programmed scientific films amongst avant-garde and documentary
films, where they were held in special regard as emblems of new ways of seeing. The
development of Painlevé’s hybrid aesthetic draws upon and contributes to the interwar
romance between what are nominally identified as scientific and aesthetic avant-gardes.
On 15 and 24 September, and once again on 27 October, Professor Félix
Henneguy of the Collège de France presented the research of Painlevé and Maurice Parat,
57
his mentor in Dr. Paul Wintrebert’s laboratory of Comparative Anatomy and Histology at
the Sorbonne, in three installments before the Academy of Sciences (Académie des
Sciences). The communications summarized their current research on vital staining and
cell morphology.
1
Newspaper accounts celebrated the son of the famous mathematician
and President of the Chamber of Deputies as the youngest scientist ever to deliver a
communication before the Academy. With the exception of the New York Sun, most of
the major daily papers misprinted his age as 20, a slight exaggeration Painlevé let go
uncorrected for aesthetic reasons. The excitement in the press also resonated with a
collective wish for a renewed, energetic, and productive France, eager to forget the
butchery and waste still haunting the nation.
2
In the midst of his presentations at the Academy, on 10 October, Painlevé made
his artistic debut with the publication of “Drame néo-zoologique” (“Neo-zoological
Drama”)(See Appendices). Perhaps the first and only comparative anatomy “found”

1
Maurice Parat and Jean Painlevé, “Constitution du cytoplasme d’une cellule glandulaire: la cellule des
glandes salivaires de la larve du Chironome,” presented by Félix Henneguy, séance of 15 September,
Comptes Rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des Sciences, Tome 179 (Paris: Gauthiers-
Villons, 1924): 543-544; Parat and Painlevé, “Observation vitale d’une cellule glandulaire en activité.
Nature et rôle de l’appareil réticulaire interne de Golgi et de l’appareil de Holmgren,” presented by Félix
Henneguy, séance of 29 September, Comptes Rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des
Sciences, Tome 179, 612-614; and Parat and Painlevé, “Appareil réticulaire interne de Golgi, trophosponge
de Holmgren et vacuome,” presented by Félix Henneguy, séance of 27 October, Comptes Rendus
hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des Sciences, Tome 179, 844-846. Although the title “Les
colorations vitales sur le protoplasme animal” (Vital staining in animal protoplasm) appears in several press
accounts, and has been the primary title under which Parat and Painlevé’s communication has been referred
to by the few scholars who have written on Painlevé, it does not appear in the Comptes Rendus and is most
likely a summary from a press release.
2
Anon., “L’Académie des Sciences S’Intéresse aux Recherches d’un Savant de Vingt Ans, M. Jean
Painlevé,” Le Petit Parisen, 30 Sept 1924, 1. Reports, all echoing each other, also appear in, Anon., “M.
Painlevé savant de 20 ans,” Paris Soir, 1 October 1924; Anon., “Tel Père, tel Fils,” Midi Socialiste, 3
October 1924; Anon., “Paul Painlevé’s Son Addresses Academy,” New York Sun, 30 September 1924; and
Anon., “Painlevé’s Son is Precocious Scientist,” Chicago Tribune, 2 October 1924. See Hamery, Jean
Painlevé, 26; and Berg, “Contradictory Forces,” 11 for Painlevé’s remarks on the misprinted age.
58
poem, Painlevé’s text appeared in the sole issue of Surréalisme, edited by Ivan Goll
(Figure 7).
3
With attention equal to that given his recent report to the Academy, the
gentlemen of the press reported on the young Painlevé’s first literary venture. This time,
however, the journalists expressed far less enthusiasm, many reproaching the poem as if
it were somehow responsible for worsening the condition of the gravely ill Anatole
France, whose deteriorating health was front page news (he died 12 October).
4
Depending upon the commentator’s sympathies with the politics of the young author’s
father, reviews ranged from mild bemusement to acerbic readings of the poem, frequently
reprinted line for line, as an affront to literature and the French language, a stain on a
prominent family name, a symptom of the failures of modern education and education
reform (see chapter four), and even the stuff of nightmares.
5

3
“Drame néo-zoologique,” Surréalisme, no. 1, ed. Ivan Goll (1924): 12; and “Neo-zoological Drama,”
trans. Jeanine Herman, in Science is Fiction, 117.
4
Updates on Anatole France’s condition appear on the front pages of L’Humanité, L’Instransigeant, Le
Petit Parisien, and Le Figaro on 10-11 October 1924, and page 3 of Le Temps.
5
Anon., “Cinq minutes chez…Jean Painlevé (Surréaliste),” Canard Enchaîné (1924), np; P., “Un Début
dans les Lettres,” Soliel du Midi, 13 October, 1924, np.; Jean-Bernard, “Le Phénomène Painlevé,” Journal
de la Marne, 6 November 1924, np; Anon., “Un début,” Opinion, 17 October 1924, np; and Désiré
Lacoudre, “Une École,” Harvre Éclair, 5 March 1925, np. All from Presses Coupures Originaux dossier,
FJP.
For example, the satirical paper Le Carnard Enchaîné imagined an interview between the young
Painlevé and an interlocutor, in which Painlevé invites the journalist to sit on a lamp, and then laces his
everyday conversation with invented scientific terms: “Surrealism, he explained to me sweetly, is not
composed with instances of daily parapatrycormédique… Your acquiescence is sphérigène.” The writer
with Soliel du Midi responded to Painlevé’s references to the lower stratum in kind: “Very well, my colon!
as one says in the barracks, this son of his father is not an ordinary guy!” Jean-Bernard extracts the majority
of the poem, save the introduction of Painlevé (as realist and surrealist) as being too crude to reprint, and
then asks: “Have you been carried off with admiration? Not me. To be honest, I have understood
nothing…” Bernard reads as if he is composing an oblique obituary for France (the writer and country),
noting through a citation to the essayist Jean La Bruyére: “If you want to say ‘it rains’ say ‘it rains’ and no
more. Clarity and simplicity are the true characteristics of the French language.” Désiré Lacoudre, referring
to the author as Jean-Paul-Prudent (a reference to Paul Painlevé’s pacifist leanings as minister of war and
then president during World War One, but if one forces a Parisian pronunciation, it can be read as: “Pas-
Prudent,” not prudent, not careful, an ironic reading of the elder Painlevé’s wartime pacifism) after a
59
Painlevé’s literary debut in Surréalisme was followed in quick succession by the
11 October opening of the Bureau of Surrealist Research, initiated by the circle of
surrealists gravitating around André Breton, at 15 rue de Grenelle in the 7
th
arrondissement, with the aim of “gather[ing] all the information possible related to forms
that might express the unconscious activity of the mind.”
6
Four days later, André
Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism” appeared; rushed to press in order to counter the gall
Goll’s claim to the movement and definition of Surrealism.

quotation from the poem, vows “I have not invented this. One does not invent such a thing, even in a
nightmare.”
6
The Bureau was put under Antonin Artaud’s direction in January 1925, in a space owned by the family of
Painlevé’s maternal cousin Pierre Naville. On the Bureau see Gérard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist
Movement, trans. Alison Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 63; and Maurice Nadeau,
The History of Surrealism, with an introduction by Roger Shattuck, trans. Richard Howard (1944; repr.,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 91-92.
In a brilliant mistake, Le Figaro ran the following announcement in its “Petites Nouvelles” section
on page 2:
The review Surréalisme has just arrived with a “Manifesto of Surrealism” by Ivan Goll, a
previously unpublished letter from G. Apollinaire on the same subject, and contributions from
Pierre Reverdy, Joseph Delteil, Marcel Arland, René Crevel, Jean Painlevé, P.-A. Birot, Paul
Devinée [sic., Dermée], and Robert Delauney.
A Center “where all those interested in manifestations of thought separated from all
artistic preoccupations will be received” is open at 15, rue de Grenelle, everyday from 4 to 6 pm.
Anon., “Petites Nouvelles,” Le Figaro, 10 October 1924, 2. Le Figaro made an additional error: the actual
hours of the Bureau of Surrealist Research were 4:30 to 6:30 daily.
The following day, the newspaper L’Instransigeant ran a brief correction in their Letters section
under the heading “There is surrealism and then there is surrealism…” noting that Goll’s journal and the
Bureau of Surrealist Research were distinct entities. Anon., “Lettres,” L’Intransigeant, 11 October 1924, 2.
The cahiers from the first day of the Bureau of Surrealist Research, according to Gérard Durozoi,
report that correction letters were sent to both Le Figaro and L’Intransigeant. Threatening letters were also
sent to other writers and journalists seen as misusing or appropriating the term (History of the Surrealist
Movement, 712n4).
60
Fig. 7. Cover of the sole issue of Ivan Goll’s Surréalisme (1924).
61
A month later, on 15 November, Jean Tedesco opened the first cinema
exclusively dedicated to repertoire and avant-garde films in Jacques Copeau’s renown
Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, located at 21 rue du Vieux-Colombier, a two minute walk
(in an almost straight line) away from the Bureau of Surrealist Research, and both located
approximately halfway between Painlevé’s home at 81 rue de Lille, and the Sorbonne’s
Laboratory of Comparative Anatomy and Histology. Taking a closer look at the interplay
of Painlevé’s scientific formation and research interests with regards to scientific cinema,
his involvement with Surréalisme—which must be understood as separate from the
surrealist movement with a research station at 15 rue Grenelle—and the broader cinema-
culture of the times helps to elaborate the sort of historical context and “detailed
intertextuality” necessary for understanding the often elusive images of early nonfiction
cinemas; this is certainly the case for documentary as seen and engaged by Painlevé.
7
1.2 The Life Sciences: Painlevé’s Scientific Formation
A closer look at Parat and Painlevé’s research in the context of the Sorbonne’s
Comparative Anatomy and Histology laboratory and its place within contemporaneous
debates in biology sheds considerable light on some of the sources and concerns that
became the primary subject of Painlevé’s films: marine biology and the protocols of
seeing, observing, and experimenting that provide a key touchstone of his later cinematic

7
On “detailed intertextuality” and the enigmas of early nonfiction cinema, see Thierry Lefebvre,
“Introduction: Images du réel/non-fiction,” 1895: Images du Réel, La Non-Fiction en France (1890-1930),
ed. Thierry Lefebvre, no. 18 (1995): 8. Lefebvre quotes Laurent Mannoni’s description of writing about
Marey’s films as “living proofs of the theories” and adds one must approach them from the perspectives of
the history of science, art, photography, and cinema (8).
62
regard. Painlevé began studying medicine at the Sorbonne in 1921. As part of the
required coursework for all medical students, Painlevé would have taken coursework in
zoology with such figures as Rémy Perrier, director of the La Faune de la France en
tableaux synoptiques illustrés (1924) and Georges Bohn, author of La Nouvelle
Psychologie animale (1911). In his second year of study, Painlevé left the faculty of
medicine after having a heated disagreement with his professor, Dr. Delbert, whom he
considered to be treating a hydrocephalic patient with cruelty.
8
Returning to his boyhood
interests cultivated at the Jardin des Plantes, he switched to zoology and biology, and
joined the Comparative Anatomy and Histology laboratory, under the direction of the
recently appointed chair Paul Wintrebert (1867-1966). This gave him the opportunity to
research at the Biological Station at Roscoff, where he further cultivated his love and
knowledge of marine life and met the love of his life, Geneviève “Ginette” Hamon.
9
The laboratory’s chair, Paul Wintrebert, originally trained in medicine but
specialized in embryology, then considered by the French academy one of the most
prestigious fields in biological research.
10
French fin-de-siècle embryological study

8
In his obituary note for Jean Painlevé, Jean Rouch recalls his uncle regretfully failing his most gifted
student on his exams in Physics, Biology, and Chemistry at the Sorbonne, remarking, “He would have been
a very bad doctor, but he will certainly be a great filmmaker.” Jean Rouch, “Jean Painlevé (1902-1989),
Pionnier du cinéma de demain,” in Jean Painlevé, ed. Brigitte Berg, 7.
9
On Painlevé’s studies see Berg, “Contradictory Forces,” 9, 11-12; and Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 26. For a
brief overview of the study of biology in French universities in the 1920s, see Raoul M. May, “French
Instruction and Research in Biology” Science, New Series, vol. 65, no. 1673 (1927): 53-55.
10
Jean-Louis Fischer, “Experimental Embryology in France (1887-1936),” International Journal of
Developmental Biology, vol. 34, no. 1 (1990): 19-20. In addition to coining the term cytoskeleton,
Wintrebert is credited with the discovery of painted frogs, Discoglossus pictus, in Banyuls region near the
French-Spanish border in 1906.
The information on the status of embryology in France comes from Richard M. Burian, Jean
Gayon, and Doris Zallen, “Singular Fate of Genetics in French Biology: 1900-1940,” Journal of the History
of Biology, vol. 21, no. 3 (1988): 380.
63
consisted of two primary tendencies regarding the source and causes of cell development:
neo-preformation, which “saw the entire individual as contained within the egg cell”; and
the neo-epigenesis, according to which embryological development is shaped by
environmental contingencies (milieu), and “biological events are the responsibility of
physicochemical rather than morphological structures.”
11
These schools, which found
increasing reconciliation during the 1910s and 1920s, originated in the pioneering work
of Laurent Chabry, whose research supported neo-preformation, and Yves Delage, whose
research supported neo-epigenesis. Chabry studied the embryos of Ascidia aspersa (dirty
sea squirts), invasively altering cell blastomeres with a needle in order to produce
monsters against which undisturbed cell development could be compared and understood.
His work posits that, undisturbed, all of the elements of an organism are a priori present,
and that methodically disturbing or destroying different elements would reveal, through
negation, their “normal” function.
12
Delage conducted microsurgical work on sea urchin

11
My understanding of the terms neo-preformation and neo-epigenesis comes from the work of science
historian Jean-Louis Fischer. Ideologically, he sees the split between neo-preformation and neo-epigenesis
as being a question of relative constraint or freedom—these are, quite literally, different philosophies of
life. Fischer, “Experimental Embryology in France,” 21; Fischer, “Yves Delage (1854-1920) and the
ideology behind his research on fécondation,” trans. K. Sander, Development Genes and Evolution, vol.
204, no. 4 (1995): 221; and Fischer, “The embryological œuvre of Laurent Chabry,” Development of Genes
and Evolution, vol. 201, no. 3 (1992): 125-127.
12
The violence of Chabry’s experimental technique—Fischer describes it as “a direct attack at the
individual cell or blastomere under the microscope”—follows the experimental method of Claude
Bernard’s “experiments by destruction.” Fischer, “The embryological œuvre of Louis Chabry,” 125; and
Claude Bernard, Introduction à l’étude de la médicine expérimentale (1865; repr., Paris: Delagrave, 1898),
17. On Claude Bernard’s experiments of destruction and cinema, see Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body:
Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 17-46, esp. 26-29.
64
embryos at Roscoff, where he directed the Biological Station from 1901-1920.
13
His
experiments altering conditions of fécondation, or the initiation of the development of a
new organism, favored explanations of epigenesis, emphasizing the impact of
environmental conditions upon development.
14
Wintrebert, an avowed neo-Lamarckian and staunch neo-epigenesist (at a moment
when most of his colleagues were adapting to a reconciled position between preformation
and epigenesis), took special interest in the phenomenon of parthenogenesis (a form of
asexual reproduction) and favored, according to Fischer, methodologies that emphasized
cellular function over morphological structure.
15
Wintrebert’s research interests and
ideological commitments to neo-Lamarckian and neo-epigenesis theories, seem to have
disposed him to welcome methods of observation and documentation of cellular
functions and development through microcinematography and time-lapse
cinematography, which allow the viewer to see, in “real time,” the changes in phenomena
invisible to the naked eye. During the 1910s Wintrebert collaborated with the biologist

13
It is worth noting here the central place of marine invertebrates in embryology, and thus the importance
of the Roscoff Biological Station, located on the northern coast of Brittany, to the education of students in
the Comparative Anatomy and Histology laboratory.
14
K. Sander, who translated Fischer’s essay on Delage, points out that one must be wary in this context
about translating fécondation as “fertilization” as that is only part of what Delage and his peers understood
by the term. It is more accurate to understand fécondation as the initiation of development. Fischer, “Yves
Delage,” 219n1.
The debates between neo-preformism and neo-epigenesis echo questions raised in the emerging
social sciences and arts at the time. Consider the impact of neo-epigenesis—and in proximity,
Lamarck—on Hippolyte Taine’s thesis of race, milieu, and moment and its subsequence influence on a
figure such as Émile Zola and his naturalism.
15
Fischer, “Experimental Embryology in France,” 19-20.
65
and filmmaker Jean Comandon on a research film.
16
Further archival research is
necessary to determine if Wintrebert taught with film, and to what extent he shared
scientific films with his students. But he played a formidable and decisive role in
Painlevé’s entrance into cinema, and provided the material for his first scientific films.
Parat and Painlevé’s report to the academy concerned their research on vital
staining and cell morphology, and although Painlevé was not yet using the cinematograph
in the laboratory, the study introduced concerns Painlevé would later take up
cinematically, namely the problem of seeing scientifically. Their research belongs to the
debates over the status of the Golgi apparatus, or internal reticular apparatus, a net-like
structure of cells first described by the Italian neurohistologist Camillo Golgi in 1898.
17
Golgi set into motion a great cytological enigma when he described the structure of this
apparatus but refrained from speculating about its purpose.
18
During the 1920s and early
1930s, the Sorbonne and Wintrebert’s laboratory in particular was home to the research

16
Comandon mentions his collaboration with Wintrebert on an unnamed film on page 3 of an 8 page letter
on scientific cinema in Paris, addressed to Luciano de Feo, director of l’Institut International du
Cinématographe Éducatif, 4 April 1933, Fonds Jean Comandon, Dossier: COM.B2, L’Institut Pasteur,
Paris. In the same letter Comandon notes, “A special place must be reserved for Jean Painlevé whom is
well known [for] the beautiful production of films about ocean life and micriobiological films on cellular
phenomena.” (4). This letter is reprinted in Valérie Vignaux, “Contribution à une histoire de l’emploi du
cinéma dans l’enseignement de la chirurgie,” 1895, no. 44 (2004). I have not been able to locate the precise
title or date of the collaboration between Comandon and Wintrebert: it does not appear to be listed with
such a credit in Comandon’s filmography published in Jean Comandon and Jean Painlevé, Jean Comandon,
Les pionniers du cinéma scientifique (Brussels: Hayez, 1967), 35-52.
17
Golgi, an incredibly skilled draftsman, was also at the center of the debates about scientific representation
that raged at the turn of the 20
th
century. See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York:
Zone, 2007), esp. 115-121.
18
Ariane Dröscher, “From the ‘apparato reticulare interno’ to ‘the Golgi’: 100 years of Golgi apparatus
research,” Virchows Archiv, vol. 434, no. 2 (1999): 103-107.
66
of a number of scholars who skeptically examined the morphological status of the Golgi
apparatus.
19
Parat and Painlevé’s work hypothesized that rather than being a distinct net-like
structure, the Golgi apparatus is in fact produced by the osmium and silver fixatives used
in slide preparations for studying the apparatus, which, according to the authors, when
introduced into cells, produce vacuole clusters that only appear to be a structural
component. In their own words the Golgi apparatus “is rather more an artifact than the
image of reality,” a side-effect of the interventions required for observation.
20
Subsequent
research proved the validity of Golgi’s discovery, and it is today an important subject of
biomedical and pharmaceutical research. With the benefit of historical distance, the
report can be understood in a generous manner as raising useful critical methodological
concerns even if their critique of Golgi was a mistaken, if reasonable, expression of the
limits of direct light microscopy and histology.
Parat and Painlevé’s contributions to comparative anatomy and laboratory
technique have faired much better. Their study of the saliva glands of Chironomidae
larvae (non-biting midge larvae, also known as bloodworms) through vital staining with
neutral red provides a case study for demonstrating the morphological similarity between
the Golgi apparatus in plant cells (as described by A. Guilliermond and G. Mangenot)
and animal cells. Although their question of whether the what that is similar is an
apparatus or merely an artifact of observation has proven to be wrong, their descriptive

19
Ibid., 106.
20
Parat and Painlevé, “Observation vitale d’une cellule glandulaire en activité,” 614.
67
confirmation of the morphological similarities of these components—whatever they
are—in animal and plant cells remains valid.
21
Regardless of its impact upon scientific debates, Parat and Painlevé’s research
offers a snapshot of the protocols of looking and describing engendered by the
Comparative Anatomy and Histology laboratory, as well as an expression of the limits of
these techniques for the study of their objects. Histology, the study of microscopic
structures of plant and animal tissue, relies upon staining and fixing agents in order to
render the structures and elements of microscopic cells visible in slide preparations. One
drawback with staining and fixing, however, is that it kills the organism. Beginning in the
1880s, and accelerated by the development of neutral red in the 1890s, methodical
procedures for introducing stains that do not—immediately—kill the organism, a practice
known as vital staining, came into use to meet the desire to study functions and activities
at the cellular level (which is the research agenda Wintrebert prioritized).
22
Vital staining better allowed for the study of life processes in medias res.
However, it did not remove lingering questions about the level of unintended intervention
within the scenes set upon the microscope’s stage: the problem of artificiality and
artifacts impeding the documentation of life or the expiration of life. The critique Parat
and Painlevé wagered expresses an anxiety about the media through which processes of
life become visible (through their dying, a mortal staining), and the extent to which one
can or cannot separate the content (the identification of the Golgi apparatus) from the

21
Parat and Painlevé, “Constitution du cytoplasme d’une celle glandulaire,” 544.
22
H. J. Conn and R. S. Cunningham, “History of Staining: The Use of Dyes as Vital Stains,” Biotechnic
and Histochemistry, vol. 7, no. 3 (1932): 81-90; and Fischer, “Experimental Embryology in France,” 20.
68
form (vital staining and fixatives). Their objective, at the crossroad of desire and caution,
was for a method of examination that extended the possibilities of rendering the invisible
visible, “in order to observe them without alteration” as was typical of Bernardian
experiments.
23
Successful observation, in turn, required adequate representation.
Techniques for drawing (figure 8), photography, and chronophotography remained
among the standard forms for documenting and reproducing results for publication, but
they could not fully represent a key component of such work: movement maintained
during a visually uninterrupted duration.
24
Fig. 8. Illustration accompanying Parat and Painlevé’s “Observation vitale d’une cellule glandulaire en
activité. Nature et rôle de l’appareil réticulaire interne de Golgi et de l’appareil de Holmgren,” 612.

23
Parat and Painlevé, “Constitution du cytoplasme d’une cellule glandulaire,” 543.
24
On the debates over scientific representation see Daston and Gallison, Objectivity.
“Visually uninterrupted” should nonetheless be understood with as a historically relative term. As
René Thoreau Bruckner reminds us, film is a medium structured by dark intervals and a recording
apparatus whose shutter “blinks.” See, René Thoreau Bruckner, “The Instant and the Dark: Cinema’s
Momentum,” Octopus: a visual studies journal: The Dark, vol. 2 (2006): 21-36. Likewise, the pronounced
flicker effect of film projection, particularly in early cinema, emphasizes the presence of these intervals,
this lost time.
69
1.3 Life in Motion: A Brief Résumé of Film in the Laboratory
It would have never occurred to the pioneers of cinema to dissociate research on
film from research by means of film. —Jean Painlevé, 1955
25
For histologists, embryologists, and others working in biology, film promised to
transform the nature morte (still life) of the stained slide preparation into the nature
vivante (living nature) of the moving image, a representation of life itself, in all its
dynamism—with the ironic effect of producing the means to better destroy life at the
cellular level, as Lisa Cartwright argues in Screening the Body.
26
It is, in fact, regarding
the question of tracking movement that film would make some of its most valuable
interventions. Yet despite its hereditary link to some of the most respected laboratories of
France—such as the photographic revolver of the astronomer Pierre-Jules-César Janssen
(1824-1907), and the physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) with his assistant
Georges Demenÿ (1850-1917), whose motion studies provide one of the closest
forbearers of the cinematic apparatus
27
—members of the Academy of Sciences
maintained an ambivalent position regarding the use of the filmic apparatus in research,
given film’s spectacular qualities and associations with popular entertainment. Of course,
the divisions between films intended as “pure” scientific research films, as aesthetic
pursuits, as educational objects, and as “pure” entertainment have never been firm.

25
Jean Painlevé, “Scientific Film (1955),” trans. Jeanine Herman, in Science is Fiction, 162.
26
Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body, 17-46.
27
Which is not to make an argument for an exclusively French patrilineage for film nor to exclude any of
the researchers working throughout Europe and the United States whose research helped realize the
dominant (and alternate) forms the apparatus would take. It is not my intention to reduce film to a set of
technological conditions. On some of the cultural conditions of possibility for cinema prior to the arrival of
the filmic apparatus, see Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle
Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
70
In La Cinématographe (1928), Lucien Bull, a protégé of Étienne-Jules Marey and
pioneer of high-speed cinematography and later in life a touchstone for the rapport
between different schools of experimental film, identifies two key contributions of the
cinematograph for scientific research: it produces documentary records and it serves as a
prosthesis that extends human perception in space and time.
28
Bull outlines four primary
ways by which film expanded the limits of perception: microcinematography (the use of
a film camera with a microscope or ultramicroscope/dark field microscope), x-ray
cinematography (the use of a film camera in conjunction with a Röntgen x-ray device),
time-lapse cinematography, and his own specialty, high-speed cinematography. Thierry
Lefebvre notes that Marey either developed and implemented himself or recorded viable
techniques for executing each of these during the course of the1890s, and that in the
coming decades these techniques would be the mark of the originality and specificity of
the contributions of scientific popularization films.
29
Marey’s concern to control as much

28
Lucien Bull, La Cinématographe (Paris: Armand Colin, 1928), 113-156. Bull’s text, produced at the
height of scientific film cinephilia, is excellent on technical matters, but tends to eschew historical
discussions of these techniques, making the text less helpful for getting a sense of the development of time-
lapse, slow motion, and other techniques he helped perfect.
29
Thierry Lefebvre, “Film scientifique et grand public. Une rencontre différée,” in E J Marey: Actes du
colloque du centenaire, ed. Dominique de Font-Réaulx, Thierry Lefebvre, and Laurent Mannoni (Paris:
Arcadia, 2006), 159-160.
Lefebvre writes that in 1891 Marey connected his mobile strip chronophotograph to a microscope
and filmed blood globules in motion, Vorticella, arborized crystals, and infusorians. That same year he
wrote out the technique for making successive images of a starfish rotating, taking one image per minute.
In 1894 he filmed cats falling at 60 frames per second (fps) and microorganisms at 100 fps. Marey’s
expressed interest in radiography was realized by Jean-Charles Roux and Victor Balthazard, who managed
to successfully produced x-ray films of a frog’s stomach, and Joachim-Léon Carvallo, who constructed a
röntgencinematograph at the Marey Institute at the turn of the century. To this list, I would also add
Marey’s 1890 experiments chronophotographing aquatic creatures in an aquarium in Naples.
71
as possible the excess of the photographic image and his aversion to uses of the film
outside of the laboratory need not be re-rehearsed here.
30
Roxane Hamery writes persuasively and eloquently about the importance of
Marey not just for scientific film but also for Painlevé in particular. Marey invented his
own research methods and equipment—exemplified by chronophotography, a “science of
the image”—and in the process, helped move biology from descriptive naturalism to the
“study of life as perpetual motion,” summarized by his 1868 treatise Du mouvement dans
les functions de la vie and the 1894 text Le mouvement.
31
If Marey’s œuvre can, in a
sense, be understood as embodying all the potentials of the nascent form, by his death in
1904 a generation of young scientists was developing specialized uses for each of the
four key techniques of scientific film for research in almost all of the natural sciences.
Eugène-Louis Doyen (1859-1916), a pioneer in the field of surgical films, played
a central if unwitting role both in the exposure of scientific films to popular audiences
and the anti-film reaction amongst the medical and scientific communities. Beginning in
1898, Doyen, along with Clément-Maurice and Ambroise-François Parnaland as his
camera operators, began to film his surgical procedures with the aim of using them for
teaching purposes. Doyen believed that an essential element of teaching surgery, and one
impossible to convey to more than a few students in lectures, textbooks, or even the

30
On the question of excess in Marey, see Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time:
Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 54. On Marey’s
disinterest in film outside of the laboratory, see Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow:
Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. Richard Crangle (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), esp. 340-
345. The best study of Marey’s œuvre remains Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules
Marey (1830-1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
31
Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 47-48.
72
anatomy theater was the delicate gestural economy and temporal dimension of surgical
procedures. Film breaches the distances demanded by hygienic protocols, requiring that
all spectators stand at least two meters away from the operation. Clearly understanding
film’s potential for magnifying and accelerating the impact of his teaching, Doyen
explained: “When a cinematograph is used to film a typical operation, you can explain in
less than a minute to a thousand people what it would take an entire lecture to
demonstrate to a small number of students situated next to the professor.”
32
Doyen, presciently coining a phrase twenty-seven years prior to John Grierson,
claimed that surgical films “possess an undeniable documentary value and will
henceforth serve the history of surgery.”
33
He believed that documentary records of
surgical performances would be a benefit to medical students by facilitating teaching to
other surgeons by helping to propagate the latest techniques across national borders, to
the history of the profession by creating a record of its great surgeons and procedures. He
also believed film captured the distinct “personality” of the surgeon, his artistry and style,
and would thus serve the surgeon himself as a critical mirror, unrelentingly honest in its
contributions to the surgeon’s self-analysis.
34
Finally, he believed the use of surgical

32
Eugène-Louis Doyen, “Le Cinématographe et l’Enseignement de la Chirurgie,” Revue Critique de
Médecine et de Chirurgie, 1 année, no. 1 (1899): 2.
33
Ibid., 3.
34
Ibid., 4. Using language that will resurface in the 1920s in the work of the medically trained filmmaker
and theorist Jean Epstein and in the 1930s through Walter Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious,
Doyen writes “The entire psychology of the surgeon and operating team lives again on the motion picture
screen” (4). He regards cinema as a truth serum and even form of psychoanalytic x-ray vision: “The
operator appears on the screen such as he is, with all his personality…You read on his face his intimate
thoughts and you will be conscious of his will, the presence of mind, and the potency of the true surgeon”
(5). While film provides an ultimate analytic knowledge of the self, this knowledge is not a cold objective
rationalism, but rather is haunted by film’s uncanny capacities. “The cinematograph procured real emotions
73
films in teaching would help reduce suffering and death and possibly even be reassuring
for patients, who will be able to see that the person under the knife “sleeps peacefully; he
does not suffer; and the loss of blood is insignificant.”
35
(Figure 9)
Fig. 9. Dr. Eugène-Louis Doyen (left, cutting), surgeon-cinéaste, at work performing knee surgery, 1898.
Reproduced from Doyen, Traité de therapeutique et chirurgicale et de technique opératoire, Tome 1
(Paris: A. Maloine, 1908), 389.
In developing his theory, he also established an aesthetic protocol for his surgical
films. Based upon the films I have seen or read descriptions of, Doyen’s surgical
demonstration films were primarily single-take films (Clément-Maurice extended the
film magazine to reach durations of 5 minutes or more), using static framing of the action

from me. Especially one day when I discovered, in certain postures, a truly striking resemblance with my
father, the Dr. O. Doyen, whom I believed to see revived in front of me” (4).
In a nice coda to Doyen’s reflections, the in an interview in 1930, the surgeon Jean-Louis Faure
reflects upon the experience of watching Doyen’s film: “to re-see him, this man that I knew and admired so
much, and who is no longer here, this did something to me…” Paul Sabon, “Les Films Chirurgicaux d’hier
et d’aujourd’hui,” La Revue du Cinéma, no. 8 (1 March 1930): 10.
35
Ibid., 6, 3. Of all the words I might use to describe my reaction to Doyen’s Résection du genou (ca.
1898), “reassuring” is not among them.
74
in a medium-long shot. These images should not be mistaken for simply adapting the
single-take aesthetic of early Lumière actualités (which are themselves far more complex
than initially understood). These films are highly choreographed performances between
surgeon and camera operator, each acutely aware of the interplay of the timing of the
procedure and the timing of the film itself.
Doyen’s first public demonstration of his films occurred at the British Medical
Association’s Congress in Edinburgh in July 1898, which, according to Doyen, was so
warmly received that the conference-goers demanded a second screening. His reception
in France, however, was far more tepid. The Academy of Medicine (Académie de
Médicine) in Paris, cancelled a scheduled projection of Doyen’s films at the last moment,
and despite being a founding member of the French Congress of Surgery (Congrès
français de chirurgie), in October of the same year he was forced to rent a theater separate
from the conference after the organization refused to allow him to present his films.
Despite Doyen’s faith that “This new application of the cinematograph could not
fail to seduce those who had initially critiques it,” he seems to have met almost
immediate resistance.
36
This may be in part due to the legacy of Claude Bernard, whose
description of a formation in the life sciences as a necessary passage through “the long
and dreadful kitchen” that leads to a “superb salon, resplendent with light,” suggested the
public might be better off not knowing too much about the medical arts.
37
Likewise,

36
Ibid., 3.
37
Claude Bernard, Introduction à l’étude de la médicine expérimentale (1865; repr., Paris: Delagrave,
1898), 27. This description matches Bernard’s own biography: as Marta Braun writes, Bernard spent the
early part of his career practicing vivisection in a damp cellar, under constant suspicion from the police and
75
surgeons with less public bravado may have been reluctant to submit themselves to film’s
all seeing eye. Yet such professional modesty also reveals the scandalous quality of the
surgical spectacle, its indecorous frankness but also its contamination by the cinema’s
primary vocation: popular entertainment.
Doyen’s cause was not aided by the fact that his films did become popular
entertainment, after his assistant Parnaland clandestinely sold a number of his films,
including depictions of gynecological procedures and his controversial separation of the
conjoined twins Doodica and Radica Neik (well-known in Paris from Barnum’s
circus)—a single long-take performance during which he looks directly at the camera
operator Clément-Maurice and asks “How much do I have left,” presumably in reference
to the camera’s film stock in the magazine.
38
It is through the re-purposing of scientific
films as sensational “attractions” that Jean Painlevé claims to have seen his first films at
the fairgrounds at Chartres: a caesarean performed by Doyen and an actualité on the
death of the anarchist gangster Jules Bonnot.
39
The circulation of Doyen’s films amongst

the horror of his wife, who until the end of her life, gave considerable sums of money to antivivisectionist
societies. Marta Braun, Picturing Time, 10.
38
Anon., “Les sœurs hindoues,” Le Petit Parisien, 11 February 1902, 1, quoted in Thierry Lefebvre, La
Chair et le celluloïd: Le cinéma chirurgical du docteur Doyen (Saint-Paul: Jean Doyen, 2004), 39.
Lefebvre raises the question as to how much of this account is fabulation and how much is accurate
reporting, but Doyen can be seen during this operation addressing the camera operator with what appears to
be this question. Doyen’s La Séparation des sœurs siamoises (1902) is available as an extra feature on Jean
Painlevé: compilation no. 2 (Les Documents Cinématographiques, Paris, 2005).
39
Jean Painlevé, “Reflexions sur l’œuvre du Dr. Comandon,” in Jean Comandon, 29-30. In different
forums, Painlevé claims this occurred in 1911, 1909, or 1913. It should be noted that Jules Bonnot died in
April of 1912, thus making the first two dates impossible. See Hélène Hazéra, “Jean Painlevé, moisson
d’images fantastique et amusante,” Libération, 12-13 March 1983, cited in Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 24-25,
which lists the year as 1909; and Jean Painlevé interviewed by Philippe Ensault, “La Vie de Jean Painlevé,”
unpublished transcript (1982), 6-7, Radio and Television dossier, FJP, he recollects the date as 1913, which
seems to be the more accurate.
76
the fairgrounds and popular movie theaters marred both the surgeon’s reputation and the
use of film amongst many in the scientific community, but also evidenced a popular thirst
for such astonishing films. Doyen served as an object lesson for future scientific
filmmakers in both the power of the document to enlighten and disturb, and the delicate
balance required in order to negotiate the demands of the scientific community and the
desires of the crowd. Filmmakers whose technique took precedence over the content of
their images, at least to a certain measure, fared better than the brutalist film documents
of Dr. Doyen in negotiating the passage between the specialized and public uses of film.
The legacy of Marey was taken up and expanded into new realms and new
applications by his many successors, the most notable of whom were Lucien Bull (1876-
1972) and Jean Comandon (1877-1970). They merit special mention for their influence
on Painlevé.
Lucien Bull, came to Paris from Ireland at age nineteen for a six-month stay and
never left. Bull began his career in scientific film as an unpaid assistant to Marey, an
arrangement that lasted two years. During this time, he did a bit of everything around the
Institute (Virgilio Tosi identifies Bull as the man dressed in white jumping hurdles in
films taken at the Parc des Princes between 1895 and 1896) but showed a particular
genius for devising solutions to the technical challenges of filming.
40
Bull specialized in

On cinema as an “attraction,” see Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its
Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser with
Adam Barker (London: BFI, 1990), 56-62; and Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and
the (In)Credulous Spectator,” Art and Text, no. 34 (1989): 114-133.
40
Virgilio Tosi, Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography, trans. Sergio Angelini
(London: British Universities Film and Video Council, 2005), 173 (originally published in Italian in 1984);
and Lucien Bull and Jean Painlevé, Lucien Bull, Les pioneers du cinéma scientifique (Brussels: Hayez,
1967).
77
the fruitful manipulation of the discordance between the speed of recording and the speed
of projection. In 1902 Bull began experimenting with high-speed
cinematography—speeding up the frame rate when filming to produce the effect of slow
motion when projected at the standard operating speed of sixteen frames per second—in
order to conduct studies on the physiology of insects in flight.
41
By 1904 Bull was
achieving speeds of 1,200 frames per second, which he achieved by rethinking the
architecture of the cinematic apparatus. In order to keep the intermittent device from
snapping the film at such high speeds but still achieve sharp exposures, he had the film
mounted on a rotating drum, and instead of using a shutter mechanism between
exposures, used intense electric spark flashes that gave sufficient light without
overheating his actors. (Figure 10) In 1905 he achieved speeds of 2,000 frames per
second, which he used for studies of flying insects and in subsequent years speeds
exceeding 15,000 frames per second, which he used for ballistics studies (such as
imagery of projectiles puncturing soap bubbles and bullets passing through a wooden
plank).
42

41
Bull, La Cinématographe, 131-156; Bull, “Les Merveilles du Ralenti,” Cinéa, no. 80, 1 December 1922,
6; and Bull, “Les Merveilles du Ralenti,” Cinéa-Ciné Pour Tous, no. 34, 1 April 1925, 10-11. The last
piece is an expanded version of the article from December 1922. See also Tosi, Cinema Before Cinema,
172-176; and Pierre Thévenard and Guy Tassel, Le Cinéma Scientifique Français, preface by Jean Painlevé
(Paris: La Jeune Parque, 1948), 11-39. Thévenard and Tassel offer helpful technical explanations with an
abundance of excellent illustrations, but their dating system is at times questionable. They refer to Bull with
a French rendering of his name: Buhl.
42
Bull, La Cinématographe, 145; and Bull, Lucien Bull, “Les Merveilles du Ralenti (1925),” 11. Tosi,
Cinema Before Cinema, 176, notes that after the second world war, Bull achieved a frequency of 1,000,000
frames per second.
78
Fig. 10. Frame capture from Lucien Bull, Vol de la Grosse Mouche Bleu (1904-1905, Ref. B2). This
footage of the flight of a large bluebottle fly includes key elements of the mise-en-scène of scientific films:
a metronome to measure duration and a ruler to establish scale. These images were likely filmed at 1,200
frames per second.
These films drew interest from scientific communities and the military. They also
found a growing following amongst filmgoers, who delighted in photogenic aspects of
slow-motion studies of athletes produced by Pathé under E. Labrély’s supervision during
World War One, such as Éducation physique étudiée au ralentisseur (January 1916), Les
Jeux étudiés au cinéma lent (March 1916), Les Sauts d’obstacles en hauteur (April
1918). Cinéphiles crowded into the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier to see Bull’s films
projected as part of Jean Tedesco’s lecture “Studies in Slow-motion” in February 1926.
43

43
Jean Tedesco, “Études de Ralenti (Conférence prononcée au Vieux-Colombier le Vendredi 26 Février
1926),” Cinéa-Ciné Pour Tous, no. 57, 15 Mars 1926, 11-12. Lefebvre draws a connection between Bull
and Pierre Noguès’s work at the Marey Institute, popular slow-motion films made by Pathé and the other
major studios; and René Clair and Françis Picabia’s use of slow-motion in Entr’acte (1924). Thierry
Lefebvre, “De La Science à L’Avant-Garde: Petit panorama,” in Images, science, mouvement: autour de
Marey, ed. SEMIA (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), 108-109.
See also, Georges Houard, “Le Cinématographe Ultra-Rapide,” Je Sais Tout, 15 année, no. 163
(June 1919): 675-680; and Paul Sabon, “Ralenti et Accéléré: Une visite à l’Institut Marey,” La Revue du
Cinéma, no. 10 (1 May 1930): 3-9. Sabon mentions the centennial celebration for Marey at the Collège de
79
The same year that Bull began his studies in slow motion, he also developed a
fully automated time-lapse cinematography system at the request of Antoine Pizon, who
wanted to use film to study a botryllus colony (marine microorganisms). The apparatus
simultaneously triggered the light source and microcinematograph to expose one image
every fifteen minutes. When projected at sixteen frames per second, the standard
projection speed at the time, the film achieved incredible temporal condensation: showing
development that took days to film in a matter of minutes. Bull used the same technique
to film the blossoming of lilies, making an exposure every five minutes over the course of
several days, that when projected showed the undulating movements of blooming flowers
in a matter of seconds.
44
Carvallo used the apparatus to study the digestive system of
frogs and the Swiss biologist Julius Ries used the equipment at the Marey Institute to
produce a two-minute film on the fertilization and development of sea urchin eggs in
1907. On 8 November 1909, Lucienne Chevroton and F. Vlès, two researchers in Charles
Albert François-Franck’s laboratory at the Collège de France working at the Biological
Station at Roscoff under the advisement of Yves Delage, also made
microcinematographic studies on the development of sea urchin eggs. Benefiting from
the sponsorship of Léon Gaumont, who provided materials for the microcinematography,

France as one of the first time his films were to be made readily available to the cinema-going public, to
which we should add, that is not already habituated to the programming of the specialty theaters throughout
Paris.
44
Bull, La Cinématographe, 128, 129-131; and Tosi, Cinema Before Cinema, 174.
80
the two young scholars presented their findings before the Academy of Sciences on 8
November 1909.
45
That same fall Jean Comandon, a medical student working on his doctorate under
the direction of Paul Gastou at Saint-Louis hospital, presented the results of his research
diagnosing syphilis spirochetes by means of a cinematograph connected to the recently
invented ultramicroscope—also known as a dark-field microscope—which functions by
shining light onto the field at a lateral angle so that it is scattered by the particles it
encounters, making typically transparent objects smaller than the wavelength of light
appear in high contrast against a dark background.
46
(Figures 11) Epidemiological
research on syphilis, known by scientists as the “Great Imitator” for its long latency and
tendency to mimic other diseases, was a national priority in fin-de-siècle France, when it
was estimated that as much as 15 percent of the male population of Paris was syphilitic.
47

45
Lucienne Chevroton and F. Vlès, “La cinématique de la segmentation de l’œuf et la chronophotographie
du développement de l’Oursin,” presented by Yves Delage, Séance of 8 November, Comptes Rendus
hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des Sciences, Tome 149 (Paris: Gauthiers-Villons et cie., 1909):
806-809. Chevroton later married François-Franck and began publishing under her new last name.
Gaumont’s patronage of François-Franck’s laboratory at the Collège de France began in 1904. See
Lefebvre, “Film scientifique et grand public,” 165; and Oliver Gaycken, “Devices of Curiosity,” 116-118.
46
Jean Comandon, “Cinématographie, à l’ultramicroscope, de microbes vivants et de particules mobiles,”
presented by Albert Dastre, séance 26 October, Comptes Rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie
des Sciences, Tome 149 (Paris: Gauthiers-Villons et cie., 1909): 938-941. Reports in the press confirm the
presentation as occurring on 26 October 1909, but the note does not appear in the Comptes Rendus until 22
November 1909, two weeks after Chevroton and Vlès’s presentation: further research is necessary to
confirm whether their presentation was actually made earlier and appears as a note in the 8 November
séance, or if the temporal lag with Comandon is due to something as banal as needing to get the film strips
reproduced for publication.
47
Oliver Gaycken, “Devices of Curiosity,” 96. The figure on syphilis infections comes from Barbara
Larson, The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society, and the Fantastic in the Work of Odilin Redon
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2005), 103.
My information on Jean Comandon’s research draws primarily from Comandon and Painlevé,
Jean Comandon; Oliver Gaycken, “Devices of Curiosity,” 95-111; Isabelle Do O’Gomes, “L’œuvre de
Jean Comandon,” in Le Cinéma et la Science, ed. Alexis Martinet (Paris: CNRS, 2002), 78-85; Thierry
Lefebvre, “Contribution à l’histoire de la microcinématographie: de François-Franck à Comandon,” 1895,
81
Fig. 11. Photograms depicting syphilis spirochetes in mouse blood and trypanosomes in rat blood.
Reproduced from Isabelle Do O’Gomes, “L’Œuvre de Jean Comandon,” in Le Cinéma et la Science, ed.
Alexis Martinet (Paris: CNRS, 1994), 79.
Comandon’s research, building upon that of his mentor Gastou, examined over
500 samples of blood, semen, spinal fluid, and other effluvia infected with syphilis under
the ultramicroscope. With the aid of the ultramicroscope Comandon was able to diagnose
syphilis spirochetes based upon their distinctive, shimmying movements. He first
attempted to photograph his fugitive subjects, but they moved too quickly. He next turned
to the cinematograph, perhaps on the advice of his former mentor Victor Henri, who two

no. 14 (1993): 35-46; and Hannah Landecker, “Cellular Features: Microcinematography and Film Theory,”
Critical Inquiry, no. 31 (2005): 903-937; and Landecker, “Microcinematography and the History of
Science and Film,” Iris, no. 97 (2006): 121-132.
82
years previously had presented his cinematographic research on Brownian motion at the
Academy of Sciences.
48
Finding the equipment at the Saint-Louis hospital inadequate for the task, with
Gastou’s help Comandon made contact with Charles Pathé—head of the most powerful
studio in France. Pathé, seeing commercial potential in scientific films (and not wanting
to be outdone by the competition at Gaumont and Éclipse), agreed to sponsor Comandon
on the condition that he move his research base to the Pathé studio at Vincennes, where
he had access to the best equipment and some of the most skillful technicians in France.
With the means at his disposal, Comandon produced remarkable series of images.
Prior to Comandon’s debut at the Academy, Pathé took a patent out on the
technical improvements made to the ultramicrocinematograph. After the defense of his
dissertation, the studio head hired Comandon to direct a new scientific film unit for
Pathé. The unit produced popular and educational scientific films, which found their
debut before popular audiences on 28 January 1910 at the Cirque d’Hiver with a program
titled “La Cinématographe des microbes.” Between 1910-1914, Pathé’s science unit
produced approximately 250 films—more than sixty percent of the estimated 400
scientific popularization films produced during these years.
49
Science films for a popular
audiences produced during the epoch, as the historian Theirry Lefebvre has shown,
followed the two basic criteria, succinctly summarized by the technical director of Éclair

48
Victor Henri, “Étude cinématographique des mouvements browniens,” presented by Albert Dastre,
séance of 18 May, Comptes Rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des Sciences (Paris:
Gauthiers-Villons et cie., 1908): 1024-1026. Henri made his film in François-Franck’s laboratory at the
Collège de France with assistance from Lucienne Chevroton.
49
Gaycken, “Devices of Curiosity,” 94. These figures are based upon research by Thierry Lefebvre.
83
George Maurice. First: “the choice of subjects should be accessible, if not to everybody,
then at least to the average viewer.” Second: “the presentation should be bright and
amusing”
50
Comandon and Pathé’s partnership lasted from 1910-1926 when, due to
financial strains of the postwar market and changing exhibition practices, Pathé dissolved
his scientific film unit.
51
In Comandon’s estimation, the coupling of the ultramicroscope and
cinematograph produced a significant epistemic rupture in the life sciences, allowing “the
study of the motion of living microscopic beings in their normal state,” without the
intervention of stains and fixatives that, in rendering the organism visible, kill it.
52
No less
significant, Comandon saw film as enabling scientists to “materialize time and space” to

50
Georges Maurice, “La science au cinéma,” Film-Revue, no. 4 (17 January 1931): 13, cited in Thierry
Lefebvre, “De La Science à L’Avant-Garde: Petit panorama,” in Images, science, mouvement: autour de
Marey, ed. SEMIA (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), 104.
51
On the reasons for the decline of studio-produced scientific vulgarization films and their disappearance
from the theaters of the great boulevards, see Thierry Lefebvre, “De la Science à L’Avant-Garde,” 103-109.
While the break between Pathé and Comandon is usually dated to 1926, it seems to have begun far
earlier. In a letter to Charles Pathé dated 17 July 1924, Comandon vigorously protested Pathé’s “offer” to
allow him to “take back his freedom.” In making his case to remain affiliated, Comandon asserted his
propriety over the films and techniques, threatening Pathé that he would neither be able to use his films or
his methods without his consent. The liquidation of the laboratory, however, rendered his protests moot.
Letter from Jean Comandon to Charles Pathé, 17 July 1924, Fonds Jean Comandon, Dossier: COM.B1,
L’Institut Pasteur, Paris.
In 1926 Comandon found a new sponsor in the banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn, who
supported Comandon and his assistant Pierre de Fonbrune in their research, which began to focus on
botanical phenomena and developed a set of tools for conducting microsurgery on cells. After the stock
market crash, which depleted Kahn’s resources, Comandon arranged to have his equipment purchased and
moved to the Pasteur Institute at Garches, where he worked until his retirement in 1966.
On the exhibition of Comandon’s films for Pathé during the 1910s and early 1920s, see Jean-
Jacques Meusy, “La Diffusion des Films de «Non-fiction» dans les Établissements Parisiens,” 186-188. On
Comandon’s work at Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète, see Paula Amad, “Cinema’s ‘Sanctuary’,” 141-
142.
52
Jean Comandon, “Cinématographie, à l’ultramicroscope, de microbes vivants et de particules mobiles,”
941, 939 (my emphasis).
84
render it not only visible, but also in some sense present and quantifiable.
53
In a lecture to
medical students fifteen years later, Comandon described this method as productively
transforming histology into physiology (interestingly, this statement comes a year after
Wintrebert’s laboratory changed its name from Comparative Anatomy and Physiology to
Comparative Anatomy and Histology). Comandon explains the documentary value of his
footage as conserving a concrete “trace of the observation of the living” that improves
upon the precision of photography since “the cinematograph, through movement, gives
life to these fugitive images.” He continues, “It is an ever faithful memory which readily
reproduces all the phases of a phenomenon or an experiment. In addition, the
cinematograph, by acting upon the ‘time’ factor, allows us to modify the speed and in this
manner render perceptible movements which otherwise escape our senses because they
are too rapid or too slow.”
54

53
Ibid., 940.
54
Jean Comandon, “Les Notions récentes de Clinique Pratique et d’Application au Diagnostic des
Méthodes de Laboratoire Courantes,” lecture delivered 4 April 1925 at the Faculté de Médicine de Paris,
Clinique Médicale de l’Hôtel-Dieu, Fonds Jean Comandon, Dossier: COM.C2, L’Institut Pasteur, Paris (my
emphasis). Comandon reiterates the historical shifts in biology aided by the ultramicroscope and
cinematograph in his essay “Le Cinématographe et les Sciences de la Nature,” in Le Cinéma des Origines à
nos jours, preface by Henri Fescourt (Paris: Éditions du Cygne, 1932), 319-321—a text illustrated with
photograms from Painlevé’s Les Oursins and Crabes. He traces an evolution from histology and
bacteriology in the tradition of Pasteur, examining specimens in a drop of water but often under conditions
that alter behavior, to anatomical studies using stains—“we studied being killed by these manipulations and
we made, through this sight, a sort of dissection, thanks to elective staining”—and finally the physiological
period, observing life and its modifications through the ultramicroscope and microcinematography. He
notes cinema has the added benefit of reducing “the useless sacrifice of animals and notably our faithful
companion the dog.” See also, Jean Comandon, “La Vivisection et L’Enseignement,” Le Matin, 23 June
1914, for Comandon’s opinions on the potential of the cinematograph to reduce the number of animals
sacrificed to science.
Amongst Comandon’s papers in his archives at the Pasteur Institute is a manuscript “L’utilisation
du cinématographe dans la recherche biologique,” Sciences, no. 12 (1937): 1-8, in which he offers a
summary of his definition of life (greatly indebted to Marey) and the role that the cinematograph has played
in its constitution. “Life manifests itself through movement; we imagine it as something fluid, which drains
itself [s’écoule] by producing constant modifications within beings endowed with it.”
85
Film becomes, from this perspective, both a microscope and telescope of time that
genuinely expands the possible realms of observation and research. This concept of
temporal plasticity links the scientific and aesthetic interests in film as a medium, and
becomes an object of scrutiny and speculation in early film theory.
55
Likewise, this
plasticity discovered through utilization of the cinematograph informs Comandon’s
theorization of life: “Life manifests itself through movement; we imagine it as a fluid
thing, which flows by producing, in those beings endowed with it, constant
modifications.”
56
It would be a mistake to overlook Comandon’s acute sensitivity to the
aesthetic dimension and eloquence of his images both in their appearance and in the
efficiency and precision with which they produce a picture of truth, and even the extent to
which a desire to produce aesthetic images possibly drove his research. “Everyone who
has worked with this mode of examination, against the black background, knows how
beautifully certain preparations can appear. They doubtlessly have regretted not being
able to preserve these images that are almost magical [presque féerique] and often of the
highest scientific interest.”
57

55
On the influence of scientific cinema on classical film theory, see Hannah Landecker, “Cellular Features”
and “Microcinematography and the History of Science and Film.”
56
Jean Comandon, “L’utilisation du cinématographe dans la recherche biologique,” Sciences, no. 12
(1937): 1, manuscript held in Fond Jean Comandon, Dossier: COM.C1, claspeur 3: manuscrits et
dactylogrammes d’articles de Jean Comandon, L’Institut Pasteur, Paris. Comandon seems to be articulating
lessons from Marey and the philosopher Henri Bergson, who proclaimed: “Life in general is mobility
itself.” Bergson cited in Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 83. Subsequent articulations of this project will need to take up
Bergson’s work in greater detail. For further consideration of the relationship between Bergson and early
cinema, including Comandon, see Paula Amad, “Archiving the Everyday: A Topos in French Film History,
1895-1931” (PhD Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2002), chapter 5.
57
Jean Comandon, “L’Ultramicroscope et la cinématographie,” La Presse Médicinale, no. 94 (1909): 841,
cited in Gaycken, “Devices of Curiosity,” 101 (Gaycken’s translation).
86
Comandon’s 1909 film debut generated immediate excitement. Le Matin reported
the proceedings of the Academy’s séance with the headline “Success in Filming the
Invisible,” describing Comandon’s cinematographic “victory” over the world of the
invisible and quoting Dastre as proclaiming that the consequences of Comandon’s work
are “incalculable.”
58
Shortly after Comandon’s presentation at the Academy, La Presses
Médicinale organized a séance for doctors and members of the medical community at the
Hôtel des Sociétés Savantes on 19 November 1909, which further spread the excitement
of his work. As if in replay of the drama of the Lumière brothers’ first projections, where
a still image became mobile, reporters expressed considerable excitement at the
astonishing revelations of ultramicrocinematography. Ventujol, writing for Ciné-Journal,
explains:
It is impossible, for those who have not seen one of the projections of Dr.
Comandon, to get an idea of the activity of microorganisms; one has the
impression of being in the presence of an unknown world, as varied, as active as
that which can be seen with our naked eyes. One finishes by even feeling a certain
malaise in thinking that at the very instant that one watches the screen, it is
possible that an equally terrible battle is taking place within our own bodies.
59

58
Anon., “On réussit la cinématographie de l’invisible,” Le Matin, 27 October 1909, 1. For an account of
the press response to Comandon’s presentation at the academy, see Gaycken, “Devices of Curiosity,” 99-
101; and Isabelle Do O’Gomes, “L’œuvre de Jean Comandon,” 79.
59
Ventujol, “Société Française de Photographie,” Ciné-Journal, no. 70 (20-26 December 1909): 5. See
also, R. D., “Une Séance à l’Académie des Sciences,” Cine-Journal, no. 62 (25-31 October 1909): 6-7; R.
Villers, “La Cinématographie de l’Invisible,” La Nature, no. 1902 (6 November 1909): 364-366; Edmond
Perrier, “Le Cinématographe au service de la science” Cine-Journal, no. 64 (8-14 November 1909): 12-14;
Dr. René Ledent, “L’ultramicroscopie et le cinématographe,” Le Scalpel et Liége Médical, no. 22-28,
(November 1909): 304; Anon. “La Cinématographie des Microbes,” La Dépêche Médicale, no. 11
(November 1909): 9-10.
87
This mixture of astonishment laced with a sense of the uncanny replays itself over and
over again in accounts by the press.
60
But the films also met with resistance within the Academy and the scientific
community. Painlevé, irritated by the over-emphasis on the aesthetic dimension at the
expense of the scientific dimension of Comandon’s work, wrotes of the difficulty
Comandon encountered in getting his films taken seriously as science, despite their debut
at the Academy of Sciences—a frustration Comandon himself expressed on occasion: “it
was not too long ago that scientists hardly dared to admit that he used the cinematograph
for his research, fearing that his work would be dismissed on account of this.”
61
A report
on the séance at the Academy of Sciences published in Ciné-Journal gives a precise
picture of the more skeptical response to the use of film in serious research, which
precisely zero in on the problem of incalculability (to maintain Dastre’s vocabulary).
“Objections can be raised regarding the experimental value of the new methods of
investigation: in other words, how accurately will the ‘film’ obtained from the

60
Three of the best examples of this can be found in essays published in 1913, 1920, and 1922. The first is
Regis Gignoux, “Défiez-vous du Ciné…,” Le Journal, 26 December 1913, np, FJC, Dossier: COM.D
Presse. Gignoux text imagines a date between two young lovers, Germaine Paradis and Fernand Pommelin,
whose romantic intentions are thwarted by a Comandon’s images of teeming microbial populations living
on and in the body. The second is Colette’s review of a program in which Colette and an audience of
children marvel at slow-motion footage of a seagull and time-lapse footage of the germination of a bean.
See Colette, “Cinema: from Aventures Quotidiennes,” in Colette at the Movies: Criticism and Screenplays,
trans. Sarah W. R. Smith, ed. Alain and Odette Virmaux (New York: Ungar, 1980), 59-61; and Paula
Amad, “‘These Spectacles are Never Forgotten’: Memory and Reception in Colette’s Film Criticism,”
Camera Obscura, no. 59, vol. 20 (2005): 118-163. The third is Émile Vuillermoz, “La Cinématographie
des Microbes (Le Docteur Comandon),” Le Temps, 9 November 1922, republished in Jeune, Dure et Pure!,
ed. Nicole Brenez and Christian Lebrat (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 2001), 109-110. Vuillermoz
performs poetic close readings of a set of Comandon’s films screened at the Conservatoire des Arts et
Métiers, emphasizing their balletic and violent qualities.
61
Jean Painlevé, “Reflexions sur l’œuvre de Jean Comandon,” 30-31; Painlevé interviewed by Hélène
Hazéra and Dominique Leglu, “Jean Painlevé Reveals the Invisible (1986),” in Science is Fiction, 172; and
Jean Comandon, “L’utilisation du cinématographe dans la recherche biologique,” 1.
88
microscope translate the forms and movements contained in the observed preparation?”
62
The journalist expresses reservations regarding the effect of filming, the heat of lighting,
and the vibration of the machines upon the organisms and phenomena being studied. He
adds, “I do not speak of the sources of errors inherent to the cinematograph itself” which
includes the act of projection with its flickering light and play of shadows.
63
More
seriously, he asks if the Brownian motion in Comandon’s films is not perhaps inherent to
the preparations or an effect of filming and projection, rather than a naturally occurring
phenomenon. “In the domain of pure science, it is thus difficult to assign a precise value
to the new resources offered by the cinematograph.”
64
Comandon managed to continue making films for almost six decades by
straddling the domains of scientific research, propaganda, and scientific popularization
that during the decades of the 1910s and 1920s, in particular, found an incredible
diversity of audiences, and exposed spectators to ways of seeing the world. Comandon, as
Roxane Hamery convincingly lays out, provided an important precursor and role model
for Painlevé. Painlevé would soon face much of the same academic resistance, difficulty
in finding sponsorship, and misunderstanding faced by Comandon. But he also found in
Comandon a shared sensibility for the aesthetic qualities, the almost magical quality of
biological processes seen through the cinematograph.
65
Aspects of Painlevé’s work may
be understood as inspired re-readings of Comandon’s films and the questions (aesthetic,

62
Félix Poli, “Microscope et Cinématographie,” Ciné-Journal, no. 63 (1-7 November 1909): 6.
63
Ibid.
64
Ibid., 7.
65
Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 48-50.
89
scientific, philosophic) they raise. Painlevé belongs to a generation of filmmakers,
cinemagoers, and critics who intently studied the perceptual lessons of Marey’s, Doyen’s,
Bull’s, and Comandon’s œuvre, and just as importantly, that of the many anonymous
filmmakers of scientific and scientific vernacularization films, not only through questions
of biology, histology, embryology, and zoology, but through a sensibility informed by a
spirit of aesthetic experimentation and sensationalism, fostered by a growing culture of
cinephilia and the spreading influence of surrealism.
1.4 Surréalisme and the poetry of comparative anatomy
During his brief stint as a medical student, Painlevé befriended Jacques-André Boiffard, a
classmate who shared his enthusiasm for photography, cinema, and jazz music.
66
Painlevé’s cousin Pierre Naville, who was also close with Boiffard, provided contact with
avant-garde circles of the time, particularly surrealism. Although only twenty years old,
Naville was well integrated in the avant-garde literary circles of the time (with
connections to Philippe Soupault, Françis Gérard, Max Jacob, Louis Aragon, Blaise
Cendrars, and André Gide) through his frequent contributions to the journal L’Œuf dur
(1922-1924). He published his own surrealist text Les reines de la main gauche (1924),
was active with the Bureau of Surrealist Research (as already mentioned, in a space
owned by his wealthy family), co-edited the first issues of La Revolution surréaliste, and
through his growing interest in leftist politics, pushed Breton’s surrealist circle towards

66
Information on this period comes from Jean Painlevé interviewed by Brigitte Berg, “Images de
Painlevé,” 8-9; Berg, “Contradictory Forces,” 9-10; Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 26, 28; and the six letters from
Jacques-André Boiffard to Jean Painlevé, circa 1922-1924, Correspondences Personnel dossier, FJP.
90
communism—opening many doors to the two friends. Painlevé and Boiffard also
befriended Pierre and Jacques Prévert, Eli Lotar, and others, who were frequent summer
guests at the Hamon family residence Ty an Diaoul (the Devil’s house) in Port Blanc on
the Brittany coast. Painlevé and Boiffard’s love of jazz led them to frequent the bars
around Boulevard Montparnasse, the notable haunts of Kiki de Montparnasse, Man Ray
(whom Boiffard later assisted), Tsugouharu Foujita, Pablo Picasso, Jean Miró, André
Masson, Alexander Calder (who did not arrive until 1926, but would become a close
friend of Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon in the 1930s; Painlevé later collaborated with
him on the 1954 film Le Cirque de Calder). Painlevé occasionally played piano at the bar
Le Jockey, banging out songs for Kiki and Chiffon to sing, and entertaining himself—if
not others—by intermixing F. J. Rickett’s “Colonel Bogey March” with Mozart’s
“Turkish March,” and cake walks and rags (admitting, to his piano teacher’s horror, a
particular fondness for Paul Lincke’s “Cake-Walk: La Fête du Nègre”). It is in this milieu
that he encountered Ivan [Yvan] Goll, a German-French Jewish poet and playwright, who
invited Painlevé to contribute to his latest literary venture, the journal Surréalisme.
67
Just as scholars should not cede documentary solely to Grierson, surrealism
should not be reduced solely to the definition give it by Breton. I would therefore like to
return to a moment when the concept had yet to coalesce, in order to illuminate
Painlevé’s engagements with surrealism. Given his fierce and jealously guarded

67
Jean Painlevé interviewed by Brigitte Berg, “Images de Painlevé,” 10; Painlevé interviewed by Philippe
Ensault, “La vie de Jean Painlevé,” 5; Painlevé interviewed by Hélène Hazéra and Dominique Leglu, “Jean
Painlevé, Qui Fait Voir L’Invisible,” Liberation, 15-16 November 1986, 22; translated into English by
Jeanine Herman as “Jean Painlevé Reveals the Invisible,” Science is Fiction, 178; and Roxane Hamery,
Jean Painlevé, 28.
91
independence, it is not accurate to refer to Painlevé as either a surrealist or a dissident
surrealist. He never belonged to nor strongly rejected any one camp. Furthermore, his
proximity to multiple competing strains of surrealism is too strong not to give it extended
consideration. In situating his œuvre within its context, it may be most useful to think of
it as a strand of dissident surrealism, while also keeping an eye to how the elements of his
work that were seen and celebrated as surrealist often belong to a longer history of
scientific representation and poetic practice.
Ivan Goll maintained a rather lively feud with André Breton over claims to
surrealism, which came to a head in 1924 with a series of heated exchanges culminating
in the publication of Surréalisme, which may be the surrealist provocation par excellence,
if not the last great Dada prank in its successful frustration of Breton’s claims to the
term.
68
The art historian Gérard Durozoi recounts that Breton and Goll were already in
disagreement over the legacy of Apollinaire in relationship to the future of surrealism
when hostilities erupted at a recital of “surrealist dances” by Valeska Gert at the Comédie
des Champs-Élysées. Roiled by this perceived misappropriation of the term surrealist,
Breton and his circle disrupted the performance with howls and whistles (just as they had
done in their attack against Tristin Tzara and Dada at the Soirée du cœur à barbe the
previous summer, causing a fracas broken up by the police). Goll came to Gert’s defense,

68
Breton’s success as the central theorist of surrealism has quite successfully banished Goll to passing
mentions or footnotes of numerous prominent studies of surrealism. Most of my information on Goll,
outside of his own writings, draws from Nadeau’s The History of Surrealism, 86n4; William S. Rubin,
Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 63, 204, 205. Gérard
Durozoi gives Goll a little more attention in his encyclopedic History of the Surrealist Movement, 65-66.
92
and Breton and he quickly came to blows. The police arrived and shut the performance
down.
Continuing the feud, on 23 August, Breton and a number of collaborators
published the text “Encore le surréalisme” in Le Journal littéraire, which insisted
“surrealism is something quite different from the literary wave imagined by M. Goll,”
and took the opportunity to announce a series of forthcoming texts that were properly
surrealist, including the journal La Revolution surréaliste and Breton’s own manifesto (a
bid for priority that Goll will brilliantly frustrate by beating Breton to the press).
69
Le
Journal littéraire gave Goll his right of response, where he reiterated the definition of
surrealism originally formulated in 1919: “The surrealist poet will evoke the distant realm
of the truth, by keeping his ear to the wall of the earth.”
70
Goll’s strange image of
eavesdropping on nature in the quest for some distant truth, and in doing so reorienting
one’s perspective—from wall to floor or perhaps from within a trench—might read as a
bit of absurdist play, and certainly suggests a felicitous relationship between Goll’s
understanding of the new art and the pursuits of naturalists. Put in a larger context, it
reveals his debt to Apollinaire and suggests a reason for his interest in obtaining a
contribution from Painlevé (beyond Painlevé’s famous name). Whatever Goll’s
understanding of surrealism does, it does not hold much of a substantial relationship to
surrealism as it has survived into the present through the force of Breton’s
contemporaneous, psychoanalytic-informed definition of surrealism as “a certain psychic

69
Breton and Goll cited in Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, 65.
70
Ibid.
93
automatism that corresponds rather well to the dream state, a state that is currently very
hard to delimit.”
71
Goll’s writings, consciously or not, often test the elasticity of the concepts they
claim, sometimes with the effect of stretching them so far that they snap.
72
It is tempting
to understand his use of surrealism partially in light of this eccentricity, though such a
reading is primarily retroactive, and separates it from the agonistic (and antagonizing)
context in which it was written. Goll’s understanding of surrealism builds from the poet
Guillaume Apollinaire’s scattered evocations of surrealism, and Goll positions the
movement as an expansion of Apollinaire’s notion of the esprit nouveau (new spirit) in
modern art, which demands poets keep pace with the scientific and technological
advances of modernity, and finds its greatest resources and force in surprise.
73

71
André Breton, “The Mediums Enter” The Lost Steps trans. Mark Polizzotti (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1996), 90. Originally published as “Entrée des médiums,” in Littérature, no. 6 (1
November 1922).
72
Put less generously, his concepts are not always developed with rigor. His essays “Films Cubistes”
(1921) and “Une definition du Cinéma pur” (1928) hold rather tentative relationships with their purported
topics. These two essay express the need for film to develop as a modern art, emphasizing the need to break
from theatrical and literary traditions. In the first text, Goll identifies a promising trend in German films
away from the novelistic tendencies of French and American cinema. He discusses a number of recent
films as informed primarily by “cubist-expressionist” painting. By 1924 he has turned against such
Caligarism, with its clunky cardboard sets (as he discusses in essay “Exemple de surréalisme: le cinéma”),
and has moved his thoughts on cinema towards film’s documentary function as the expression of “pure
cinema,” which he defines as “the most direct transposition of nature.” Yet his argument regarding pure
cinema ultimately measures and aligns it with painting.
See Ivan Goll, “Films Cubistes,” Cinéa, no. 1 (6 May 1921): 20-21; and Goll, “Une définition du
Cinéma pur,” Comœdia, 21
e
année, no. 5528 (8 February 1928): 2. In the latter essay, Goll reprises a
number of passages from his “Exemple de surréalisme: le cinéma,” Surréalisme, no. 1 (1924): 3-4. His
claims regarding surrealist cinema are far better suited in the context of theorizing a pure cinema rooted in
documentary material, but as mentioned, he never severs it from painting.
73
Guillaume Apollinaire, “L’Esprit nouveau et les poètes,” Mercure de France, 29
e
année, no. 491
(December 1918): 391. “Surprise is the greatest new force. It is in surprise, it is in the important place that
it makes for surprise that the new spirit distinguishes itself from all other artistic and literary movements
that have preceded it” (original emphasis).
94
Apollinaire coined the term surrealism in spring of 1917 in a letter to the poet
Paul Dermée (subsequently published in Goll’s Surréalisme).
[I]t is also just to restore the ‘strange magic of words’ to its role for poetic means.
All things considered, I believe it would in fact be better to adopt surrealism
rather than supernaturalism as I had initially used. Surrealism does not yet exist in
dictionaries, and it will be easier to handle than supernaturalism, already utilized
by Messrs. Philosophers.
74
In May 1917 in the program notes for Parade, a ballet featuring music by Erik Satie,
choreography by Léonide Massine, with costumes and sets by Picasso, Apollinaire
enthusiastically describes this merger of the arts as effecting
a kind of surrealism, which I consider to be the point of departure for a whole new
series of manifestations of the New Spirit that is making itself felt today and that
will certainly appeal to our best minds. We may expect it to bring about profound
changes in our arts and manners through universal joyfulness, for it is only
natural, after all, that they keep pace with scientific and industrial progress.
75
Finally, in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (drame surréaliste), which
debuted 24 June 1917, he explains:
In order to distinguish my drama…I have forged the adjective surrealist, which
does not signify anything symbolic… In order to attempt if not a renewal of
theater, at least a personal effort, I thought it necessary to return to nature itself,
but without imitating it in the manner of photographs. When man wanted to
imitate his stride, he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg. He has in
this manner created surrealism without knowing it.”
76

74
Letter from Guillaume Apollinaire to Paul Dermée, March 1917, published in Surréalisme, no. 1 (1924):
5. The use of supernaturalism would seem to allude to Gérard de Nerval and Thomas Carlyle.
75
Guillaume Apollinaire, “Parade (1917),” in Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews 1902-1918, ed.
Leroy C. Breunig, trans. Susan Suleiman, foreword by Roger Shattuck (Boston: ArtWorks and MFA
Publications, 2001), 452.
76
Guillaume Apollinaire, Œuvres poétiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 865-866, cited in Roxane Hamery,
Jean Painlevé, 29.
My understanding of Painlevé’s relationship to Goll and Goll’s relationship to Apollinaire has
benefited, and in certain manners doubles aspects of Hamery’s insightful analysis. In the spirit of precision,
it is worth pointing out a few small errors: Apollinaire had already put his definition of surrealism in
writings two times prior to the preface of Les Mamelles de Tirésias (including the 1917 letter published in
Surréalisme) and she reverses the order of appearance of Breton’s and Goll’s manifestoes (though in this
95
From these scattered musings, Goll pulls together his definition of surrealism.
Goll’s surrealism emphasizes the encounter of the root word (realism) and its
prefix (sur; on, over, super). He gleans this from Apollinaire’s interest in the transposition
of nature through the magic of words, in order to better express the spirit of modernity.
Making his targets clear, Goll insists Apollinaire’s—and his—surrealism has nothing to
do with the “counterfeit surrealism” of the ex-dadaists who, organizing their efforts
around the “total power of the dream,” will soon be “put out of circulation.” Goll’s
surrealism is instead driven by the “rediscovery of nature”—by which he means both the
natural world and material existence—that moves towards “a construction, a will.”
77
In
contradistinction to Breton, who favored automatism and will respond by outright
dismissing the Apollinarian sense of surrealism for being far too literary and
insufficiently theorized, Goll insists that surrealism is at base an aesthetic, and in
particular a poetic project.
78
Goll opens his manifesto with a pledge of allegiance to brute reality: “Reality is
the foundation of all great art. Without it no life, no substance. Reality is the ground

case her point holds, as both men had made their thoughts on surrealism public well before their dueling
manifestoes). Perhaps due to Apollinaire’s well-known love of the cinema, she makes no comment
regarding his surprising dismissal of photography in his definition of surrealism. To hazard a brief
explanation, unlike photography, it would seem that the motion and spatial-temporal dynamism of film
better endows it with the capacity for surprise.
77
Ivan Goll, “Manifeste du surréalisme,” Surréalisme, no. 1 (1924): 2. In its direct contradiction to Breton
and his circle, Goll’s definition of surrealism along rather traditional aesthetic lines may in fact be the
surrealist provocation par excellence.
78
Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924),” 24-25.
96
beneath our feet and the sky above our head.”
79
He establishes here the main point of
difference between his and the Breton’s use of the word, prioritizing the reality of the
phenomenal world (and an untroubled view of it at that) rather than that of the
imagination. Through the example of the cubists, who “profoundly abased themselves
before the simplest object” by gluing scraps of paper onto their canvases, and
Apollinaire, who wrote poems by transcribing phrases and words he heard on the streets,
Goll assigns surrealism the rather traditional and idealist task of the “transposition of
reality into a higher (artistic) plane.”
80
In a distinction that resonates with that of Grierson
discussed above, Goll sees the transposition to a higher plane as leaving behind “the art
of distraction, the art of ballets and the music-hall, curious art, picturesque art, art
founded in exoticism and erotics, strange art, uncanny art, egoistic art, frivolous and
decadent art” that provided unhealthy salves to a generation trying to forget the war.
81
Goll’s expands Apollinaire’s thinking through his theory of the poetic image.
“The most beautiful images connect elements of reality far removed from one another as
directly and as rapidly as possible.”
82
Goll’s expression can accommodate both

79
Ivan Goll, “Manifeste du surréalisme,” 1.
80
Ibid. Goll’s idealism, however, has a different provenance than the Hegelian idealism of Breton or even
of the Platonic variety. Goll is oddly compatible in spirit with the positivist Auguste Comte’s definition of
art as the idealization of reality in Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme (1848 and 1851; repr., Paris:
Société Positiviste Internationale, 1907). See chapter three for further discussion of the aesthetics of
positivism.
81
Ibid., 2.
82
Ibid., 1. Goll appears to be revising Pierre Reverdy’s definition of the image: “The more remote and just
the relationship between the two realities, the stronger the image—the more emotive power and poetic
reality it will contain.” Reverdy, “L’Image,” Nord-Sud, 13 (March 1918): 2, quoted in Richard Abel, “The
Contribution of the French Literary Avant-Garde to Film Theory and Criticism (1907-1924),” Cinema
Journal, vol. 14, no. 3 (1975): 30.
97
Apollinaire’s poetics of simultaneity and the New Spirit as well as the Comte de
Lautréamont’s “chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a
dissection table” so venerated by Breton’s circle. But Goll also seems willing to think the
photographic and filmic image on its own terms, and not just as a poetic technique for the
written word. In the surprising interdiction cited above, Apollinaire regards the
photograph to be too direct, too mimetic, too faithful to phenomena, too static, too much
like a leg and not enough like a wheel and, one could add, through its automatic
functions, too disturbing to concepts of the creative subject to adequately describe the
inspiration from nature nor artistic transposition involved in his surrealism.
83
Goll, for his part, expresses a more nuanced and open understanding of the
automatic functions of the mechanical reproduction of photography and particularly film
in its documentary capacity. Goll, perhaps with Messrs. Lumière in mind, implicitly
revises Apollinaire’s claim “Monsieur Méliès and I practice nearly the same craft: we
charm common matter” to emphasize the role of the camera itself in charming common
matter.
84
It is in this sense that he presents film as exemplifying surrealism’s transposition
of natural materials and as embodying temporal accelerations of modernity. “This is the
century of film.”
85

83
Apollinaire’s apparent distaste for photographic realism in this context should not be confused, however,
with Baudelaire’s anti-realist critique of photography. Apollinaire was all too happy to express his
difference from Baudelaire in Le Manifeste-synthèse de l’antitradition futuriste (1913): “Fuck Baudelaire,
who is also the author of the verses ‘I hate movement which displaces lines / and never I laugh and never I
cry.” Cited in Christophe Gauthier, La Passion du Cinéma: Cinéphiles, ciné-clubs et salles spécialisées à
Paris de 1920 à 1929 (Paris: Association Française de Recherche sur l’Histoire du Cinéma, 1999), 22-23.
84
Apollinaire quoted in Richard Abel, “The Contribution of the French Literary Avant-Garde to Film
Theory and Criticism (1907-1924),” 26.
85
Ivan Goll, “Manifeste du Surréalisme,” 1.
98
In “Exemple de surréalisme: le cinéma,” a companion piece to the manifesto, Goll
further clarifies his definition of surrealism as well as his understanding of the artistic
potential of film—this is, after all the moment when the question “is film an art” still
occupied many film critics in France. Film and surrealism appear almost as synonyms in
these two texts. “Film transcribes events that occur materially in reality and elevates them
to a state that is more direct, more intense, more absolute: surrealist.”
86
Similar to
Epstein’s insistence upon keeping the lens in a wild state, Goll is interested in the poetic
capacity of machine-made images of nature with minimal interference from the
filmmaker, whose job it is to coordinate materials and simply act as “an intermediary
between nature and the apparatus” that produces “the most realist art there is, pure art,” a
super-realism.
87
This is not Breton’s Freudian-inflected psychic automatism, but rather a
method for more directly engaging the raw materials of nature, for seeing them anew
thanks to the mechanical eye of the cinematograph, bringing “the distant realm of truth”
ever closer. This provides the primary grounding of the intellectual link between Goll and
Painlevé.

86
Ivan Goll, “Exemple de surréalisme: le cinéma,” 3. Interestingly, by 1928 when he wrote “Une définition
du Cinéma pur,” he has dropped surrealism from the discussion. “First, to define the word: film. Film
transcribes events occurring materially in reality and raises them to a state more direct, more absolute:
artistic.” He later states “Pure cinema is art directly extracted from life.”
This text is sometimes mistakenly credited to Jean Painlevé, as in the “Selected writings by Jean
Painlevé” in Science is Fiction, 190, and the dissertation by Isabelle Marinone. It was even included in his
funerary homage Jean Painlevé published in 1991. This confusion is in part due to the fact that Goll did not
sign either the manifesto or this text (he instead placed his name on the cover), and the fact that Painlevé
became involved in the cinema (but was not yet). A comparison of writing styles—already alluded to by
the parts of the text Goll repurposed elsewhere—shows the piece as clearly the work of Goll.
87
Ibid.
99
Lacking a paper trail and in anticipation of future archival discoveries, one can
only speculate about the precise manner and conditions under which Painlevé came to
produce the found poem “Drame néo-zoologique” (“Neo-zoological drama”), whether it
was solicited or submitted, or the extent to which the two men influenced each other’s
thinking, and whether or not, for example, Painlevé read Goll’s texts while preparing his
own.
88
(For a reproduction of the original poem see Appendix A) It is easy, nevertheless,
to understand Goll’s interest in Painlevé’s poem, as it exemplifies and even extends the
primary values his manifesto, engaging the “rediscovery of nature” and constructing
poetry from the raw materials of life, in this case, the life sciences. The poem gives a
glimpse into the emergent aesthetic sensibilities of the twenty-one year old scientist, as
well as expression of his fundamental insight into the surrealist potential of positivist
scientific data. Scientific inquiry, for him, suggests a mode of discovery packed with the
surprising and strange dramas of life, death, nourishment, reproduction, identification and
its rupture, all of which will become the recurring themes of Painlevé’s œuvre.
The poem is introduced by an editorial remark alluding to Painlevé’s recent
appearance before the Academy: “Mr. Jean Painlevé, who yesterday was honored by the
Academy of Sciences for highly realist research, reveals himself to be equally surrealist.”
In the poem, Painlevé collages bits of data and observation from laboratory research
cahiers, to which he adds some ornamental flourishes (it is not pure cut-and-paste work),
dis-organized around the fraught existence of the tubellarian Prorhynchus, a free-living

88
The following discussion and citation of “Drame néo-zoologique,” draws from the poem as published in
Surréalisme, no. 1 (1924): 12; and “Neo-zoological drama,” in Science is Fiction, 117. I have on occasion
modestly altered Jeanine Herman’s excellent translation to draw out the resonance of particular words from
the original. The original French-language version of the poem is reproduced in the appendix.
100
paramecium-like flat worm common to the mud and muck of freshwater ponds, and a
frequent resident of the aquariums in biology laboratories. Following the confused
reactions of the press, the poem is most often read as a piece of frivolous—if
exquisite—nonsense.
Roxane Hamery, in her illuminating reading of “Drame néo-zoologique,” refers to
it as a détournement or subversive decontextualization of scientific vocabulary. She
likens it to an exercise in collision montage, wherein the meaning does not exist within
each factual cell but rather is produced by the associations they raise when brought
together by their reader.
89
My own reading compliments this. However, placed within the
context of Painlevé’s scientific research, the poem’s raw facts do not seem to have been
totally evacuated of their original meanings. Rather, these facts have been mobilized to
push the logic of comparative anatomy to its limits; his method at this point remains more
scientific than cinematic. With an insouciant and mischievous spirit, the poem draws out
the latent surrealist potential of a discipline premised upon comparison—figured here as a
method of juxtaposition capable of poetic images that bring disparate realities together
most beautifully.
Painlevé’s description of the Prorhynchus initiates comparative observations and
associations with other genus and species, including slime molds (“So sweet is the
plasmodium of Myxomycetes”), protozoa (Rotifera and Stephanoceros eichorni), aquatic
flat worms and planeria (Dendrocoelum lacteum, Planaria torva, Mesostoma, Nephelis
octoculata), insect larvae (Chironomus plumosus), crustaceans (Bythotrephes

89
Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 32.
101
longimanus), mollusks and their parasites (the stagnalis snail and distome larvae), and
even the dangling appendage of a laboratory apparatus in the form of an “old marc valve”
who, in the penultimate line, explains that “spermatogenesis only takes place in the
male.”
90
The text even features Parat and Painlevé’s recent research specimen, the
Chironomidae larvae, specified here as the Chironomus plumosus. This larva practices its
own form of vital staining by consuming the Prorhynchus to “outline their intestinal
arborizations in red lace.” Painlevé also makes allusions to parthenogenesis, one of the
primary lines of research in Wintrebert’s laboratory, imagining that Prorhynchus “would
rather be born through parthenogenesis than touch these threads of the ovoviviparous
Mesostoma; he hasn’t the choice.” As alluded to by the drama in the title, the poem’s
comparative anatomy also makes reference to the human observer as part of the economy
of comparison, the scientist as poet, negotiating the twin lures of identification with the
specimens and anthropomorphic projection, which is interrupted three-quarters of the
way through the poem by the insertion of a telegram’s “Stop.”
Phrases such as “the little turbellarion knows the embrace of their
mouth”—referring to the Prorhynchus’s predators, Dendrocoelum lacteum and Planaria
torva—add an unexpected and cruel voluptuousness to the descriptive elements. He

90
This is likely a reference to both a piece of laboratory equipment and a person. To indulge a bit of
speculation, could “this old marc valve” (cette vieille soupape de marc) allude to the laboratory’s second in
command, the its chief of preparations—a sous pape or sub pope—Maurice Parat, or perhaps even to
Painlevé himself: sous pape de marc, Marc’s assistant? A less strained reading might at least acknowledge
here Painlevé’s fascination with parentage, and particularly sexual configurations that rethink the roles of
mother and father.
Roxane Hamery also notes poem’s use of a couple of phonetic deviations between present and
implied words, such as Painlevé’s evocation of the expression “pas claire du tout” (not at all clear) as “pas
calcaire du tout” (not at all calcerous)” or “jouissance des cerceux” (jouissance of hoops) and “cerveaux”
(brains). See Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 32.
102
suggests an intimate link between nutritive, sexual, and destructive appetites; a favorite
theme that Painlevé will return to with increasing fervor in his war-era films such as Le
Vampire and L’Assassins d’eau douce (1946), which in many ways is an adaptation of
the poem. Painlevé plays with this dissonance between the obscure, erudition of Latin
names and the volatile lives of these lowly, muck-dwelling organisms, without ever
implying they are somehow beneath serious attention.
The poem zigzags. It accumulates a series of strange facts offered in quick
succession, mostly separated only by semicolons (instead of line breaks), effecting a
jagged meter suggestive of a telegram or stock ticker syncopated to a hot jazz drum beat.
The relationship between each successive burst of information is tenuous, contingent:
“coolies produce little bundles; a Rotifera dries up in a corner; as it can be sensed that the
sexes are separated, the Prorhynchus sucking stops; Stephanocero eichorni is better; what
difference does a double on a belvedere make. Stop.” The facts collide against each other
in a manner suggestive of the seemingly chaotic and spasmodic motions of the text’s
bestiary, the literally blind encounters of the sightless Prorhynchus and its fellow
jitterbugs. As the poem proceeds, it becomes increasingly difficult to locate its subject,
which indeed becomes more and more diffuse and relations of clear causality dissolve.
This effect seems due as much to Painlevé’s relatively unformed skills as a writer as to an
intentional effect, but it will become a stylistic tick that Painlevé later develops to rather
effective use in such films as Les Oursins.
Painlevé’s engagement with Surréalisme very much reflects Goll’s ideal surrealist
method of creating art through a rediscovery of nature, of reality (the two converge in
103
Goll’s manifesto and statement on cinema) and its transposition to a higher (artistic)
plane. The pursuit of the neo-zoological, a new zoology, in Painlevé’s poem appears to
literalize Goll’s method: working with the raw materials of scientific observation of the
natural world and poetically coordinating them, producing the neo, the new from this
transposition of raw to wrought. Along the same lines, Painlevé’s approach coincides
very closely with Goll’s observations on cinema, wherein the filmmaker is a
documentarian, a conductor whose creative and imaginative work is not involved in
constructing cardboard cities but rather in coordinating the encounter between the
recording apparatus and the profilmic world.
A significant difference between Goll’s elaboration of surrealism and Painlevé’s
contribution to Surréalisme concerns the ends to which transposition occurs. For Goll,
artistic practice strives towards idealization, if not idealism. Even at this early point,
Painlevé’s work does not strive for the same elevation, its commitments lie embedded in
the material—the material world as well as the material selected from observation,
whether in the laboratory at a microscope or, as will be the case, in the documents
themselves (textual or filmic). Like Comandon’s remark about the desire to preserve the
striking beauty of “certain preparations” which appear “almost magical,” Painlevé’s
creative work is rooted in discovery and elaboration that in this context sees a species of
cinematic beauty as immanent rather than invented, and, to cite Comandon again,
materializing—bringing into view—previously unknown aspects of reality, given their
invisibility to unaided human perception. Unlike Goll, Painlevé does not share the same
desire to disengage from the (popular) arts of distractions, curiosity, eroticism, and
104
exoticism (for better and worse), that Goll insists surrealism must abandon.
91
Furthermore, in distinction to Goll’s surrealism, which leaves the status of the real as
such undisturbed, Painlevé’s poetic approach, in its larval state, does not yet intimate that
scientific observation may have a provocatively disturbing effect on epistemological
paradigms, but its juvenile fascination with sexual anxiety, erotic violence, and devouring
drives show the first flashes of an approach to scientific observation as an agent of
disturbance.
92
Painlevé’s differences from the surrealist circle of André Breton are more the
result of personal politics than philosophical commitments. Painlevé’s participation in
Goll’s Surréalisme made him an automatic, if unwitting enemy of Breton’s cause, but
Breton, who never hesitated in this period to fiercely attack even his most intimate
friends, does not appear to have expelled any energy making accusations against
Painlevé. For his part, Painlevé seems to have regarded Breton mostly from a safe
distance—happy to witness his provocations, such as reprimanding a man for walking

91
This is not just a matter of taste, but as suggested through the citations to Bataille above (and engaged in
the next chapter), is in part based upon a materialism born of scientific practice but which has philosophical
resonances with Bataille’s base materialism. In his 1986 interview with Hélène Hazéra and Dominique
Leglu, “Jean Painlevé, Qui Fait Voir L’Invisible: Voyage au centre du cinéma scientifique avec un pioneer,
franc-tireur et iconoclaste,” Liberation, 15-16 November 1986, 20-21; translated into English by Jeanine
Herman as “Jean Painlevé Reveals the Invisible,” in Science is Fiction, 175, Painlevé gives an uncanny
précis of Bataille’s “Big Toe”: “I’m very proud that we live in an era that finally recognizes its dependence
on shit. All of genetics relies on colon bacilli, which in turn rely on our feces. All experiments are done on
it. We’re deep into shit.”
92
Painlevé’s work suggests these consequences but does not always pursue them. Such will be the project
of Gaston Bachelard in the early 1930s, when he published a series of attacks against realist
epistemologies, which he believed experimental physics showed to be too limiting to scientific thinking.
See Gaston Bachelard, “Noumène et Microphysique,” Recherches Philosophiques, no. 1 (1931-1932): 55-
65; Bachelard, “Le Surrationalisme,” Du Surréalisme au Front Populaire: Inquisitions: Fac-similé de la
revue de documents inédits, ed. Henri Béhar (1936; repr., Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1990), 1-6; and Gaston
Bachelard The Formation of the Scientific Mind, trans. Mary McAllester Jones (1938; repr. Manchester:
Clinamen Press, 2002). This question is addressed in chapter three of this dissertation.
105
down the street with an umbrella so violently that the police became involved, but not
compelled to join in.
93
He was largely unaffected by Breton’s legendary charms and later
in life admitted to vastly preferring Aragon’s Traité du style to Breton’s Nadja. In this
respect Painlevé is quite unlike his friend and sometime collaborator Boiffard, who
actively participated in the launching of the surrealist enterprises of autumn 1924 and was
ranked by Breton as having performed acts of “Absolute Surrealism”—though Painlevé
certainly would have been current on the Surrealist circle’s activities through Boiffard.
94
Painlevé, who rejected the institution of marriage and advocated free love, certainly
would not have tolerated Breton’s doctrinaire moralism and his idealization of
monogamous, heterosexual romance based upon medieval chivalry. Just as importantly,
he would not have endured Breton’s distaste for jazz, and openly voiced disagreement
with Breton’s postwar position on music.
95
In terms of creative production, Painlevé’s developing aesthetic draws upon a
different set of concerns than those central to surrealism as defined by André Breton and
his circle. Breton’s manifesto (published as a preface to Poisson soluble), the
establishment of the Bureau of Surrealist Research, and the launching of the journal La
Révolution surréaliste in December 1924 helped solidify surrealism as a singular

93
Painlevé with Hélène Hazéra and Dominique Leglu, “Jean Painlevé Reveals the Invisible,” 175-176.
94
André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 26; and Painlevé interviewed by Brigitte Berg, “Images de
Painlevé,” 10.
95
Jazz, smoking opium, drinking alcohol, homosexuality, hedonism, reading Nietzsche and Dostoevsky,
etc., were among the list of activities Pope Breton prohibited amongst his followers in 1924. Michel Surya,
Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (New
York: Verso, 2002), 74-77. Brigitte Berg notes Painlevé’s discontent with Breton’s position on music in
“Jean Painlevé et l’Avant-Garde,” in Jeune, Dure et Pure!, ed. Nicole Brenez and Christian Lebrat (Paris:
Cinémathèque Française, 2001), 111.
106
movement following Breton’s terms by the year’s end. Breton ambitiously expanded the
stakes of surrealism beyond Goll’s understanding, claiming for it nothing less than
solutions to “all the principle problems of life,” and the opening exhortation of
Révolution surréaliste echoed these ambitions, calling for a new Declaration of the
Rights of Man.
96
To solidify his propriety, Breton went so far as to provide dictionary and
encyclopedia entries for surrealism in his manifesto.
SURREALISM. n., masc. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one
proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other
manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of
any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior
reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence
of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all
other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the
principle problems of life.
97
In comparison to Breton, the young Painlevé staked out a much more modest
project—and while it is important not to produce global readings from one boyishly
exuberant poem, nor to expect it to support the same sorts of claims a manifesto
makes—its is safe to say “Drame néo-zoologique” did not seek out the ruin of reason so
much as it aimed to make it more elastic.
Roxane Hamery asserts that Painlevé’s approach finds in reality phenomena
strange enough to produce the disturbances that the surrealists sought in such altered
states as sleeping fits, dreaming, and hypnosis as triggers for the imagination: “It suffices,

96
Cover, Révolution surréaliste, no. 1 (December, 1924). “Il faut aboutir à une nouvelle déclaration des
droites de l’homme.”
97
André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924),” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and
Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 26.
107
according to Painlevé, to be receptive to the real.”
98
And yet, both the Bretonian approach
and that of Painlevé overlap in their interest in automatic behaviors—be they of the
unconscious or instinct—and share a dedication to expanding the frontiers of the real that
takes the protocols of scientific research as their primary mode of inquiry.
99
Both projects
engage the same axes identified by Annette Michelson as central to the surrealist
project—eros and chance—and yet the horizons to which they fix their gaze, and the
philosophical underpinnings of these commitments remain proximate to each other while
diverging considerably.
100
Through engagement with ideas of dissident surrealists, and
subsequently the montage theory of his friend Sergei Eisenstein, Painlevé’s foray into
poetry as a creative treatment of actuality—a poetic documentary based not in
transposition or narrativization but in juxtaposition and comparison—will soon be
reinvented through the cinema, setting the poetic image in motion.

98
Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 32.
99
Surrealism often looked to science for inspiration. Breton studied medicine, frequently turned to natural
and biological metaphors in his writing, and in his 1938 self-portrait collaged “Automatic Writing,” he
featured himself working at a microscope. Furthermore, the journal Révolution surréaliste modeled itself
after La Nature.
Roger Caillois will come closest to synthesizing the surrealist and Painlevéan tendencies with his
turn to “comparative biology” in his essay “La Mante religieuese,” Minotaure, no. 5 (1934): 23-26;
translated into English by Claudine Frank and Camille Naish as “The Praying Mantis,” in The Edge of
Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 66-
83. See chapter two for further discussion.
100
Annette Michelson, “But Eros Sulks,” Arts, vol. 34, no. 6 (March 1960): 32-38; and Annette Michelson
interviewed by Stuart Liebman and David Shapiro, “Surrealism and Cinema: A Conversation with Annette
Michelson,” Millennium Film Journal, vol. 1, no. 1 (1977-1978): 52-59.
108
1.5 Experiments with Cinema
Painlevé’s formation in the life sciences—zoology, histology, embryology, and especially
comparative anatomy (his diploma was technically in physics, chemistry, and
biology
101
)—helped the young scientist develop a rigorous eye not only for detailed
comparisons by homology, but also striking juxtaposition. Painlevé also received a
significant—if less formal education by immersing himself in the cinema culture of the
moment. As a youth, in addition to his adventures seeing the caesarean and the film on
Bonnot at the Chartres fairgrounds, Painlevé and his nanny frequented the Saint Michel
cinema, taking in films by Mack Sennett, Georges Méliès, Emile Cohl, and serials such
as Le Masque aux dents blanches, Les Mystères de New York, and Fantômas.
102
His early
cinema-going years coincided perfectly with the highpoint of production of scientific
popularization films (1909-1914), when Pathé’s science film division headed by
Comandon, Gaumont’s Encyclopédie series, and Éclair’s Scientia series (established in
1911), as well as smaller operations such as Éclipse (the French arm of the Urban
Trading Company) and Kineto, flooded the theaters.
103
He came of age at precisely the
moment when a lively cinema culture emerged in Paris (and not just Paris, of course, but

101
Contemporary eyes should not misread this degree as a triple major; as Raoul M. May explains, a
university degree (license) in biology required students to acquire three certificates, each granted by taking
two or three courses within each subfield. May, “French Instruction and Research in Biology,” 53.
102
Berg, “Contradictory Forces,” 7.
103
On scientific vernacularization prior to World War One, see Gaycken, “Devices of Curiosity”; Gaycken,
“‘A Drama United Them in a Fight to the Death’: some remarks on the flourishing of a cinema of scientific
vernacularization in France, 1909-1914,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, vol. 22, no. 3
(2002): 353-374; Thierry Lefebvre, “The Scientia production (1911–1914): scientific popularization
through pictures,” Griffithiana, 47 (May 1993); and Lefebvre, “Film scientifique et grand public. Une
rencontre différée.”
109
throughout Europe) through an expanding network of ciné-clubs, film magazines and
journals, and the emergence of film repertory houses and specialized theaters that created
circuits of cinema outside of and alternative to the commercial studios system and
boulevard movie theaters. These smaller institutions supported and nourished not only
experiments in filmmaking, but experiments in cinema—in manners of programming and
viewing films in a spirit of critical reflection, that in turn spurred modes of production at
the intersection of experimental and documentary modes of filmmaking.
Between 1924 and 1929 small movie theaters specializing in avant-garde,
documentary, and repertory films opened throughout Paris to cater to the growing
cinephilia. The culture of cinephilia had been cultivated in the aftermath of World War
One with the founding of such ciné-clubs as the Canard aux Navets (run by the actress
Eve Francis), Club des Amis du Septième Art (founded by the poet Ricciotto Canudo),
Ciné-Club de France (organized by the filmmaker Léon Poirier), and the Association des
Amis du cinéma (run by Jean Pascal). The establishment of theaters dedicated to the
modes of engaged spectatorship rehearsed in the ciné-clubs sought to spread cinephilia to
a wider public.
Jean Tedesco’s Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier opened 14 November 1924, with a
program comprised of a documentary (André Sauvage’s poetic study of mountain
climbing, La Traversée du Grépon), an avant-garde short without title cards (Michel
Silver’s L’Horloge), and a “classic” (Charlie Chaplin’s Sunny Side/Une Idylle aux
Champs). After a difficult first year (sometimes projecting films to a near empty room),
Tedesco’s cinema began attracting audiences with a growing interest both in the
110
medium’s history and the latest formal experiments, largely drawing audiences consisting
of the students in the Latin Quarter, who flocked to the discounted Monday afternoon
matinees, and the artists living in neighboring Montparnasse. The success of the Vieux-
Colombier allowed him to open a second theater on the right bank; the 180 seat Pavillon
du Cinéma at the Boulevard des Italiens, which reprised programs from the Vieux-
Colombier.
Inspired by the Vieux-Colombier’s success, and a growing enthusiasm for film
culture, on 21 January 1926 the actors Armand Tallier and Laurence Myrga (who had
appeared together in Poirier’s Jocelyn [1922], a landmark of early French realist film)
opened the Studio des Ursulines, a 300-seat theater at 10 rue des Ursulines in the 5
th
arrondissement. In quick succession, a series of theaters specializing in avant-garde and
repertory films opened in Paris: José Miguel Duran’s Ciné Latin, a 300 seat theater at 10-
12 rue Thouin in the 5
th
arrondissement, Jean Mauclaire’s Studio 28, 337 seat theater at
10 rue de Tholozé in Montmartre, the Salle des Agriculteurs, a 500 seat theater at 8 rue
d’Athènes in the 9
th
arrondissement, Henri Diamant-Berger’s Studio Diamant, a 160 seat
theater at 2 avenue Portalis in the 8
th
arrondissement, and Jean Vallée’s L’Œil de Paris at
4-bis rue de l’Étoile in the 17
th
arrondissement.
104
In 1929, by Christophe Gauthier’s
count, there were over 1700 seats in specialty theaters in Paris—a number that would
rapidly decline as the sound film established its dominance (and those theaters without

104
Information on the specialty theaters and the alternative cinema networks draws upon Christophe
Gauthier, La Passion du Cinéma, 115-123, 135-143, 362-369 (Annex 9); Noureddine Ghali, L’Avant-
Garde Cinématographique en France, 57-61; Richard Abel, French Cinema, 257-260; and Jacques
Bernard Brunius, En Marge du Cinéma Français (Paris: Arcanes, 1954), 123-124.
111
the means for costly refurbishments saw ticket sales decline) and the fallout from the
financial market crashes began to reverberate in France.
105
The Vieux-Colombier was not the most successful, adventurous, or fashionable of
the specialty theaters—the Studio Ursulines, for example, took greater risks in their
avant-garde programming, holding the debut of Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique after
Tedesco, turned him away, and Studio 28 and Studio Diamant were far more chic
106
—but
Tedesco’s sustained efforts to institutionalize film programming practices that were
historically and aesthetically informed but also forward looking set the direct model that
many of the specialty theaters adapted—allowing for some generalization of its effects.
(Figure 12) Tedesco’s programming aimed to attract but also cultivate a public,
challenging their thinking and taste. In short and with something of a missionary’s zeal,
Tedesco sought to educate film spectators in practices of viewing film as a popular art
form—a pursuit that was not separated from the quest for the elusive visual pleasures
critics and theorists of the moment referred to as photogénie, and which Grierson would
later dismiss as so many “shimmying (and otherwise discursive) exoticisms.”
Photogénie was a particularly elusive and polyvalent concept, and certainly one
involved in a visual economy of exoticism that Grierson aptly identifies. Most of its

105
Christophe Gauthier, La Passion du Cinéma, 191.
106
See Standish D. Lawder, The Cubist Cinema, 186-187, includes passages from Tedesco’s memoirs
regarding his missed opportunity with Léger. Noureddine Ghali writes of the surprising fashionableness of
the Ursulines, where an estimated 20-25,000 visitors came in its first year. Ghali, L’Avant-Garde
Cinématographique en France, 59. Studio 28 was decorated by Jean Cocteau. In a review of the newly
opened Studio Diamant, Charles de Saint-Cyr described the interior of the theater as inspired by Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis with seats comparable to those in a Pullman train. Charles Saint-Cyr, “Un Nouveau
studio est ouvert! Une salle curious. Un hallucinant documentaire de Jean Painlevé. Quelques mot à propos
de Crise,” La Semaine à Paris, no. 343 (21-28 December 1928): 55. The décor was purportedly so chic
(and shiny) that it distracted spectators from the films themselves. See Richard Abel, French Cinema, 269.
112
prominent theorists refrained from giving it too stable a definition. Nevertheless, it was
the signifier around which a number of influential theories of cinematic specificity and
cinephilia were constructed and it placed spectatorship at the center of its concerns.
Given its prominence to 1920s film theory and the concerns of perception within the
present project, it will be worthwhile to cite two key ideas, that of surprise and mobility,
as they will be recurrent themes of this study.
Fig 12. Advertisement for Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Cinéa-Ciné Pour Tous, no. 75 (15 December
1926): 4. Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
For Louis Delluc, writing in 1920, photogénie is the product of “the accord
between cinema and photography,” a not at all self-evident explanation which one can
take to mean the coincidence of motion and a plastic beauty informed by chance (chance
is the key aesthetic principle of Delluc’s understanding of photography: “The gesture
113
captured by a Kodak has nothing at all to do with the gesture one wished to secure. We
generally benefit from this.”
107
One understands the importance of the machine, and the
mechanical, here as well.
In his extensive writing on photogénie, Jean Epstein echoes Delluc’s emphasis on
mobility and plasticity, both internal to shots and in between them. He explains “an
aspect is photogenic if it moves and changes simultaneously in space and in time.” He
later specifies, “only the mobile and personal aspects [appearances but also angles] of
things, beings, and souls can be photogenic, that is to say, can acquire a superior moral
value through cinematographic reproduction.”
108
Epstein, trained in medicine and
philosophy, does not mean morals in the sense of a French Christian bourgeois morality
or even in an idealist sense, but, is far more attuned to a Nietzschean understanding of
morals (he was a considerable reader of Nietzsche), suggesting that superior moral value
is not necessarily more upright, but morals that have undergone transvaluation, for
cinema is nothing for the Apollinairean theorists, if not a process of transposition, which
under the pressure of Nietzsche, turns towards transvaluation.
Film historian Richard Abel’s discussion of photogénie is particularly
enlightening. He summarizes Delluc’s theory of photogénie as premised upon the
relationship of filmic images to the real. The processes of recording and projecting
transform the materials filmed, but this transformation does not reduce or eliminate the

107
Louis Delluc, “Photographie,” and “Photographie n’est pas Photogénie,” in Le Cinéma et les Cinéastes:
Écrits cinématographiques I, ed. Pierre L’Herminier (Paris: Cinémathèque française, 1985), 36, 33.
108
Jean Epstein, “L’essentiel du cinéma (1923),” and Le Cinéma vu de l’Etna (1926) in Écrits, vol. 1, 120,
140 (original emphasis). On Epstein’s debts to Nietzsche, see Chiara Tognolotti, “L’alcool, le cinéma et le
philosophe. L’influence de Friedrich Nietzsche sur la théorie cinématographique de Jean Epstein à travers
les notes du fonds Epstein,” 1895, no. 46 (June 2005): 37-54.
114
“realness” of the images. Abel cites Delluc’s essay “Cinéma,” Paris-Midi, 5 March 1919:
“The miracle of cinema is that it stylizes without altering the plain truth.”
109
It is, Abel
asserts, a process of defamiliarization. “The effect of photogénie was singular: to make us
see ordinary things as they had never been seen before.”
110
Tedesco’s approach to programming, his hunt for the photogenic, essentially
revised pre-war theatrical practices—then disappearing—of starting an evening with an
eclectic mix of actualités and shorts—often procured from the flea markets around
Clignancourt—and perhaps a recent avant-garde film, before the main attraction, which
was presented as being selected for its contribution to film history or film style.
111
Yet
Tedesco insisted, perhaps too emphatically, that his was not the anarchic “mixed salad”
approach of throwing together whatever was on hand—the very sorts of practices Jacques
Vaché and André Breton tried to recreate as spectators by entering and leaving screenings
at random in order to approach images outside of the narrative context, maximize their
disorienting effects.
112
Instead, it consisted of a careful process of selection, curation, and
canon formation.

109
Richard Abel, “Photogénie and Company,” in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology,
vol. 1: 1907-1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 107-111, quotations from 110.
110
Ibid.
111
Christophe Gauthier, La Passion du Cinéma, 119-120. On the specific theaters and networks dedicated
to nonfiction films see Jean-Jacques Meusy, “La Diffusion des Films de ‘Non-Fiction’ dans les
Établissements Parisiens,” 1895, no. 18: Images du Réel: La Non-Fiction en France (1890-1930), ed.
Thierry Lefebvre (Summer 1995): 169-99.
112
On Breton and Vaché’s insolent film spectatorship, see André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Grove, 1960), 32, 37 (originally published in French in 1928); and Breton, “Comme dans un
Bois,” L’Âge du cinéma, nos. 4-5 (August-November 1951): 26-30, translated into English as “As in a
Wood,” in The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, 3
rd
edition, ed., trans., and
introduced by Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Lights, 2000), 72-77.
115
The desire to elevate both the film text and its modes of reception motivated the
incorporation of an explicitly pedagogical element to screenings in the form of a film
repertory comprised of brief passages from films shown during previous seasons of the
Vieux-Colombier deemed “classic” (the repertory list drawn from the 1924-1927 seasons
is printed in Cinéa-Ciné Pour Tous, nos. 87-88 [15 June - 1 July 1927]: 11-12; of the 99
films listed 22 are science or documentary films). Tedesco imagined this montage of
film’s greatest hits as an additional element to the programs, one that would take a
comparative approach to the history of film style. In defense of his idea, and perhaps a
little defensively, he clarified: “If we do not want the Cinema’s Repertoire to be confused
with a sort of Musée Grévin of film, where one readily encounters horrors and
curiosities—it is essential to see clearly ahead, to foresee, if it is not too presumptuous,
the progressive march of our art, so that the archives of its past, so brief but so rapid,
support and consolidate instead of misleading and diverting.”
113
Tedesco envisioned the education of the eye offered by the Vieux-Colombier as
not only expanding the tastes of the public (helping sustain a market not only for his

113
Jean Tedesco, “La Question du Répertoire du Film. Bilan 1926-1927,” Cinéa-Ciné Pour Tous, nos. 87-
88 (15 June - 1 July 1927): 11. In the third installment of André G. Brunelin’s “Au Temps du Vieux
Colombier de Jean Tedesco (suite et fin),” 88, Brunelin refers to Epstein declaring, in reference to the
Vieux-Colombier, “he did not believe in a Musée Grévin of cinema.” This was apparently said or written in
autumn 1925 (Brunelin does not cite a source). Epstein’s remark seems to have stung Tedesco, who greatly
admired the filmmaker/theorist and frequently screened his films. Ironically, Tedesco seems to have
interiorized the barb’s implicit snobbishness, and insisted on differentiating his project from the perceived
lurid curiosities of the famous wax museum. In opposition to the cabinet of curiosity aspect of the Musée
Grévin, one might understand Tedesco’s defense of his use of film fragments as analogous the gourmet
who feasts solely on chicken oysters and not the whole bird. Of course, the highly subjective fragments
featured in Tedesco’s cinematic image repertoire are the result of fetishism too.
On the Musée Grévin’s incorporation of cinema, see Vanessa Schwartz and Jean Jacques Meusy,
“Le Musée Grévin et le cinématographe: l’histoire d’une rencontre,” in 1895, no. 11 (1991): 19-48; and
Vanessa Schwartz, “From Journal plastique to Journal lumineux: Early Cinema and Spectacular Reality,”
in Spectacular Realities, 177-199.
116
theater but for a more adventurous understanding of the possibilities of commercial
cinema) but as influencing filmmakers, whom he counted amongst his audience. The cut-
up extracts featured as part of the repertoire of the Vieux-Colombier, Richard Abel
suggests, inspired numerous avant-garde short films.
114
The theater’s programming also
participated in critical debates of the moment, often situated in direct dialogue with
articles published in Cinéa-Ciné Pour Tous, and can be understood as producing an
intervention—if ephemeral—into the critical and aesthetic discourses of the moment. At
the time of the theater’s opening, filmmakers, critics, and theorists (often one in the
same) were shifting focus from debates over whether and how film was an art to taking
increasing interest in examining films in order to better understand its specificities as a
medium and its systems of signification.
Beginning in December 1922 with the release of Gance’s blockbuster railroad
melodrama La Roue, which featured frenetic, rapid montage sequences of locomotion
and mechanics (scenes which were often extracted from the original 32-reel, almost 9
hours long film and shown at ciné-clubs and lectures, including by Tedesco for his April
1924 lecture “Sélections symbolistes” for the Club des amis du septième art), and in
1923, with Man Ray’s abstract study of light and form Le Retour à la Raison (featuring
images of nails and tacks made using Ray’s camera-less direct exposure technique, no
doubt inspired by word of, if not the images in, Viking Eggling’s Diagonal Symphony
and Hans Richter’s Rhythm 21, both produced in Germany in 1921), sparked interest in
film’s purely plastic, non-narrative elements, which suggested to many a film form free

114
Richard Abel, French Cinema, 254.
117
from the influence of other arts, particularly theater and literature (due to its
nonrepresentational form, music remained a prevalent metaphor for such theorists had a
modified and even non-essentialist understanding of pure film).
115
Fernand Léger and
Dudley Murphey’s Ballet mécanique (1924), René Clair and Françis Picabia’s Entr’acte
(1924), Jean Grémillon’s Photogénie mécanique (1924), Henri Chomette’s Jeux des
reflets et de la vitesse and Cinq minutes de cinéma pur (1925), Jean Epstein’s Photogénie
(1925), and Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma (1925)—all short, non-narrative films
that experimented with the plastic qualities and play of light, motion, and relationships of
shots suggested the possibility of non-narrative practices of filmmaking.
Tedesco decisively shaped the discourse on specificity through his frequent
inclusion of “pure” scientific research films and prewar scientific vernacularization films
in his regular programs and amongst the Film Repertory, presenting the films
simultaneously as positivist documents—if not always documentaries—and as aesthetic
object lessons.
116
Perhaps inspired by Jean Comandon’s recent lecture at Musée Galliera

115
Tedesco’s lecture is cited in Christophe Gauthier, La Passion du Cinéma, 353. On film pur (pure film)
and arguments regarding the essence of film, see Jean Epstein, “L’essentiel du cinéma,” in Écrits, vol. 1,
119-120; and Germaine Dulac, “L’Essence du Cinéma—L’Idée Visuelle (1925),” and “Quelques
Réflexions sur le ‘Cinéma Pur’ (1926),” in Écrits sur le Cinéma (1919-1937), ed. Prosper Hillairet (Paris:
Paris Expérimental, 1994), 62-67, 73-74. The music-turned-film critic Émile Vuillermoz, who began
writing film reviews for the newspaper Le Temps in 1916, due to the dramatic decrease in concerts,
particularly of “serious” German music, perhaps more than any other writer of the moment set the
discourse for adapting such ideas as “visual music” and “visual symphony” to film, which he largely
approached, from a musical perspective, as an art of composition. His ideas, developed over hundreds of
columns for Le Temps, were summarized in his lecture at the Vieux-Colombier “La Musique des images,”
delivered 26 March 1926 and subsequently published as the essay “La Musique des Images,” in L’Art
Cinématographique, vol. 3 (Paris: Librarie Félix Alcon, 1927), 39-66.
116
This is not to say Tedesco was the sole figure to champion scientific films in popular contexts. Jean
Comandon gave occasional illustrated lectures featuring his ultra- and microcinematigraphic films as well
as his time-lapse films of plant life. These ranged from lectures at professional conferences in science,
medicine, and education, as well as private organizations such as the Société Industrielle de Mulhouse
(where he gave several lectures between 1921 and 1930), and two prominent talks within the frame of film
118
(given the same day that Surréalisme appeared), Tedesco seems to have recognized in
these avant-garde films a similar imperative as that of science films: to reveal the
invisible, to expand the realm of perception, and see the world differently.
Thierry Lefebvre, in his essay on the embrace of science film by the avant-garde,
suggests that scientific vernacularization films provided avant-gardists with “the ideal
antidote” to the conceits of filmed theater and narrative films, replacing invented stories
with the basic dramas of life.
117
They certainly did this, but their presentation at the
Vieux-Colombier was intended to put such films in conversation with each other rather
than fortify the wall of the medium’s forbidden city (to draw upon a metaphor from
Epstein)—a certain restrained promiscuity, despite the protests against being
characterized as a Musée Grévin of film, seems to have been built into such practices.
118
Tedesco’s selection of scientific vernacular and research films provided historical
examples, a history, for filmmakers interested in experimentation that connected their
work equally the motion studies of Marey and Muybridge, the camera tricks of Méliès
and Lucien Bull and Jean Comandon, suggesting a deeper engagement with film history
than the rhetoric of avant-garde rupture admits. Significantly, these programs and similar

aesthetics: his lecture “Les Infiniment Petits (La Vie micronienne au Cinéma)” delivered 28 October 1922
in the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) amphitheater C at the invitation of the
Association des Amis du Cinéma, and his lecture “La Microcinématographie ” given 10 October 1924 at
the Musée Galliera. Among the attendees of this second lecture were the author Colette, the filmmaker
Germaine Dulac, and most likely, Jean Tedesco himself. Paula Amad notes that during his time at Albert
Kahn’s Archives de planète, his flower study films, such as Germination des fleurs and the hand-tinted Les
Fleurs were featured as the grand finales during private séances for Kahn’s guests. This included Colette,
who visited on 2 January 1922, and whose own sense of cinema, as Paula Amad argues, was deeply
informed by Comandon’s films. See Paula Amad, “These Spectacles Are Never Forgotten.”
117
Thierry Lefebvre, “De la Science à L’Avant-Garde,” 107.
118
Jean Epstein, “De Quelques Conditions de la Photogénie (1923-1924),” in Écrits, vol. 1, 137
119
efforts at Studio des Ursulines, Ciné Latin, and other theaters, particularly in the middle
of the decade, helped turn the avant-garde toward documentary film, perhaps as much as
the influence of Soviet films did.
119

119
The importance of Soviet cinema on the French avant-garde should not be ignored, but also not
overstated, and needs to be placed in its proper time line. For example, Bill Nichols’s claim in
“Documentary and the Modernist Avant-Garde” that most documentary historians “choose a myth of
origins to the reality of Soviet invention” (609n53, my emphasis) needs to be nuanced by greater attention
to context. While there was clearly great interest in Soviet cinema in France as throughout Europe, with
regards to the French documentary practice, the impact of Soviet cinema does not seem to have achieved
critical mass until the end of the 1920s. This is towards the end of, rather than prior to, the efflorescence of
avant-garde documentaries around 1928.
In his incredibly detailed study of the French avant-garde of the 1920s, Noureddine Ghali notes
that Eisenstein’s films were only screened in Paris twice during the decade—in 1926 the Ciné-Club de
France projected the banned Potemkin and the Amis de Spartacus screened it for its members in April
1928, when it caused something of a sensation. During Eisenstein’s famous appearance at the Sorbonne on
17 February 1930, his films were prevented from being screened by the prefecture—a transcript of his
improvised lecture was published as “Les Principes du Nouveau Cinéma Russe,” in La Revue Du Cinéma,
2
e
année, no. 9 (1 April 1930): 16-27. Likewise Ghali also notes that Vsevolod Poudovkin’s montage
theory was not translated into French until its publication in Cinéa-Ciné Pour Tous in January 1929. Ghali,
L’Avant-Garde Cinématographie en France, 51, 53-54, 181.
Dziga Vertov’s influence, according to Georges Sadoul’s Histoire du Cinéma, 203, was much
greater in Germany than France, and as Annette Michelson notes in “Dr. Craze and Mr. Clair,” Vertov felt
scooped by René Clair’s Paris Qui Dort (1924). Sadoul, a key source for Nichols, suggests that the
influence of Soviet cinema turned avant-garde filmmakers away from objects and towards humans as their
primary subjects, but does not give many specifics. (One could cite the Russian émigré Dimitri Kirsanoff as
inspiring part of the turn from objects to people. His melodrama Menilmontant (1926), named for an
impoverished district of Paris, which draws upon the realist aesthetics developed right after the war by
André Antoine and Léon Poirier, but places it within an urban milieu and mixes in rapid montage and other
avant-garde tricks. This film certainly captured the interest of audiences in January 1926, and may have
influenced aspiring documentary filmmakers to turn toward human subjects, but why this more so than any
other realist film of the moment? Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que des heures (1926), generally recognized as
starting the cycle of avant-garde documentaries (and is the first theatrically released city symphony), is
occasionally credited as being inspired by Soviet cinema, and yet it premiered at the Vieux-Colombier in
October 1926, a month before the Ciné-Club de France’s 12 November screening of Potemkin. Further
research is needed to substantiate this claim.) Vertov came to Paris as a visiting filmmaker in July 1929,
giving a lecture and screening sponsored by the Ligue Noir & Blanc at Studio 28 on 23 July 1929. In a
review by Émile Vuillermoz, Vertov’s films were warmly received, credited for its particularly skillful
anthropomorphism of machines, but also regarded as “nothing new.” Vuillermoz, a somewhat conservative
man, dismissed Vertov’s discourse prior to the screening on the concept of the kino-glaz as obvious and a
bit puerile (Vuillermoz would prefer that all remain quiet). Émile Vuillermoz, “Chronique du Cinéma: À
l’Est, rien nouveau,” Le Temps, 27 July 1929, 4. If Vertov appeared as talented but “nothing new”—a
punning allusion to the novel À l’Ouest, rien nouveau, revised as All’s Quiet on the Eastern Front—to one
of Paris’s seasoned critics in 1929, this may say something about liveliness of the cinema culture of the
time. Granted, some of the reticence on Vuillermoz’s part may be due to politics. One can also speculate as
to the indirect success of Vertov’s ideas and aesthetic (well underway since 1924) preceding him in France
through his younger brother Boris Kaufmann, an émigré to France who made a study of Les Halles
centrales (1927) and may have helped spread the kino-glaz gospel. Even with Kaufmann, however, his
impact was primarily felt through his later collaborations with Jean Lods on 24 heures en 30 minutes and
120
Tedesco’s interest in science films seems to have drawn from a personal interest
in the material, its heightened capacity for photogénie—its “unsuspected aesthetic”—but
also its potential popular appeal, serving as an “antidote” to narrative film, as position
Tedesco complicates, but also serving as a sort of cinephilia philter. In “Études de
Ralenti” (slow-motion studies) a sort of “science for cinephiles” lecture on Lucien Bull’s
research delivered at the Vieux-Colombier 26 February 1926 and subsequently reprinted
in Cinéa Ciné Pour Tous, Tedesco describes Lucien Bull’s slow-motion films (recorded
at speeds upwards of 20,000 frames per second) of flying insects, bursting bubbles, and
bullet’s passing through wooden planks as the “latest weapon in the war against the
enemies of cinema.”
120
He noted that audiences who bristled at soft-focus and other
optical deformations during screenings of purported classics (his example is D. W.
Griffith’s Broken Blossoms) were often seduced by slow-motion footage of athletes,
dancers, and animals in motion. The reception to Bull’s films seems to have been
particularly strong, inspiring Tedesco to take-up the science film with particular intensity.
“You have expressed to me last year by your welcome your unanimous desire that the
Vieux-Colombier not remain indifferent to these discoveries; that we effectively support
them.”
121
This support came not only in the form of repeated screenings of Bull’s images,
which were integrated into the theater’s official repertory under the heading “Le Cinéma
de l’Invisible” (Cinema of the Invisible), and an active effort to screen vernacular and

Aujourd’hui (ca. 1929) and with Jean Vigo on À Propos de Nice (1930)—a film with strong Vertovian
resonances, Taris (1931), Zéro de Conduite (1933), and L’Atalante (1934).
120
Jean Tedesco, “Études de Ralenti,” 11-12, “unsuspected aesthetic” appears on 12.
121
Ibid.
121
research science films, but also, it appears, production or at least distribution of scientific
films through the Laboratoire du Vieux-Colombier, the small studio installed in the
theater’s attic. Although very little is known about Tedesco’s laboratory beyond its
primary project—collaborating with Jean Renoir on La Petite Marchande d’allumettes
(The Little Match Seller, 1928)—a number of science and wildlife documentaries bear its
name as “film du Laboratoire du Vieux-Colombier”: Etoiles et fleurs de mer (Stars and
Flowers of the Sea), La vie secrète du Grillon des Champs (The Secret Life of Field
Crickets), La Mante religieuse et l’Araignée (The Praying Mantis and Spider), Les
animaux photogéniques (Photogenic Animals), La Vie invisible du sang (The Invisible
Life of Blood), Papillons et chrysalides (Butterflies and Chrysalises), Les Poissons
Transparents et les Poulpes (Transparent Fish and Octopuses), La Vie Sensible des
Végétaux (The Sensitive Life of Plants), and La Vie d’une plante à fleurs (The Life of a
Flowering Plant).
122
The place of importance given to scientific films within the aesthetic,
historical, and commercial project of film programming at the Vieux-Colombier can in

122
Nothing, to my knowledge, has been published on the Laboratoire du Vieux-Colombier’s science and
nature films—even Thierry Lefebvre, an indefatigable researcher of French science films of this period,
admits in his essay “De La Science à L’Avant-Garde” that precious little is known about it (107). The list
of films I have assembled is drawn from advertisements for the Vieux-Colombier in Cinéa-Ciné Pour Tous,
but makes no claims to being exhaustive (I hope to pursue this further at a later date). The final film, La Vie
d’une plante à fleurs appears listed as a production of the Laboratoire du Vieux-Colombier in a program for
the Ciné Latin from 1929 reproduced in Gauthier’s La Passion du Cinéma, 211. While doing research at
Les Documents Cinématographiques, Brigitte Berg showed me a film carrying that title card but also the
end credits “Collections Albert Kahn” and “Institut Pasteur” (Jean Comandon’s successive employers). The
film is unmistakably the work of Jean Comandon, and includes the famous germination of a grain of wheat
sequence that so fascinated Germaine Dulac (and has often been mistaken for her own creation—she never
made a botanical film). Further research is necessary to answer whether the Ciné Latin advertisement is
mistaken, if the film was co-produced by the Vieux-Colombier, or if Tedesco acquired the film in one
manner or another in order to redistribute it under the theater’s name. If so, was this also the case for the
other science and wildlife films bearing the Laboratoire du Vieux-Colombia seal? Might they have been
acquisitions of prewar Pathé, Gaumont, and Éclair films from his trips to the used film vendors in the 18
th
arrondissement?
122
part be understood as due to the economy with which they presented the ideals of an
emergent cinephilia, dedicated to both film’s documentary base and potential for plastic
expressiveness and artistic expression. These films, considered along side other forms of
experimentation, suggested a model for how a rigorous rapport could be maintained
between the imperatives of the real and the imagination, and that it could even hold a
popular appeal.
A final point worth emphasizing about the programming form institutionalized by
the Vieux-Colombier and adapted by many of the other small theaters: their modest
pedagogical mission, to offer attentive spectators an education in viewing. Tedesco’s
efforts respond to a plea made a decade earlier by the critic Émile Vuillermoz, writing in
1916, to ameliorate the “magnificent disdain” for documentary film. Contrasting the
variety and possibility of documentaries to their present use, Vuillermoz humorously
describes the prevalent mentality of programmers and spectators:
The documentary film, universal activity, voyages, photographic reportage,
scientific curiosities, the life of plants, birds, fish, wildcats or microbes…these are
good, at the very most, to ‘mop up the screen,’ to stand-in for an orchestra piece
while the spectator stumbles in the shadows, chasing the shimmering worms [on
the screen] in order to find his seat.
123
In giving scientific films a second look, and placing them into conversation with other
films, Tedesco echoed the sentiment that the films deserved to be watched, considered,
and kept alive. By placing them within an aesthetic and historical frame, he also
suggested that a protocol for polyvalent readings of these films, that often discovered in

123
Émile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’Écran,” Le Temps, 25 April 1917, 3. These “shimmering worms” that act
as beacons, guiding spectators to their seats, are likely a reference to Comandon’s
ultramicrocinematographic images of spirochetes and trypanosomes, such as shown in figure 11.
123
the midst of their documentation astonishing moments of photogénie and marvelous
disorientations that seem to break out of their contexts. Such a reading positioned
vernacular and research science films as a common ground for both budding cinephiles
and surrealists. Tedesco believed that the beacon cast from their images, those so many
shimmying worms, could do more than help spectators find their seats.
These reflections found an ideal audience member in the young Painlevé.
Painlevé would soon begin to superimpose and incorporate the encounters between
aesthetic experimentation and scientific experimentation on film experienced in the
cinema into his own films.
124
The following chapter explores just how Painlevé’s
formations in science, surrealism, and cinema were replayed, revised, and realized on
screen. Painlevé’s films took distinct advantage of the medium’s unique capacity to bring
together seemingly contradictory impulses in unresolved tension—a property André
Bazin (indirectly citing the positivist Hippolyte Taine) identified as film’s capacity for
creating “true hallucinations.”
125

124
Painlevé pays tribute to the important role of the programmers (in French the much more lively
animateurs) of the Vieux-Colombier, Pavillon, Studio Ursulines, and Studio 28 in exposing a generation to
such “marvelous documentaries” in his lecture “Les poètes du documentaire,” Conférence au palais de
Chaillot, 5 February 1948, held in Écrits dossier, FJP.
125
André Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (1958; repr., Paris:
Éditions du Cerf, 2007), 16; and Hippolyte Taine, De L’Intelligence, t. 2, 3
e
ed. (Paris, Hachette, 1878), 13,
25 (first edition published 1870).
124
CHAPTER 2
PAINLEVÉ’S FIRST FILMS, 1926-1928
2.1 “The Republic has no need for Ignoramuses”
Painlevé’s first forays into filmmaking were not in scientific research films or
documentaries, but rather avant-garde inspired fictional films. In 1926 he started his
career in cinema as an actor, playing one of the principles, alongside Michel Simon,
Tania Fédor, in René Sti’s (né A. Ornstein) L’Inconnue des Six-Jours (The Unknown
Woman of the Six-Day Race), a never released fictional narrative with surrealist
flourishes, produced by Société des Cinéromans. L’Inconnue’s plot revolves around two
men who fall in love with the same mysterious woman (the titular “unknown”) and
follow her to the Six Days bicycle race. The film purportedly intermixed material shot in
the studio with documentary footage of racing cyclists and “surreal” animated passages
depicting metamorphic bicyclists.
1
His debut as a filmmaker followed shortly after with a
series of five absurdist vignettes screened during a production of Ivan Goll’s “alogical”
play Mathusalem, ou l’éternel bourgeois (Methuselah, or the Eternal Bourgeois),
directed by René Sti, with music by Maxime Jacob, costumes and sets by the pin board
animator Alexeieff, L. Medgyès, and Geneviève Hamon, and featuring Le Loup blanc, a
theater troupe formed by Sti and Roger Andrieu. The play previewed in matinees at the
L’Œil de Paris in late November 1926 and then moved to the Théâtre Michel in winter

1
Roxane Hamery suggests that the film’s animator, listed as Georges Gros, was most likely the painter
Georges Grosz. See Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 36, and on the film in general, 35-42. In Jean Painlevé, the
homage assembled by Brigitte Berg in 1991, Painlevé mentions that Sti stood for “stimulant” (65).
125
1927.
2
The films, shot in the style of Max Linder comedies (or in the style of René Clair’s
homage to Linder), featured Antonin Artaud and a brief appearance by “Josephine
Baker’s double from the Moulin Rouge,” shot from behind, furtively performing the
shimmying “black bottom” on Yorick’s grave (when the director shows up she hops into
a seat). The importance of these films lies less with their content, style, or the
philosophical and theoretical questions they pose, than with the experiences and contacts
Painlevé made during their production, and the manner in which they spurred Painlevé to
begin articulating an approach to filmmaking.
In the evening editions of 9 January 1926 and the morning edition of 10 January
1926, the daily newspapers ran variations on the same story, “The Son of M. Painlevé is
going to make movies out of devotion to science,” “M. Jean Painlevé seeks resources for
our laboratories in the cinema,” and “In order to save his laboratory, Mr. Jean Painlevé
will make movies.”
3
The articles announced that the son of the Minister of War would be

2
Dates established through Anon., “Petit courrier,” Comœdia (25 November 1926); and Anon., “sans tître,”
Avenir, 5 January 1927. Both held in Presses 1920-1929, FJP. Gossip columns of the time ran rumors that
the wife of “Andrieux” [sic.] took special interest in Painlevé, which, when unreciprocated ended with the
theater troupe ejected from L’Œil Paris.
3
Anon., “M. Jean Painlevé, fils de M. Paul Painlevé, minister de la guerre, va faire du Cinéma,” Paris-
Times, 9 January 1926; Anon., “M. Jean Painlevé cherche dans le cinéma des ressources pour nos
laboratoire,” Le Quotidien, 10 January 1926, 1-2; Anon., “Pour sauver son laboratoire M. Jean Painlevé
fera du cinéma,” Populaire (Nantes), 10 January 1926; Anon., “Le jeune savant photogénique,” Petit
Journal, 10 January 1926; “M. Jean Painlevé au cinéma,” Journal des Debats, 10 January 1926; Anon.,
“French War Minister’s Son Joins Movies to Aid Science,” The New York Times, 10 January 1926; and
Anon., “M. J. Painlevé Film Actor,” Daily Mail, 10 January 1926; all held in Presses 1920-1929 dossier,
FJP.
Interestingly, the article in the Paris-Times, the author refers to Painlevé and Sti having
collaborated on several scientific films together. If this is correct (there is no other evidence to support
this), it may explain why Painlevé often dates his L’Œuf de l’épinoche to 1925, when it is typically dated to
1927, after he had encountered André Raymond, the camera operator on L’Inconnue and L’Œuf de
l’épinoche. This of course, does not mean that Painlevé had not attempted some films with René Sti prior to
filming with Raymond, a possibility suggested by the first review for La Pieuvre, written by Pierre
Lazareff, the scenarist for L’Inconnue. “One recalls that the young scientist Jean Painlevé to whom we
already owe important discoveries, learned the cinema by making a film for the benefit of the laboratories,
126
playing a leading role in a modern (but not too modern) drama for the Société des
Cinéromans, and donating all of the proceeds to Professor Wintrebert’s laboratory at the
Sorbonne, which despite tripling in size over the past three years, was running on a
meager annual operations budget of 10,000 francs and, according to Painlevé, had a debt
of over 75,000.
4
As a sign of good faith and inspired public relations, the director of
Société des Cinéromans, Jean Sapène (whose wife acted in the film), wrote a check for
10,000 francs to the Wintrebert’s laboratory and agreed to give the film’s profits to the
lab.
As with the publication of “Drame néo-zoologique,” journalists were quick to
editorialize what it meant for the son of a prominent politician to pursue a career as an
actor—or worse, a cabotin (ham), in the contemptible world of cinema. In an editorial
published 20 January 1926 in the Lyon républicain, Jeanne Landre fretted over the young
Painlevé’s decision to choose an easy life:
M. Jean Painlevé, who is it appears very photogenic, will act the fool for the
magic lantern. While he cultivates the fifth art, his cultures will “marinate” as
they like. And since success and money come quickly in the movies, the young
scientist will doubtlessly permanently separate himself from the laborious
research for which he was intended.
5

under the direction of M. A. René Sti. Since then, with an aim at vulgarization, he worked alongside this
metteur-en-scène and then alone.” Pierre Lazareff, “M. Paul Painlevé, ministre de la Guerre, assiste à la
présentation d’un film de son fils, Jean Painlevé,” Paris-Midi, 15 December 1928, held in Presses Coupures
Originaux dossier, FJP.
4
Jean Painlevé, “Pourquoi je vais faire du cinéma,” Le Soir, 14 January 1926, held in Presses 1920-1929
dossier, FJP.
5
Jeanne Landre, “sans titre,” Lyon républicain, 20 January 1926, quoted in Roxane Hamery, Jean
Painlevé, 39.
127
Echoing the theme of destiny, Maurice de Walleffe, writing in Paris-Midi, also opined on
the irresponsibility of Painlevé shirking his birthright. De Walleffe criticized both
Painlevé senior and junior, reading the son’s various endeavors as the symptom of his
father’s failings, summing up his piece by declaring, “If it is true that a revolutionary
tribunal told Lavoisier in sending him to the guillotine: ‘The Republic has no need for
scientists!’ … The Republic has even less need for ignoramuses.”
6
Feeling the pressure to
respond to the family critics, Painlevé published a series of retorts, beginning with a short
article for Le Soir published 14 January 1926 as “Pourquoi je vais faire du cinéma” (Why
I am going to make movies) and revised a number of times, taking shape as “Pourquoi je
fais du cinéma,” a text published in the Club du Faubourg’s periodical Le Faubourg.
7
These texts, as well as contemporaneous interviews, help clarify Painlevé’s early thinking
about cinema, his emerging role as a defender of cinema and advocate for scientific
endeavors, and one of the sources of the fierce—and stubborn—independence he staked
out for his projects.

6
Maurice de Walleffe, “Le Film ou Le Forum: M. Painlevé et le Cinéma: La République n’a pas besoin
d’ignorants,” Paris-Midi (12 January 1926), held in Presses 1920-1929 dossier, FJP. Antoine-Laurent de
Lavoisier was chemist and biologist sent to the guillotine during the reign of terror. One can see in de
Walleffe’s allusion an insult to both Paul Painlevé—the mathematician turned politician—and his son.
Roxane Hamery concisely summarizes the bad faith argument of de Walleffe’s editorial (when it
was reprinted in La Vie latine): first he lambastes the failures of the father and then attacks his son for not
choosing the same path. Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 48. Victor Hoerter published a humorous poem comparing
the career paths of the Minister of War and the aspiring movie star in the satirical review Charivari under
the title “Le fils de M. Painlevé va faire du cinéma.” It is reprinted in La Croix du Nord, 25 January 1926,
held in Presses 1920-1929 dossier, FJP.
7
Jean Painlevé, “Pourquoi je vais fair du cinéma.” This text reprinted in Cinégraphe journal in February
1926, and published in an expanded and revised form as “Je fais du cinéma,” in Express, 26 January 1926,
and Ciné-Miroir, no. 92 (15 February 1926): 61; and finally as “Pourquoi je fais du cinéma,” Le Faubourg
(organe official du Club du faubourg), 10
e
année, no. 68 (25 April 1926): 1-2. All held in Presses 1920-
1929 dossier, FJP.
128
Although engaged in the production of a narrative feature, and seeking to launch a
career on the screen, Painlevé expresses his interest in producing documentary films for
the public. The brief introduction to “Pourquoi je vais faire du cinéma” notes the young
scientist’s desire to “revamp documentaries, accentuating the parts that may please the
general public as well as the purely artistic views.”
8
In an interview in Comœdia
published the next day, he adds that if he fails as an actor he is still interested in using
cinema in conjunction with his research, noting an interest in developing documentaries
on animals.
9
He also begins here to articulate his own take on cinema’s specific allure
and usefulness as a research tool, using a discourse resonant with the Apollinairean
understanding of surrealism and its further development as photogénie. Explaining how
during conversations on the nature of cinema with René Sti he came to what seemed to
him like entirely new conceptions of cinema, he felt a sharp “desire to participate in the
production of this intense, if suggestive, life that one creates only on the screen.”
10
A complex understanding of mediation and representation, of intervention
involved in the creation of the filmic image is already immanent here. Filmmaking for
Painlevé is already conceived of as a production as much as a discovery, a force of
nature. Its product is a particularly modern form of life, a life form he will call, along
with others of his generation, film, the movies, cinema. Film offers an intensification of
perception and an intensification of what is perceived and what is perceptible, a

8
Jean Painlevé, “Pourquoi je vais faire du cinéma.”
9
Yves Dartois, “M. Jean Painlevé devant l’objectif,” Comœdia, vol. 20, no. 4771 (15 January 1926), C1.
10
Jean Painlevé, “Pourquoi je vais faire du cinéma.” He repeats this formulation across the various
reiterations of this text.
129
materialization (to recall Comandon’s terms) of phenomena only visible to the camera.
Film also remains suggestive, evocative, still at a certain remove from the real, and also
capable of abstraction. The production of an intense if suggestive life particular to film
can stand as Painlevé’s own theory and conception of photogénie. When developed
through his documentary studies of animals (we should not lose track of the fact he offers
this idea of film and cinema in speaking about L’Inconnue) this conception pushes a
notion of filmic life towards filmic and even cinematic wildlife.
These same texts find Painlevé taking up the position of defender of cinema as a
“serious” endeavor, a discourse that will intensify when he begins to produce and
distribute scientific research films and documentaries in the coming years. One of the
lessons to draw from Roxane Hamery’s research on Painlevé, and one already suggested
by André Bazin’s brief text “Science Film: Accidental Beauty,” is the importance of
recognizing and elaborating the extent to which Painlevé’s œuvre must be understood and
theorized beyond the limits of his films to include the bureaucratic, promotional, and
programming aspects of his career. This also happens to be a site where his personal
efforts most directly engage with larger discourses of documentary, and in many ways
affected a larger public during his own times (few of his films, as we will see, reached a
very wide public in their original release).
11

11
Roxane Hamery’s research and writing on Painlevé’s promotion and defense of scientific cinema are
indispensable for getting a broader picture of Painlevé’s œuvre. See Hamery, “Jean Painlevé et la
promotion du cinéma scientifique dans les années trente,” 1895, no. 47 (December 2005): 79-86; and
Hamery, Jean Painlevé, esp. 89-107.
One of frequently overlooked aspects of André Bazin’s 1947 text “Beauté du hasard: le film
scientifique,” is that the text is far more a review of Painlevé’s film programming than it is about Painlevé’s
films. In fact of the 8 paragraphs in the text, with the exception of a mention of Pasteur (Painlevé’s 1947
collaboration with Georges Rouquier) in the 4
th
paragraph, it is only in the final paragraph that Bazin gives
a brief analysis of Painlevé’s films, and then it is primarily in light of the scandalous effects they have on
130
Given Painlevé’s engagement with Surréalisme as well as his cinephilia (which
would have exposed him to pure and vernacular scientific films), it is not surprising that
his remarks on cinema express both an epistemological openness and excessive
epistemological enthusiasm regarding film (what I develop as epistemania in subsequent
chapters). The press release announcing his entrance into cinema already framed it as
intimately linked to his scientific endeavors—making it appear as an almost selfless act
of charity rather than a savvy (which is not to say insincere) justification for his decision
and a calculated bit of advanced marketing for the film. If Painlevé’s name offered
Société des Cinéromans an opportunity to get the project into the press, it also offered
Painlevé an opportunity to bring Wintrebert’s laboratory to public attention, both to argue
modestly for its contributions to science and to call attention to its financial troubles.
In “Pourquoi je fais du cinéma,” the version of his justification published in Le
Faubourg on the occasion of a debate at the Club du Faubourg about the crisis of funding
in the arts and sciences, Painlevé responds directly to de Walleffe and Landre, also
vaguely alluding to “certain intellectuals in certain professorial milieus” who have
criticized his efforts. He likens these critics to the doctors who mocked Lister for
insisting on the importance of washing one’s hands before surgery—a mentality
counterproductive to scientific and social progress. “They are masters of a technique: we

audiences. André Bazin, “Beauté du hasard: le film scientifique,” L’Écran français (21 October 1947): 10
and reprinted with slight revision (the addition of a footnote on Edgar Morin which appears in the
otherwise truncated version of the text in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma, vol. 1) in Le Cinéma français de la
Libération à la Nouvelle Vague (1945-1958), ed. Jean Narboni (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1988), 317-321;
and translated by Jeanine Herman as “Science Film: Accidental Beauty,” in Science is Fiction, 144-147. I
am grateful to Oliver Gaycken for his exchanges with me on this text.
131
facilitate and modernize it. Instead of adopting it, they ridicule it.”
12
Painlevé would
become increasingly militant in his advocacy for the use of film in scientific and
academic contexts, but also seek to disturb such hermetic enclaves.
Painlevé’s response to his early critics also indicates his desire to separate himself
from the legacy of his father, trying to escape the almost unavoidable label “son of Paul
Painlevé” and to combat accusations of nepotism. Admitting that he could easily use his
father’s name and connections to find money for his laboratory (or his other projects), he
resists doing this, preferring to remain—with the exception of social questions—outside
the realm of politics, concluding the various iterations of “Pourquoi…” with the vow “I
will not seek to impose myself in any manner through my name.”
13
Whether for œdipal or
political reasons or both, Painlevé would maintain an almost total independence in his
endeavors, preferring to remain independent and to work on his own terms that to take
subventions with strings attached. Painlevé jealously guarded this independence as much
in his career as a filmmaker as in his institutional work, with the exception of his teaching
post at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.
L’Inconnue des Six-Jours, however, never made it into theaters. Roxane Hamery
notes that production delays and mounting costs combined with a loss of faith in Sti’s
ability to pull the production together, spelled out the film’s doom.
14
Painlevé, in
interviews given later in life, confirms this account, calling the long deceased Sti a

12
Painlevé, “Pourquoi je fais du cinéma,” 2.
13
Painlevé, “Pourquoi je fais du cinéma,” 2.
14
Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 41. She notes that even after the film disappeared, a number of critics
blamed Painlevé for its failure.
132
“conman” and a “useless loafer,” though the film’s failure to materialize did not cause a
definitive rupture between the two men—in the fall of 1926 reports still quoted Painlevé
as describing Sti as his friend and manager.
15
Although the film never met its public, and
Painlevé seems to have taken this as a sign not to pursue acting, the experience convinced
him to make further endeavors in the cinema. He also met one of his most important
collaborators during the shoot, the camera operator André Raymond, whose technical
skills and gift for bricolage drew Painlevé’s attention. (Figure 1) Raymond customized
his camera so that he could disengage the crank to make single image exposures, thus
allowing him to produce animation and time-lapse photography. Painlevé credits
Raymond with giving him the idea to make L’Œuf de l’épinoche.
16
The five shorts Painlevé directed for the Paris production of Ivan Goll’s
Mathusalem, ou l’éternel bourgeois (originally staged in Germany in 1919, but revised
for presentation in France, originally as part of a collection of Goll’s writing published in

15
Painlevé interviewed by Hazéra and Leglu, “Jean Painlevé, Qui Fait Voir L’Invisible,” 20; Hazéra and
Leglu, “Jean Painlevé Reveals the Invisible,” 172; and Painlevé interviewed by Brigitte Berg, “Images de
Painlevé,” 9. In his interviews given late in life, Painlevé occasionally reveals a mean streak, and his
remarks about former friends and associates should only be taken as reflections of his present state of mind.
As for L’Inconnue, it is not fully clear to what extent it was abandoned as incomplete or if it was
simply shelved. In Painlevé’s essay “Pourquoi je fais du cinéma,” published in Le Faubourg, the newsletter
of the Club du Faubourg, ends with an editorial note promising a preview screening of the film on 15 May
1926. The conservative paper Le Victoire claims it was shelved because theaters “unanimously refused it,”
though that seems rather unlikely. Jean Painlevé, “Pourquoi je fais du cinéma,” and Anon., “Exploitation
du Scandale,” La Victoire, 5 January 1927, held in Presses 1920-1929 dossier, FJP. See also, Hamery, Jean
Painlevé, 41.
Articles citing Painlevé as calling René Sti his friend and manager include Anon., “M. Jean
Painlevé au Théâtre,” George London, “Le Fils de M. Painlevé devient ‘le fils de Mathusalem’,” Journal,
ca. December 1926; Anon., “M. Jean Painlevé au Théâtre,” Echo des Étudiants, 9 December 1926; both
held in Presses 1920-1929 dossier, FJP.
16
For a description of André Raymond, see Jean Painlevé, “Les Films biologiques,” Lumière et Radio, no.
1 (10 September 1929): 16; Painlevé interviewed by Berg, “Images de Painlevé,” 9; Berg, “Contradictory
Forces,” 15-17; and Hazéra and Leglu, “Jean Painlevé, Qui Fait Voir L’Invisible,” 20; and Hazéra and
Leglu, “Jean Painlevé Reveals the Invisible,” 172.
133
1923 by Éditions de la Sirène) were produced to be integrated into the performance,
adding another dimension to the play’s satire of a bourgeois shoe magnet and his neurotic
family. Painlevé played the finance-obsessed “son of Mathusalem” in the show.
17
Shot
either in late autumn of 1926 or early winter of 1927, the films were projected onto
cloudy backdrop installed in the theater, and the actors provided dialogue for them. The
sequences, as part of a theater piece, express a broadly experimental ethos even if the
ambitions do not match the outcome. They also index the early filmic avant-garde’s
fascination with prewar comic cinema—the half-incoherent gags and attempts at a daffy
anarchic energy have a “primitive” quality to them.
The vignettes include images of Mathusalem’s name projected onto the Eiffel
Tower, Palais de Trocadéro, and the Bourse (stock exchange) followed by stop motion
images of a shoe flying around a globe to literalize Mathusalem’s dreams of conquering

17
For a detailed discussion of the play and film, see Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 42-45; photograms
and descriptions of five sequences appear in Science is Fiction, 60-63; and Jean Painlevé, “Mathusalem” in
Jean Painlevé, 65 (this last source, culled from interviews late in life, should be read with a cautious eye,
dates and details are slightly unreliable).
Claire Goll, in her memoir (of questionable reliability) co-written with Otto Hahn, La Poursuite
du Vent (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1976), 142-143, gives an account of the production of Mathusalem. She
describes Painlevé as using a camera from his laboratory at the Sorbonne to film Artaud much in the
manner he would one of his specimens. “Jean was impassioned to the point of paying him for each frame.
This was his highest demonstration of interest since, like the majority of millionaires, he loved nothing as
much as his money” (142).
In his interview Hazéra and Leglu, “Jean Painlevé, Qui Fait Voir L’Invisible,” 20; translated into
English as Hazéra and Leglu, “Jean Painlevé Reveals the Invisible,” 173-174, he tells of Artaud stealing all
of the money for the filming from Painlevé’s wallet (Painlevé alludes to it likely being so he could score
morphine). When Painlevé discovered the theft, Artaud angrily demanded he be searched. While shooting
the funeral procession at Patte d’oie in Meudon (a suburb of Paris, southwest of the periphery), a flock of
nuns rushed toward Artaud, thinking him a bishop. As they came towards him he yelled, “Get back,
daughters of Satan!” Despite the troubles Artaud caused (what would one expect by engaging Artaud),
Painlevé claims to have continued to admire him, following his work and attending his performances with
great interest—he even provided illustrations for the original publication of Artaud’s “La vieillesse précoce
du Cinéma,” Les Cahiers jaune: Cinéma 33 (1933): 22–25. Artaud, however, kept his distance. After the
theft Painlevé jokes that even though the two men lived on the same street, Artaud would always cross the
street if he saw Painlevé coming.
134
the world; the young double for Josephine Baker doing the black bottom for Hamlet on
Yorick’s grave (Figure 13) and then Mathusalem interrupting Hamlet’s monolog to
replace Yorick’s skull with one of his shoes; Mathusalem leading a charge of colonial
adventurers with a comically flaccid sword; Artaud as a cardinal leading a funeral
procession with the mourners on scooters and Painlevé’s Bugatti as the hearse
(accompanied by fox trot music); and a wedding parade with all of the participants
imitating the bride and groom’s crazy march (set to a funeral march), with the newly
married couple getting in a violent row after disagreeing over proper technique.
18
For all of their attempted zaniness, the vignettes are a bit too theatrical. The
cinematography primarily uses full-shots, with the only distinguished footage being the
medium close-ups of Antonin Artaud’s face. (Figure 14) In these moments, and the
fleeting shimmy of the young woman doing the black bottom, the fictional film takes on
strong documentary quality.
19
It is in this flash, a mere few meters of film, that the key to

18
The vignettes, particularly the funeral and wedding processions, are strongly reminiscent of the funeral
chase scene in René Clair and Françis Picabia’s Entr’acte. The sequence featuring Hamlet even opens with
a sign posted on the front of the Théâtre Populaire announcing “Relâche pour les dérnières répétitions de
Hamlet” (Canceled for the final rehearsals of Hamlet), which would seem to be a nod to Françis Picabia
and Erik Satie’s ballet Relâche, which featured Entr’acte. Alain and Odette Virmaux goes so far as to refer
to these sequences as “a confessed quasi-plagiarism of the famous sequence from Éntr’acte” in their
“Documentairisme et l’Avant-Garde” in Jeune, Dure et Pure!, ed. Nicole Brenez and Christian Lebrat
(Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 2001), 104. Hamery, in her analysis of the film, disputes this. Citing the
French version of the play from Éditions de la Sirène in 1923, she notes the stage directions indicate the use
of films and the funeral scene is introduced by dialogue in the play. My own comparison of the films and
Goll’s 1922 German and 1923 French scripts confirm that the play as published by includes descriptions of
the dream sequences to be projected as films with considerable overlap with Painlevé’s versions. He added
the blackbottom dance to the Yorrick scene and the scooters to the funeral procession, and cut out a sexual
fantasy of Malthusalem’s. Clair’s film, at least by reputation, may have influenced some of the decisions
made, but it did not provide the blueprint (it might have been a wilder and funnier film if it had).
19
I echo here the insight of the concluding point of Jean Dréville’s essay “Documentary: The Soul of
Cinema (1930),” trans. Richard Abel, in French Film Theory and Criticism, vol. 2: 1929-1930 (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 44. “I hope you understand now that we must broaden the meaning
of documentary. Yes, Ombres blanches is a documentary; but so is that exploration of the human face
called La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc [Dreyer, 1928]!”
135
Painlevé’s technique as a documentary filmmaker begins to emerge: to root his art of
observation in getting closer.
Fig. 13. What difference does a double on a belvedere make? Frame capture of “Josephine Baker’s double”
performing the black bottom before Jean Painlevé (dress as Hamlet) and an appreciative audience sitting on
Yorick’s tomb.
Fig. 14. Frame capture of Antonin Artaud as a bishop in the 4
th
vignette from Mathusalem (1927).

136
2.2 “The cinema is not serious”: L’Œuf de l’épinoche, de la fécondation à l’éclosion
(1927/1929)
Around the same time as his endeavors in fictional filmmaking, Painlevé endeavored to
produce his first scientific film document/documentary, L’Œuf de l’épinoche, de la
fécondation à l’éclosion (The Stickleback’s egg: From fertilization to hatching), as a
supplement to the research of Wintrebert and his student Yung Ko Ching, a Chinese
national doing advanced research at the Sorbonne.
20
Wintrebert and Yung were studying
the physiology of the development of stickleback embryos (chosen for their
transparency), as well as the inauguration and development of blood circulation.
Although they had already presented on their research at the Academy of Sciences in
1926, the integration of film into their research helped to better illustrate their
observations, as well as reveal movements related to development difficult to follow
without the aid of the cinematograph and its capacity for temporal manipulation.
21
As
with Comandon’s research on syphilis spirochetes, the method and insights of their
research relied upon tracking with precision particular kinds of motions, the distinct
shimmies that appear as the very condition of life.
Painlevé and Raymond collaborated on filming stickleback eggs through a
microscope, using the old scientific equipment at Pathé’s studio-lab in Vincennes, where
Comandon had once worked. In order to produce the time-lapse imagery, they worked in

20
As noted above, fertilization does not capture the full significance of fécondation as understood by
embryologists of the time, but should also be understood as the initiation of development.
21
Paul Wintrebert and Yung Ko Ching, “La contraction protoplasmique des ébauches embryonaires chez
l’Épinoche et l’Épinochette,” transmitted by F. Henneguy, séance 23 August 1926, Comptes Rendus
hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des Sciences, Tome 183 (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1926): 455-
456.
137
alternating shifts, taking a frame once every three minutes over a period of several days
(they apparently did not have access to the automated system such as Comandon then
used).
22
The edited film consists of approximately 89 shots and 41 title cards, runs 27
minutes at 16 frames per second. Like the presentation to the Academy of Sciences that it
accompanied, it is divided into two sections: the first documenting protoplasmic
contractions in the eggs and the second following the development of embryonic
circulation.
23
From a scientific perspective, the filmed component of Wintrebert and
Yung’s research demonstrated protoplasmic contractions where they previously had not
been thought to exist, helping illustrate the small isolated contractions occurring in a
number of blastomeres between the more readily visible contractions of the whole
organism. “Thanks to the chronophotographic study, the two great periods of movements
of the entire organism are thus connected by a phase of contractions that simple

22
My account in part draws upon recollections offered in Jean Painlevé, “L’Œuf d’épinoche,” in Berg, Jean
Painlevé, 73. See also, Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 54-56; and Berg, “Contradictory Forces,” 17.
23
The film is usually dated as having been shot in 1927 (Painlevé mistakenly dates it to 1925 in many
interviews and recollections). It is often presumed that Painlevé presented it to the Academy in 1928, prior
to the release of any of his theatrical films. Consulting the Comptes Rendus hebdomadaires des séances de
l’Académie des Sciences, however, suggests it was not presented until 22 July 1929. See Jean Painlevé,
Paul Wintrebert, and Yung Ko Ching, “Le développement de l’Épinoche (Gaserosteus aculeatus L.) analysé
par la chronophotographie. Contractions protoplasmiques et circulations embryonnaire,” transmitted by F.
Mesnil, séance 22 July 1929, Comptes Rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des Sciences,
Tome 189 (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1929): 208-210. It is unclear if the film preceded this line or research or
was used to document it after the fact. This publication, however, raises the possibility that the second part
of the film may not have been completed until 1929, as it corresponds to recent research of Wintrebert and
Yung published as “Les premières phases de la circulation chez l’Épinoche,” Comptes Rendus des séances
de la Société de biologie, no. 101 (1929): 1000.
Why do these dates matter? Largely because it shows that Painlevé’s reflexive documentary ethos
based upon an incident that occurred while editing L’Œuf de l’Épinoche, as articulated by Hamery in Jean
Painlevé, 54, 121-132, comes after the production of his first group of popular films and thus does not
directly inform them.
138
observation could not take in and analyze.”
24
The second part of the presentation and
corresponding film concerns the order of the development of the circulatory system of the
stickleback, arguing for the existence of serous circulation prior to the establishment of
globular circulation and arguing for the unification of vitelline circulation (between an
embryo to its yolk sac) to the Hepatic portal system (which directs blood from the
gastrointestinal organs to the liver).
25
The production served as a miniature film school for Painlevé, who by working
alongside Raymond, experimented with microcinematography and time-lapse imagery.
The film seems astonished at its own capacity to reveal uncommon vistas, such as the
canalicular passage in the chorion membrane (figure 15), and the frenzy of motion during
the egg’s contractions (figure 16) and as the heart begins circulating blood (figure 17).
The images communicate a sense of the drama of technological revelation. The film
makes use of multiple rack focuses (shifting the focal plane of the image), which parallel
the visual experience of a histologist switching between objects on a microscope, while
also taking advantage of the embryo’s transparency to distinguish different details of the
organism and give the sensation of movement in depth. The microcinematography also
features quite a bit of camera movement. Towards the end of the study of the circulation
system, the camera tilts down from a highly magnified close-up of the vitelline vascular
network, flush with gushing streams of blood (figure 18), motivating a cut to a medium

24
Painlevé, Wintrebert, and Yung, “Le développement de l’Épinoche,” 209 (my emphasis). It is unclear
why they use chronophotographic instead of cinematographic to describe the technique employed. This
could be a simple mistake, but may also have been a strategy for presenting film as linked to a technique
already widely accepted and connected to a proper name of consider heft: Étienne-Jules Marey.
25
Ibid.
139
Fig. 15. The canalicular passage in the chorion membrane of a stickleback egg shown under high
magnification. Frame capture from L’Œuf de l’épinoche (1927).
Fig. 16. Self-scrambled eggs: Time-lapse cinematography reveals the violent churching of the internal
contractions of stickleback eggs. Frame capture from L’Œuf de l’épinoche (1927).
140
Fig. 17. Circulation in the embryo: the heart is the light grey tube-shaped mass just left of center below the
embryonic equator. Frame capture from L’Œuf de l’épinoche (1927).

Figs. 18 and 19. The vitelline vascular network of a newly hatched stickleback shown in high magnification
cuts to a shot that reveals (for the first time) part of the developed stickleback. Frame capture from L’Œuf
d’épinoche (1927).
141
shot of the vitelline vascular network as situated on the exterior of a newly hatched
stickleback (the closest viewers get to seeing a developed stickleback) (figure 19).
To the informed audience of the Academy, the film itself contains an argument
about the continued presence of contractions in the embryo as well as the order of the
presentation of the development of the circulatory system (ending with images of blood
flowing from an aorta to a vein in the tip of the stickleback’s tail, switching from jerky,
rhythms of the heart beat in the aorta to the smooth return flow in the vein). On these
grounds, one can observe a rhetorical function in operation, even in the sort of film
Grierson would try to disavow from documentary. Yet the individual documents of the
film, each of the 89 shots, should not be mistaken as “transparent” or self-evident, even to
an informed audience. The title cards orient the viewer as to what is being represented
(from what angle, under what technical conditions) and guide the spectator as to what to
look for and where to look on the screen. (Figures 20-21) The frequent use of the word
“Rémarquer”—to observe, to notice—in the title cards is in large part because the images
are endowed with an almost overwhelming visual plentitude, complicated by the
polyrhythmic motion of the different parts of the embryo, especially in the sections
addressing circulation and the heart, where the heart beat, the flow of blood, and
contractions of the embryo make the entire image field scintillate and quiver.
26
The
presentation of the film’s primary information also marks its distinction from the

26
These images are certainly open to multiple readings and assessment. Upon second viewing, they struck
me as incredibly dynamic, filled with motion and transformation. The journalist P. Werrie, giving a critical
assessment of Painlevé’s relatively young body of work, describes this film as evoking the “feeling of the
profound monotony that is at the heart of life.” P. Werrie, “Le Film Scientifique: L’œuvre documentaire de
Jean Painlevé, ou la plus haute forme du cinématographe,” Le Vigntième Siècle, 23 December 1932, np,
held in Presses Coupures Originaux dossier, FJP.
142
Griersonian approach, its politics of description—of the activity of delineation—does not
eschew the responsibility to make selections, to decide what matters among an
overwhelming flow of data, but nor does it completely abstract the information from its
complex context. The images maintain a tension or ambiguity between information and
excess, the knowable and the unknown.

Figs. 20 and 21. Title card (left): “Observe the canaliculi of the zona radiata (dark strirations).” Title card
(right): “Observe the protoplasmic contraction of the walls of the extraembryonic coeloms.”
Frame captures from L’Œuf de l’épinoche (1927).
Painlevé’s cinematic debut at the Academy of Sciences was marked by two
incidents that were to have a significant impact upon the rest of his career. First, in an
echo of Jean Comandon’s presentation of his films at the Academy in 1909, Painlevé’s
presentation met with vocal resistance from members of the distinguished assembly. Prior
to the screening, one of the members of the Academy apparently proclaimed, “The
cinema is not serious, I prefer to leave” and exited the salon.
27
Wounded egos aside, as

27
Jean Painlevé, “Le Cinéma au service de la Science,” La Revue des Vivants, no. 10 (October 1931): 490;
and Painlevé, “Reflexions sur l’œuvre du Dr. Comandon,” 30. Berg, “Contradictory Forces,” 17; and
143
Painlevé already mentioned in “Pourquoi je fais du cinéma,” while defending his
participation in L’Inconnue des Six-Jours, the scientific community’s long held resistance
to cinema—dismissed as a frivolous diversion—struck him as squandering an
opportunity to further modernize research and teaching practices. In the coming years he
would make concerted efforts to change the minds of scientific practitioners through his
institutional activism.
Ironically, the second incident threatened to confirm the prejudices of his critics
in the Academy. When preparing the print for his presentation at the Academy, Painlevé
made an almost fatal mistake:
I smoked heavily—chain-smoked, in fact: English cigarettes with hot ashes, while
I edited the film. I set fire to the copy, and so had another one made, which I put
together hurriedly for the projection at the Academy. I put one of the sequences in
upside down by mistake, in which one sees the embryonic heart spread on the
nutritional ball and reject the blood corpuscles instead of attracting them… I was
horrified but said nothing, and at the end several astonished specialists asked to
see the film again. Given the late hour, we arranged to meet the next day. As soon
as I returned home, I quickly turned the sequence back round…so that the
specialists never saw the strange phenomenon of the heart rejecting the corpuscles
instead of attracting them again. If I had simply signaled that this was an “editing”
mistake, when the cinema was already considered a fraud, I think that film would
have been forbidden in labs and universities.
28
This episode gave Painlevé a healthy respect for the contingencies of film’s truth claims,
a perspective that would inform his subsequent thinking on documentary production and

Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 123, also discuss this incident. In Painlevé’s recollections published as “Montage
de séquences filmée en 1925” in Jean Painlevé, 69, he identifies the offended scientist as the botanist Louis
Blaringhem, who had just been admitted to the Academy. He mentions, however, to have recently
discovered a letter from Blaringhem thanking him for a film, suggesting a shift in attitudes. The letter in
question is Louis Blaringhem, Laboratoire de Botanique de L’École Normale Supérieure, to Jean Painlevé,
19 February 1937, held in Correspondences: A-B dossier, FJP.
28
Jean Painlevé, “The Stickleback’s Egg/L’Œuf d’épinoche,” in Jean Painlevé, 73 (translation modified).
In the television series Jean Painlevé: Au fil de ses films (1988), the producers Denis Derrien and Hélène
Hazéra show the footage from L’Œuf de l’épinoche both forwards and in reverse.
144
presentation and the question of evidence. A tension exists in Painlevé’s thinking on this
subject. It is caught between an insistence on the value of film for scientific research and
communication, and an awareness of the contingencies of its truth claims. The most
interesting contributions of his films to documentary history and theory emerge along this
line—this delineation that is also a contamination—that marks out his art of description.
2.3 “A More Exact Poetry”: Painlevé’s early theatrical documentaries, 1928
In 1928 Painlevé loaded up a rickety flatbed truck with an electric generator and
aquariums, and drove northwest from Paris to Ty an Diaoul (the devil’s house), the home
of the Hamon family in Port Blanc, on the northwestern coast of Brittany. Here, Painlevé,
Geneviève Hamon, and André Raymond installed a modest film studio. Throughout the
spring and into the summer, Painlevé, Hamon, and Raymond undertook the arduous task
of filming marine life in aquariums set up in the Hamon home, and at the beaches a few
kilometers to the west in Perros-Guirec. Their goal was to produce footage for films
made for theatrical release.
The subjects for the documentaries were based upon creatures Painlevé had
encountered during his childhood holidays at Brittany with his grandmother as well as
during his zoological studies at the Sorbonne and at the Biological Station at Roscoff.
Capturing the “stars,” keeping them alive in salt-water tanks long enough to film them,
and getting them to perform, often against instinct, the desired gestures and behaviors for
the camera under hot lights required great patience from the crew. According to Painlevé,
technical malfunctions were a regular occurrence: the gas powered generator—the sole
145
power source—often stalled out, lights caught on fire and exploded, aquariums broke and
seawater spilled onto equipment, and sand and salty air damaged camera gears and rusted
equipment.
29
Despite the at times difficult working conditions, Painlevé and his two
collaborators were very productive. They recorded the bulk of the footage for Painlevé’s
first five popular documentaries, which Painlevé took back to Paris to edit. These films
included (listed in order of original release): La Pieuvre/The Octopus, Le Bernard-
L’ermite/The Hermit Crab, La Daphnie/The Daphnia, Hyas et Sténorinques, crustacés
marins/Hyas and Stenorhynchus, Marine Crustaceans, and Les Oursins/Sea Urchins.
30
After the coming of sound, he would re-release Le Bernard-L’ermite and Hyas et
Sténorinques with music and light narration, in 1931.

29
Maurice Bourdet, “La Pieuvre: Un film de Jean Painlevé,” Le Petit Parisien, 16 December 1928, 2;
Painlevé interviewed within Charles de Saint-Cyr, “Les Monographies Documentaires de M. Jean
Painlevé,” La Semaine à Paris, 11-18 January 1929, 40-41; and Jean Painlevé, “Les Films Biologiques,”
Lumière et Radio, no. 1 (10 September 1929): 16-17.
30
Little paper trail exists for Painlevé’s early films, outside of accounts in the popular press when the films
were released. My timeline draws largely from Roxane Hamery’s research on the release dates for
Painlevé’s early films, drawn from listings in Cinématographe française and Pour Vous. See Hamery, Jean
Painlevé, 66-67, and 269-270; as well as Painlevé’s description of his first five films in “Les Films
Biologiques,” 15-18.
La Pieuvre debuted at Studio Diamant 14 December 1928; Le Bernard-L’ermite debuted at Studio
Diamant 1 February 1929; La Daphnie debuted at Studio Diamant 15 February 1929; Hyas et Sténorinques
debuted at Studio Diamant 24 April 1929; and Les Oursins debuted at Studio des Ursulines 11 October
1929.
In spring and summer of 1929 Painlevé returned to Port Blanc to make four films with Geneviève
Hamon and their friend Eli Lotar. Only two of the films were released: Caprelles et Pantopodes (Caprella
and Pantopoda, 1930) and Crabes et Crevettes (Crabs and Shrimp, 1931). Projects on lobsters and spiders
were abandoned after Painlevé had a violent break with Lotar when the latter accidentally sent
panchromatic film to be developed without marking it as such, and the processors treated it as
orthochromatic film and destroyed valuable footage of caprella giving birth.
146

Figs. 22 and 23. Advertisements for the Studio Diamant and the début of Jean Painlevé’s La Pieuvre, here
given almost equal billing with Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Abwege (Crisis, aka, The Devious Path, 1928), and
Bernard-L’ermite (1929), playing alongside André Sauvage’s poetic documentary Les Iles de Paris, a
prewar film, and Kinugasa’s Juji-Ro (Crossroads). From La Semaine à Paris, no. 343, 21-28 December
1928, 87; and La Semaine à Paris, 15-22 February 1929, 85. Source: Bibliothèque National de France.
Painlevé made a distribution arrangement with Henri Diamant-Berger, the
filmmaker and former critic (he founded Le Film and gave Louis Delluc his start), who
surely saw the benefit of Painlevé’s name for raising the profile of his soon to open
specialty theater, Studio Diamant, at 2 Avenue Portalis in the 8
th
arrondissement
(Painlevé terminated their partnership in December 1930 and the Studio Diamant
shuttered its doors shortly afterwards).
31
The films were released intermittently between
December 1928 and November 1929, with Les Oursins premiering at Studio des
Ursulines. La Pieuvre premiered Friday 14 December 1928 on a program with prewar
film from Germany (the advertisement lists The Max Linder/Maurice Chevalier film Par

31
Letter from Jean Painlevé to Société des Films Diamant, 4 December 1930; and Letter from Henri
Diamant-Berger to Jean Painlevé, 15 December 1930, both held in Correspondences C-D dossier, FJP.
147
Habitude, but this seems to have changed), La Chronique de Deauville (a scenic portrait
of the seaside town directed by Diamant-Berger), and W. G. Pabst’s Abwege (Crisis, aka,
The Devious Path, 1928). (Figure 22-23)
As was often the case with Painlevé’s endeavors, the first review, written by
Pierre Lazareff (the scenarist for L’Inconnue) appeared in Paris-Midi under the headline
“Mr. Paul Painlevé, Minister of War, attends the presentation of a film by his son, Jean
Painlevé” and mostly focuses on the spectacle in the theater not on the screen, joking that
after the screening the Minister of War asked “who shot the film on the octopus?”
32
Lazareff notes that in addition to Paul Painlevé a number of distinguished people
attended the premiere in the “tastefully modernist” theater. From the world of politics,
Charles Henry, deputy chief of the Ministry of War, the senators Gaston Meunier and
Charles Lebrun, Émile Bollaert, President Édouard Herriot’s chief of staff, M. Joestens,
chancellor to the ambassador of Germany, Gaston Bergery, deputy, were all in
attendance. The playwrights Henri Duvernois and Alfred Savoir, the author Colette, as
well as the actress Pola Negri and her husband Prince Serge Mdivani, Charles Pathé, Jean
Tedesco, the filmmaker Jean Renoir, the film critic Lucien Wahl, the actor and rising
director Edmond Gréville (perhaps recognized for his performance in Abel Gance’s
Napoléon, he would soon appear in Clair’s Sous les toits de Paris and begin a successful
directing career, making the now lost avant-garde documentary La naissance des heures
and finding fame directing Josephine Baker), and the filmmaker, theorist, and science
film enthusiast Germaine Dulac.

32
Pierre Lazareff, “M. Paul Painlevé, ministre de la Guerre, assiste à la présentation d’un film de son fils,
Jean Painlevé,” Paris-Midi, Saturday 15 December 1928, held in Presses Coupures Originaux, FJP.
148
La Pieuvre and Painlevé’s other popular shorts entered the cinema in the midst of
an effloresce of avant-garde interest in documentary. La Pieuvre’s appearance also
coincided with the first explicit attempts to make surreal films. The proliferation of
documentaries, as I have argued through the overview of Tedesco’s programming at the
Vieux-Colombier (and its echo at the other specialty theaters), was spurred in part by the
aesthetic presentation of prewar science films. Jean-Pierre Jeancolas writes of 1928
heralding an 18-month boom for French documentaries. Referring to the period as the
“Documentary New Wave,” he describes it as marked by an “astounding confidence in
the image itself,” a confidence that would not quite survive the coming of sound (largely
for economic reasons: neither the filmmakers or smaller theaters could afford the new
technology, which also tended to momentarily draw most production back into the
studios).
33
Limiting the field simply to the films made in France (versus the numerous films
Belgium, Holland, Germany, the USSR, Great Britain, USA, etc.), one can cite such
avant-docs as Cavalcanti’s Rien que des heures (1926), Allégret and Gide’s Voyage au

33
Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, “N. V. D. 28, appel à témoins/D. N. W. 28, calling the witness,” in 100 Années
Lumière, 20-27.
For retrospective and historical considerations of the intimate relationship between avant-garde
and documentary film in France, which also provide key sources for the list of avant-garde documentary
films in the body of the text, see Jean Painlevé, “Les poètes du documentaire,” esp. pages 5-6; Jean-
Clearance Lamber, “Pour le dépassement du documentaire,” L’Âge du cinéma, 6: Le documentaire
expérimental et le film d’avant-garde (December 1951): 62-63; Ado Kyrou, Le Surréalisme au Cinéma,
avant-propos de Jean Ferry (Paris: Arcanes, 1953): 37-54 (the text is brimming with insights, but is rather
loose with facts); Jacques Bernard Brunius, En Marge du Cinéma Français (Paris: Arcanes, 1954), 123-
124; Georges Sadoul, Histoire du Cinéma (Paris: Librarie Flammarion, 1962), 181-210 (his chapter on
Soviet cinema and the avant-garde in France and the world); Noureddine Ghali, L’Avant-Garde
Cinématographique en France, 228-236, 287-294; Brigitte Berg, “Jean Painlevé et l’Avant-Garde,” 111-
13; Alain and Odette Virmaux, “Documentarisme et l’Avant-Garde” in Jeune, Dure et Pure!, 104-106;
Thierry Lefebvre, “De La Science à L’Avant-Garde: Petit panorama,” in Images, science, mouvement:
autour de Marey, ed. SEMIA (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), 103-109; and Oliver Gaycken, “Devices of
Curiosity,” 2-3, 11-12, passim.
149
Congo (1927), Marcel Duamel and Pierre Prévert’s Paris-Express (1927), Jean
Grémillon’s found footage film Gratuités (1927), Boris Kaufmann’s Les Halles centrales
(1927) and his collaboration with Jean Lods on 24 heures en 30 minutes (1929),
Aujourd’hui (1929) and Lods’ Champs-Elysées (1930), Antoine and Lugeon’s Au pays
des mangeurs d’hommes (1928), Pierre Chenal and Jean Mitry’s Paris-Cinéma (1928),
René Clair’s La Tour (1928), Eugène Deslaw’s La Marches des machines (1928), Les
Nuits électriques, Montparnasse, and Humain mécanique (1930), Jean Dréville’s Autour
de ‘L’Argent’ (1928), Quand les épis se courbent (1929), and Physiopolis (1930), Jean
Epstein’s Le Pas de la mule (1928), Michel Gorel and Daniel Abric’s Vive la foire, Paris-
Bestiaux, and Bateaux parisiens (1928-1930?), Albert Guyot’s A quoi rêvent les becs de
gaz and L’eau coule sous les pont (1928), Claude Lambert’s Un film sur Paris and So
This is Marsailles (1928), Georges Lacombe’s La Zone, André Sauvage’s Études sur
Paris (1928), Marcel Carné’s Nogent, Eldorado du dimanche (1929), and Jean Vigo’s À
propos de Nice (1930).
In addition to great interest in documentary at the moment, Painlevé’s films
appeared amidst the mounting surrealist fever, beginning with the raucous premiere of
Germaine Dulac and Antonin Artaud’s La Coquille et le Clergyman at the Studio
Ursulines on 9 February 1928, followed by Man Ray and Robert Desnos’s L’Étoile de
mer (1928)—featuring starfish footage from Painlevé—also at the Ursulines, and
reaching a pitch with the appearance of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien
andalou at the Studio 28 on 1 October 1929, L’Âge d’or in 1930, and Las Hurdes (Land
150
without Bread, 1932, filmed by Painlevé’s collaborator Eli Lotar).
34
These films engage
the documentary impulse to explore the material world, to see it from new perspectives,
as well as the surrealist interest in the disturbing, disorienting potential and oneiric forces
of filmic images, specifically their ability to seduce and terrify. They attempt, if not the
convergence at least the collision of these impulses, driven by the imperative to reveal
what cannot otherwise be seen.
La Pieuvre is a silent film comprised of approximately 107 shots, with only 7 title
cards (most of them mere phrases: “respiration,” “death”), lasting just under 13-minutes
when projected at 16 frames per second. For its premiere at Studio Diamant it was
accompanied by a chamber orchestra, situated behind the audience near the projection
booth, though it is not known what music was played (when Painlevé presented the film
at ciné-clubs and speaking engagements, in place of music he would narrate the film
himself). The film begins with a 9-shot prologue, consisting of 8 stationary camera set-
ups. Described by Painlevé as “several slightly romantic meters evoking the animal of
legend,” the prologue reads as a visual manifesto, laying out the filmmaker’s conception
of cinema, and an overture for the work to come.
35

34
The documentary footage of a starfish is one of the few images in the film not shot through distorting
glass. There is an undated letter, ca. 1927 or 1928, from Jacques André Boiffard to Jean Painlevé
discussing the footage for Étoile de mer in Correspondences dossier, FJP helping to establish its
provenance. In Painlevé interviewed by Berg, “Images de Jean Painlevé,” 10, he jokes that his footage in
Étoile de mer was greeting with applause for being the only moments in the film when audiences were not
bored. Painlevé has, on occasion, been credited as the “ant wrangler” for Un Chien andalou but there is no
proof of this and it does not seem that he and Buñuel had contact with each other until after the release of
Buñuel’s first film.
35
Jean Painlevé, “Les Films Biologiques,” 17.
151
The opening shot shows an octopus against an abstract black background—the
slate surface of a laboratory dissection table—seen from a high angle, as if the
perspective of a researcher perched over a specimen. The octopus is caught in the act of
leaving the representational image, moving towards the lower right hand corner of the
frame. (Figure 24) The motion of the octopus’s exit from the frame motivates a match on
action cut to the second shot, taken in a rocky enclave of a tidal pool, where an octopus,
now appearing to have switched from a vertical to a horizontal plane, flattens itself as
much as possible to blend into its surroundings as it continues to move towards the lower
right corner of the frame. (Figure 25) The exit once again motivates a cut, now to footage
of an octopus in the act of crawling off a windowsill of undetermined height into freefall.
(Figure 26) The fourth shot shows an octopus crawling over the neck and chest of a doll
in a white dress, set against a stark black background. (Figure 27) The shot quickly fades
and cuts to a medium-long shot, in full day light, of an octopus sliding from the crotch of
a tree (resembling an inverted human crotch) and once again falling from an
indeterminate height, motivating a cut. (Figure 28) Dropping in from above, an octopus
enters a close-up shot of an aquarium decorated with a human skull. (Figure 29) The
creature frantically moves first to the right and then left side of the frame, pressing its
tentacles against the front wall of the aquarium as it skirts over the skull (this sequence
contains 2 shots, indicated by a white splice line on the bottom of the frame). As the
octopus exits frame left, the shot quickly fades to a polarized image of the seashore
(appearing like black clouds at night), which then cuts to an establishing shot of the
shore, facing the unbroken horizon of the sea, shot in the full light of day. (Figures 30-32)
152
Fig. 24. An octopus slinks off screen right in the opening shot of the prologue to La Pieuvre (1928).
Fig. 25. The second shot continues the motion initiated by the first shot, with this octopus moving towards
screen right, but this time in a tidal pool. La Pieuvre (1928).
153
Fig. 26. An octopus slides off a windowsill in the third shot of the prologue to La Pieuvre (1928).

Fig. 27. An octopus crawls over a doll in the fourth shot of the prologue to La Pieuvre (1928).
154
Fig. 28. An octopus crawls through the crotch of a tree in the fifth shot of the prologue to La Pieuvre
(1928).
Fig. 29. A memento mori image of an octopus on a human skull in an aquarium, reminiscent of the iconic
images of a toad on a skull in Toad’s Frolic (Charles Urban Trading Company, 1903), in the sixth shot of
the prologue to La Pieuvre (1928).
155
Figs. 30, 31, and 32. Transitions from shot six to shot seven shot (a polarized image of the sea
shore) which cuts to shot eight (the seashore at Perros-Guirec), concluding the prologue to La Pieuvre.
156
This sequence of shots lasts all of 45 seconds but introduces the key motif of exploring
the porous borders between research and reverie, document and dream.
The prologue works upon the syntax of silent film language, typically used to
describe coherent spaces and produce meanings through the relationships built between
successive shots, to draw out its potential for alogical expression and sensation. Like a
short, filmic version of the Bernard’s and Chabry’s approach to the experimentatal
observation of marine biology, it reveals the mechanisms through which filmic syntax
functions by strategically altering it, but also revels in the strange filmic monsters its
produces. The continuous motion of the octopus—or rather octopuses, as judging by
tentacle shape and length, several different creatures appear in this sequence—across
shots connects disparate spaces to suggest a contiguity only possible in film or in dreams;
a spatial technique later adapted by Buñuel and Dalí to connect a bedroom door to the
beach in Un chien andalou. Beginning with the image of the specimen set against the
abstract black background of the laboratory (recalling the visual conventions of Marey
and Comandon), shot from above to make the horizontal plane appear vertical, the
sequence follows the creature’s attempts to remove itself from the image. From the
laboratory it moves to what appears to be its own habitat, a rocky tidal pool, but then, like
the fantastic voyages of a Méliès fantasy, continues onward, traveling through an
increasingly strange and improbable series of tableaux marked by the logical disjunctures
of an aquatic creature climbing out a window, over a recumbent doll, out of a tree, and
over a human skull—imagery flush with the commingled presence of eros and thanatos.
This short journey ends with a shot of seashore, which takes on the function of a pivot
157
between the film’s movements into and out of the laboratory, from abstract space to
milieu and habitat, and from scientific vernacularization to an experiment with form in its
own right. The prologue reverses the conventional opening of prewar science films,
which often start with a naturalist walking through a given environment, coming across
an animal, and separating it from its milieu (both literally and through close-ups) in order
to study it.
36
The slightly disorienting effect of the prologue, with its enigmatic and elusive
presentation of the animal of legend, remains in an ambivalent relationship to the
remainder of the La Pieuvre, which does not refute the oneiric elements even as it
attempts a more direct approach to its subject, lit by the afternoon sun and a cluster of arc
lamps.
37
The film gives an overview of the octopus’s habitat, anatomy (indulging in one
moment of anthropomorphism in admiring its “very human” eye, its respiration tube, and
its pigmentation shown through very high magnification), defense mechanisms (shooting
ink), and predation and diet (trying to get it to eat a rather large crab and a lobster, of
which the octopus appears petrified).
38
As with the prologue, much of the film features
the shy creatures frenziedly trying to flee, presumably from the filmmakers and their
blinding hot lights. Yet whether out of a desire to keep hidden the sides of the aquarium

36
On the classic formula of scientific vernacular wildlife films, see Thierry Lefebvre, “Popularization and
Anthropomorphism: on some prewar ‘animal films’ (the Scientia series),” trans. Martin Joughin, in
Uncharted Territory: essays on early nonfiction film, ed. Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk (Amsterdam:
Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997), 91-96.
37
In some versions of the film, the prologue is tinted blue, and in others it is not, lending a greater
continuity to the two parts. Further research is necessary to determine which version played in 1928.
38
In Jean Painlevé au fils de ses films the filmmaker admits to having Boiffard press an octopus’s head
against the side of the aquarium in order to get it to keep its eye open for filming.
158
and whatever blockades have been erected to prevent the creatures from escaping the
tidal pools—in the first shot of an octopus on the beach, you can see the reflection of
either Painlevé or Hamon standing just out of frame, presumably to induce the animal to
move in the other direction—the camera almost always maintains static framing,
allowing the animals to leave the space of representation.
39
One of the more striking features of La Pieuvre, to the extent it communicates
what Painlevé described as his motivating desire to “convey my passion of the
octopus,”
40
is its frank sadism, and its fusion of l’amour and la mort. La Pieuvre
participates in many of the conventions established by prewar scientific vernacular and
wildlife films, which often showed little compunction about the disposability of its
subjects and in many cases made a spectacle out of provoked life and death struggles
between animals as well as the hunting footage in popular safari films.
41
The film
climaxes with three acts of violent expenditure, beginning with a battle between two

39
There are three exceptions to this: there appears to be a very slight tilt after a rock is lifted from on top of
an octopus. When the fishermen arrive on the beach, three-quarters of the way through the film, the camera
pans left to better frame them. In the next shot, it also pans left to follow a small octopus crawling amongst
the rocks. Otherwise, the entire film keeps the camera stationary.
40
Painlevé interviewed by Hélène Hazéra and Dominique Leglu, “Jean Painlevé, Qui Fait Voir
L’Invisible,” 20; and Hazéra and Leglu, “Jean Painlevé Reveals the Invisible,” 174.
41
The literature on wildlife films and the spectacle of death is substantial, and holds a privileged place in
classical film theory. For historical accounts, see Oliver Gaycken, “A Drama Unites Them in a Fight to the
Death”; Derek Bousé, Wildlife Films (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), esp. 42-43,
45, 47-48, 52, 54, 58; as well as Greg Mitmann, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Cynthia Chris, Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006). For theoretical approaches, see André Bazin, “Death Every
Afternoon (1951),” and Serge Daney, “The Screen of Fantasy: Bazin and Animals (1972),” trans. Mark A.
Cohen, in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed., Ivone Margulies (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2002), 27-41; Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body; Akira Mizuta Lippit, “The Death of an Animal,”
Film Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 1 (2002): 9-22; and Vivian Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten
Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary,” and “The Charge of the Real: Embodied
Knowledge and Cinematic Consciousness,” in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 226-285.
159
octopuses held in the same aquarium, which Painlevé insisted was unprovoked and
fought for the sake of fighting.
42
The fight sequence, announced by the simple title card “La Mort,” “Death,”
shows the two animals becoming entangled in a deadly embrace. (Figures 33-34) The
larger of the two octopuses falls upon its victim, squeezing it until it turns bright white
(as octopuses do when frightened). It releases its rival, who goes into extended death
throes, contorting and twisting upon itself, lifting its fleshy skirt to expose its underside
with anguished gestures that harden as the creature sinks to the ground and stiffens. The
shot cross fades from the final, labored breaths of the octopus submerged in water (the
precise moment of its death is not actually shown) to the same creature dead at low tide,
and is followed shortly afterwards by the use of time-lapse cinematography to show the
shiny skin of the octopus bubbling as it decays in the sun. This is followed by a sequence
in which a fisherman, walking along the beach with another man and a dog, catches a
small octopus and gouges his thumbs through it, tearing at it—perhaps with the aim of
disabling it so that it cannot escape—before dropping the traumatized animal into the surf
to rinse it off and then putting it into his bucket. After this, Painlevé gives an uncanny
demonstration of the automatic behavior of a freshly severed tentacle, which, cued by
Painlevé’s hand, reflexively wiggles and deploys its suckers, before expending its energy
and becoming inanimate. (Figures 35-36)

42
“This octopus died in the course of a battle with another octopus, because octopuses engage in
fantastically fierce duels, altogether useless since they do not eat each other; their oral apparatus is of such
a sort that a gelatinous product slides out of it; the octopus can only eat hard objects, such as the crab with
its shell.” Painlevé quoted in Charles de Saint-Cyr, “Les Monographies Documentaires de M. Jean
Painlevé,” La Semaine à Paris, 11-18 January 1929, 36.
160
Fig. 33. Filmic sadism: the fusion of “l’amour” (love) and “la mort” (death) in La Pieuvre (1928).
Fig. 34. The death throes of an octopus in La Pieuvre (1928).
161
Fig. 35. A fisherman gathering octopuses sticks his thumbs through his catch in La Pieuvre (1928).
Fig. 36. Automatic behavior: the severed tentacle of an octopus wriggles and uses its suction cups in La
Pieuvre (1928).
The death sequence in particular astonished the few critics who reviewed the film,
falling under the grip of the octopus. Maurice Bourdet, who likens Painlevé to the
celebrated amateur entomologist Jean Henri Fabre, literally cannot believe his eyes,
wondering if the mere possibility of the octopus’s caress seals its victims’ fates. He
162
describes La Pieuvre as an essay on fear, but concludes: “He conjures upon the film
stock, henceforth inscribed with such precious details, still unknown world of magic.”
43
Writing for La Semaine à Paris, Charles de Saint-Cyr, whose name begs we trust him,
singles out this sequence as exemplary of the possibilities of documentary film (a special
concern of his).
The director takes this fantastic animal, that comes, as it were, from where
nightmares are born, and makes it live before us: a life as entirely strange as it is
horrible, but life all the same… She gasps, she suffers, she dies. And it is the
saddest, most agonizing, most horrifying, and most painful death. Such works are
among those which make the cinema more admirable because they contribute
something that precisely the cinema alone can give to us.
44
De Saint-Cyr’s response helps bring an important point to light. De Saint-Cyr locates the
film’s astonishing (hallucinant in French) properties in its ability to draw the facts out of
apparent hallucination, from that which emerges as it were, from where nightmares are
born. De Saint-Cyr expresses amazement at the film’s presentation of life in forms
wholly alien to the spectator, that nevertheless push him or her to reconsider, in the face
of the evidence, the parameters of what is understood as life, living, and worthy of life.
De Saint-Cyr’s initial reading suggests an almost Franciscan solicitation of
tenderness from spectators, drawn out of an empathetic response to the violence the
octopus suffers. The animation in these images reveals the supposedly revolting and base
creature to be, in actuality, “full of rapid life.” It is certainly not the “inert, slimy matter”

43
Maurice Bourdet, “La Pieuvre: Un film de Jean Painlevé,” Le Petit Parisien, 16 December 1928, 2. Jean
Henri Fabre was a school teacher and passionate amateur entomologist, famous for his multi-volume
Souvenirs Entomologiques.
44
Charles de Saint-Cyr, “Un Nouveau studio est ouvert! Une salle curious. Un hallucinant documentaire de
Jean Painlevé. Quelques mots à propos Crise,” La Semaine à Paris, 21-28 December 1928, 55.
163
put on display and sold to gourmets from the market stalls in Les Halles. As a being full
of life, something is at stake in its death. In an argument that anticipates Bazin’s “Death
Every Afternoon” by 22 years, de Saint-Cyr sees cinematic specificity in the animal’s
death. Although he does not develop the argument much further than this, in his initial
iteration published 21 December 1928, he seems to suggest that the cinematic specificity
of La Pieuvre comes from its creation and destruction of life on film. The film holds a
capacity to solicit empathy with the wholly other, to show spectators aspects of the world
they would otherwise never be able to see, and to provide, to draw a term from
Comandon once again, a materialization in time of a singular event, the real death of a
living creature, which stands as the foundation of a documentary realism.
De Saint-Cyr’s argument is clearly not one premised upon a code of cinematic
representation concerned with the disposability of the film’s actors (such animal rights
concerns will not become a major concern until much later). But his thinking helps draw
out a second reading of La Pieuvre’s contribution to a cinematic specificity that accounts
for its sadism and its relationship to the real. The scene, however, disturbs him enough to
write about it again several weeks later, when Le Bernard-L’ermite premiered at Studio
Diamant during the first week of January 1929 (figure 23), and again on the occasion of
the release of Les Oursins in October 1929 (figures 37-38). He is anxious to know if
Painlevé has provoked or otherwise staged the duel between octopuses, and subsequently
asserts that the scene “must haunt any mind (esprit) thirsty for knowledge.”
45

45
Charles de Saint-Cyr, “Un programme très copieux pour la réouverture des Ursulines et qui mérite d’être
marqué d’une pierre blanche, puisqu’il en pourrait résulter—enfin—le lancement des monographies
documentaire de M. Jean Painlevé,” La Semaine à Paris, 11-18 October 1929, 14. De Saint-Cyr asks
164
Fig. 37. Close up of a sand urchin in Les Oursins (1929).
Fig. 38. Dissection of a sand urchin in Les Oursins (1929).
After viewing Bernard-L’ermite, Painlevé’s film on the ethology of hermit crabs
that gives special focus to their means of finding shells to live in, de Saint-Cyr credits
Painlevé with re-conceptualizing the documentary in the form of a monograph (a single
subject scholarly work). De Saint-Cyr defines the documentary monograph as a
“document simultaneously of the highest scientific value and a reconstitution of a moving

Painlevé about whether the battle was provoked in his article “Les Monographies Documentaires de M.
Jean Painlevé,” La Semaine à Paris, 11-18 January 1929, 36.
165
life…” He describes Painlevé’s “agonizing and comical” studies of marine life as being
irrevocably marked by anthropomorphism and “the image of human life.”
46
De Saint-Cyr
differentiates these films from the history of documentary, which has moved from the
“simple documentary” “towards the novelistic (romancé) documentary, which is a form,
if not more elevated, at least, if I dare say it, more civilized, or at least further from
nature.”
47
Citing avant-garde films such as Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Brumes d’automne, he
also notes the emergence of the poetic documentary (or avant-garde documentary) as the
latest development (Cavalcanti would have been a better example), but notes that what
Painlevé is doing is something entirely different, insisting, “it is science, not poetry, that
attracted him” to the form. Using rather vague and elusive language, de Saint-Cyr also
cites the incorporation of “new elements of a very high value” as differentiating Painlevé
from such scientific film predecessors as Jean Comandon.
48
Ultimately de Saint-Cyr’s distinctions between the novelistic, poetic, and
scientific approaches to documentary are not very useful: they are too categorical in their
separations. As we have seen in the previous chapter, figures like Bull and Comandon
were acutely aware of the aesthetic dimension of their films, and Comandon’s botanical
films, such as Le Mouvement des Végétaux (1926-29) and Croissance des Végétaux

46
Charles de Saint-Cyr, “Les Monographies Documentaires de M. Jean Painlevé,” 36.
47
Charles de Saint-Cyr, “Les Monographies Documentaires de M. Jean Painlevé,” 38 (my emphasis).
48
Charles de Saint-Cyr, “Les Monographies Documentaires de M. Jean Painlevé,” 38-39. Absent further
clarification of what de Saint-Cyr meant by “new elements of a very high value,” this seems to be an
unfairly reductive assessment of Comandon and his contemporaries, but de Saint-Cyr is not incorrect to
note, if I read him correctly, Painlevé has a wider berth for taking detours and extemporizing in a manner
the other scientific filmmakers, mostly due to their institutional positions, cannot.
166
(1929) are suffused with a poetry that is not merely accidental. In arguing Painlevé as
somehow breaking with the identifiable modes of documentary, and not calling what
Painlevé does simply poetry (today one might say essayistic), de Saint-Cyr makes a vital
distinction that’s worth pursuing.
This specificity in Painlevé’s work, which de Saint-Cyr elusively identifies as
new but not quite science or poetry, may be productively developed and clarified by
tracing out a continuation of the debate over photogénie during the mid-1920s. The
resistance to assigning poetry the primary place in Painlevé’s documentary practice,
particularly in such harrowing and sadistic footage as that of the octopus duel, may come
from the fact that Painlevé’s film, in its overt sadism, its excess eros and thanatos, and
refusal to repress the violence at the base of representation, adds an element of resistance
to the poetic sublimation and the transposition or redemption of matter through
idealization. Considering this poetic strain in Painlevé’s films calls for an adjustment to
concepts of poetry itself, turning away from literary models towards what one might call,
in Painlevé’s own idiom, a neo-zoological aesthetics, a passionate zoology.
2.4 Animal Photogénie
Such ideas were already in circulation, and raised with growing frequency in starting
around 1925, when Germaine Dulac, writing in Paris-Midi on her own variation on
photogénie, identified Jean Comandon’s footage of a germinating grain of wheat as a key
example of cinema’s contribution to the arts, its ability to “grasp the ungraspable
167
(insaisissable).”
49
She would later add a citation to La Pieuvre in her expanded
explanation of the insaisissable, what she conceptualized as the “rendering perceptible
imperceptible moral and psychological reactions”: “Even microbes do not escape visual
investigation. Plants and animals, the infinitely small, deliver to us in a pure state, their
instincts and their gestures, the mysteries of their evolutions and their actions. We
witness the ferocious combat of sub-aquatic animals, their rebellious or hypocritical
tactics.”
50
Such creatures were key among the pet objects for theorists of photogénie. In
Marcel Defosse’s essay “Une certaine photogénie” he suggests that while the most
photogenic entities are inanimate objects, which do not alter their behavior in the
presence of the camera, documentary footage, such as the Williamsons underwater
footage, the UFA documentary Jardins de la mer, and the scene from Rex Ingram’s
fictional film Mare Mostrum featuring documentary footage of an octopus eating a meal,
have proven documentary footage of animals to be particularly striking. Defosse praises

49
Germaine Dulac, “Aphorismes… (1925),” in Écrits sur le cinéma (1919-1937), 60. For an extended
discussion of Dulac’s conception of the insaisissable, particularly in relation to botanical films, see my
“Substance abuse or, on the essence of cinema,” in Prisoner’s Cinema, ed. Melvin Moti (Rotterdam, 2008),
4-35. Insaisissable, besides being a legal term for personal effects outside of laws of seizure, and an
aesthetic term for that which lies, in a sense, beyond semantic availability, is also one of the aliases for
Fantômas.
50
Germaine Dulac, “L’Action de l’Avant-Garde Cinématographique (1931),” in Écrits sur le cinéma
(1919-1937), ed. Prosper Hillairet (Paris: Paris Expérimental, 1994), 158. After attending the premiere of
La Pieuvre, Germaine Dulac became an ardent champion of Painlevé’s work. She presented Painlevé’s
films at international conferences and even private screenings, as indicated by a letter from the Finance
Minister to Dulac dated 18 décembre 1936 granting her tax exemption for a private screening of La
Pieuvre. See fonds Dulac 132, “La Pieuvre,” GD544, Bibliothèque du Film, Paris.
One might also add that Dulac’s development of the concept of the insaisissable, a very symbolist
idea, raises a similar concept as that of Walter Benjamin’s optical unconscious.
168
these moments for being “free of interpretation” and capturing something of the “most
rebellious beauties” of life forms unbridled by human consciousness.
51
Émile Vuillermoz published a series of articles in 1927 critically thinking about
the importance of science footage and animal documentaries to the development of film
aesthetics. Referencing Colette’s desire to make a film featuring only dogs, Vuillermoz
writes, “We have often remarked upon the photogénie of animals without, however,
taking advantage of it.”
52
Vuillermoz already suggested how one might take advantage of
the photogénie of animals, besides for finding one’s seat by their glow, in a column
published five months earlier as “Films de Laboratoire” (Laboratory Films).
53
The
column, which calls for the establishment of a specialty theater dedicated to science
films, which he believes would be equally useful to scientists and artists.
Vuillermoz, rehearsing a now familiar argument, emphasizes the revelatory
powers of the cinematograph as prosthesis capable of extending the human sensorium in
space and time. Slow-motion, time-lapse, microcinematography, and x-ray photography
show “that our imperfect senses only perceive a slight share of what surrounds us… The
ultrasensitive retina of a camera records, on the contrary, a reality much more complex
and much more nuanced.”
54
One of the effects of this perceptual expansion, Vuillermoz
notes, is that it renders poetry insufficient. Making reference to films about the lives of

51
Marcel Defosse, “Une certaine photogénie,” Cinéa-Ciné Pour Tous, no. 94 (1 October 1927): 14.
52
Émile Vuillermoz, “La photogénie des bêtes,” Le Temps, 9 July 1927, 5. The article’s title seems to be a
homage to a lecture devised by Colette on the “Photogénie de l’animal,” as advertised in the 1 March 1926
issue of Cinéa-Ciné Pour Tous.
53
Émile Vuillermoz, “Courrier Cinématographique: Films de laboratoire,” Le Temps, 19 February 1927, 6.
54
Ibid.
169
insects (most likely the Laboratoire du Vieux-Colombier’s Papillons et chrysalides), he
muses about the many mistakes poets have made in idealizing the butterfly as a symbol
of insouciance, frivolity, caprice, and beauty when the cinematograph reveals that “their
existence, entirely dedicated to the law of reproduction, is dominated by the pitiless
severity of the procreative mission.”
55
Yet the cinematograph, he argues, may reveal a
magnificent new poetry, crueler perhaps, but also aimed at more deeply engaging the
world, genuinely taking up what Jean Epstein, in Bonjour Cinéma, identified as the
“desire for a more exact poetry” but also one capable of a potential wildness born of
images of the real, intensified here by the use of animals as both a figuration of “life”
itself and an uncontrolled, non-psychological presence.
56
If La Pieuvre begins to articulate an aggressive documentary ethos premised upon
a wild, unsublimated poetics, most strongly marked by a puerile sadism, this should not
be mistaken as the sole or definitive stance Painlevé’s films take. The stunning
microcinematography of La Daphnie, studying the perpetually jitterbugging 1 mm
freshwater flea at magnifications of up to 150,000 times its original size (figure 39), and
of Les Oursins, with its vertiginous exploration of the microscopic ecologies of the
creatures, channeled the ferocity of La Pieuvre into curiosity, exploration, and a sense of
the microscopic sublime. Le Bernard-l’ermite examines the question of desire, and Hyas
et Sténorinques gives itself over to the pure plastic beauty of aquatic life.

55
Émile Vuillermoz, “Courrier Cinématographique: Films de laboratoire,” Le Temps, 19 February 1927, 6.
56
Jean Epstein, “Magnification,” trans. Stuart Liebman, in French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907-1939,
vol. 1, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 239; and Epstein, Bonjour
Cinéma (1921), in Écrits sur le cinéma, 1921-1951, t. 1, 1921-1947 (Paris: Seghers, 1974), 97.
170
Fig. 39. Jitterbug: shot of a daphnia in La Daphnie (1929).
In the relatively short time-span of 2 years, Painlevé developed a rather
sophisticated approach to creation of films about wildlife, and in particular, its
strangeness. In addition to articulating a film practice that sought to integrate without
synthesizing practices of science and surrealism, Painlevé’s films began to raise rather
complex questions regarding the ontology of the medium and its epistemological limits,
what I have called in the introduction the Painlevé effect. His work is very much in
conversation with a set of competing critical concepts that emerge from surrealism at the
end of the 1920s and the early 1930s. In many ways his film offer more economical
presentations of such ideas as—informe (formlessness), amour fou (mad love), and
cruaté (cruelty). These critical impulses take a distinct form in Painlevé’s œuvre, which I
develop in the next chapter under the heading of epistemania. The medium through which
Painlevé achieved much of this is his cinematic anthropomorphism. This idea is
171
encapsulated by a review of Painlevé’s first films published in Ciné-Miroir on 11 January
1929:
In making us carefully examine these infinitesimal beings, for whom he acts as a
historian, or better still, a novelist, Jean Painlevé leads us into the domain of
dreams, where, to our astonished eyes, beings and things spill beyond the frontiers
of their volumes.
57
It will be the object of the next chapter to tease out the consequences of a documentary
film practice dedicated to spilling beyond its own frontiers.
Fig. 40. “The Revenge.” Cartoon by Goujon from Bulletin du Club de L’Écran, ca. 1936.

57
Maurice Bourdet, “Science et Cinéma: Comment M. Jean Painlevé ‘filme’ la vie des crustacés,” Ciné-
Miroir, no. 11, January 1929, np, held in Presses Coupures Originaux dossier, FJP.
172
CHAPTER 3
PASSIONATE ZOOLOGY:
NOTES ON L’HIPPOCAMPE, 1929-1935
3.1 Epistemania
To the realists. —You sober people who feel well armed against passion and
fantasies and would like to turn your emptiness into a matter of pride and an
ornament: you call yourselves realists and hint that the world really is the way it
appears to you. As if reality stood unveiled before you only, and you yourselves
were perhaps the best part of it… But in your unveiled state are not even you still
very passionate and dark creatures compared to fish, and still far too similar to an
artist in love? And what is ‘reality’ for an artist in love? You are still burdened
with those estimates of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of
former centuries. Your sobriety still contains a secret and inextinguishable
drunkenness. Your love of ‘reality,’ for example—oh, that is a primal ‘love.’
Every feeling and sensation contains a piece of this old love; and some fantasy,
some prejudice, some unreason, some ignorance, some fear, and ever so much
else has contributed to it and worked on it. That mountain there! That cloud there!
What is ‘real’ in that? Subtract the phantasm and every human contribution from
it, my sober friends! If you can! If you can forget your descent, your past, your
training—all of your humanity and animality. There is no ‘reality’ for us—not for
you either, my sober friends. We are not nearly as different as you think, and
perhaps our good will to transcend intoxication is as respectable as your faith that
you are altogether incapable of intoxication. — Friedrich Nietzsche
1
In Bill Nichols foundational study of the documentary, Representing Reality (1991), he
argues that in counter-distinction to the erotic visual pleasures of narrative films,
scopophilia, documentary films mobilize an epistephilia, “a pleasure in knowing” which
is authorized by documentary’s demonstrative, sober discourse, buttressed by appeals to

1
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. and commentary
by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), sect. 57, 121; and Le Gai Savoir (La Gaya Scienza),
trans. Henri Albert (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1901), sect. 57, 101-102.
173
rational argumentation and institutional investment.
2
Michael Renov, in his essay
“Charged Vision: The Place of Desire in Documentary Fiction,” critiques Nichols
epistephilia as too limited, underestimating the affective charge and “lure” of
documentary images. Renov argues that documentary images also have an appeal and
effect that potentially exceeds rational discourses.
3
In Nichols’ 2001 text Introduction to
Documentary, he seems to anticipate—or already have internalized—Renov’s critique by
slightly changing the wording of his definition of epistephilia from “pleasure in knowing”
to “a desire to know.” This adjustment is not insignificant—if still ultimately insufficient.
This admission of desire adds a canny nuance to the concept of epistephilia. It
acknowledges a certain quantity of fantasy or impossibility may exist in the heart of
epistephilia, even while remaining embedded in a “discourse of sobriety” that cannot
adequately account for the unconscious aspects of thought or the mad intoxication that
Nietzsche posits courses through every realism.
This chapter intervenes into this debate by arguing that Painlevé’s films suggests
a manner in which documentary practices—long before the so-called postmodern
epistemological ruptures of the 1960s—were engaged in the visualization of the presence
of an immanent tension within epistephilia, between sobriety and ecstasy or intoxication.
Painlevé’s films belong to a cultural moment of intense enthusiasm for the
epistemological possibilities of cinema that stretches across the realms of the arts and

2
Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1991), 31, 178-80.
3
Michael Renov, “Charged Vision: The Place of Desire in Documentary Fiction,” The Subject of
Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 93-103.
174
sciences. This manic excitement—an epistemania—reveals the ambivalent politics of
such a project, without completely disavowing, or pretending to be innocent of such
projects.
3.2 The Sound and the Theory
Painlevé’s first set of theatrical documentaries, released between winter 1928 and fall
1929, arrive in the final days of silent film. A lively alternative cinema culture supported
the production and exhibition of a cycle of artisanally produced documentary and avant-
garde films (with little distinction made between them). Producing such short silent films
entailed relatively low financial risk—Pierre Chenal and Jean Mitry purportedly made
Paris-Cinéma for 5,000 francs and Painlevé claimed none of his silent films cost more
than 20,000 francs to produce—and the uniform systems of recording and projection (35
mm) made it possible, if not always probable, for artisan filmmakers to find audiences for
their works, even mass ones, and if not recoup costs, at least not go into ruin.
4
It also
made it possible for filmmakers whose ideological and aesthetic positions put them at the
margins if not outside of commercial film production and exhibition to produce and show
work. This alternative cinema network, however, was on the verge of being transformed
by the arrival of sound, which reached Paris in fall 1928 with the projections of Marcel
Vandal’s colonial adventure L’eau du Nil, Willard Van Dyke and Robert Flaherty’s

4
The figures for Chenal and Mitry come from Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, “N. V. D. 28, appel à témoins/D. N.
W. 28, calling the witness,” in 100 Années Lumière, 20; Painlevé cites that figure in an interview in Anon.,
“Jean Painlevé,” Pour Vous, 31 August 1933, np, held in Presses 1930-1934 dossier, FJP. Painlevé left no
paper trail on the expenses for his films up until L’Hippocampe, so his figures should be taken as guides
and not firm numbers.
175
White Shadows, and became all but inevitable with the sensational success of The Jazz
Singer, which opened 26 January 1929 and played for 48 weeks at the Aubert-Palace de
Paris. The Jazz Singer spurred the race to respond with French talkies, which arrived with
the debuts of Gaston Ravel and Tony Lekain’s Le Collier de la reine and André Hugon’s
Les Trois Masques in October 1929.
5
The public enthusiasm for talking pictures,
however, did not immediately spread to many of the film studios and filmmakers, now
faced with the necessity of conversion, nor with many critics who saw the coming of
sound as a threat to an increasingly refined and international language of film, which they
feared would slide right back towards filmed theater.
6
Compounded with the growing
global financial crisis (though the crash would not be dramatically felt in France until
1933), the costs of conversion and production proved prohibitively high, further
marginalizing the small-stakes production of films and the economic viability of most of
the specialty theaters. Thus the enthusiasm for the aesthetic, technological, and social
potentials of cinema becomes lined with a certain melancholy regarding the coming of
sound as shattering cinema’s utopian promises on the cusp of their realization.
Painlevé’s response to the coming of sound took two forms: one economic,
related to strategies for being able to continue to make films, and the other aesthetic—and

5
On the coming of sound, see Noureddine Ghali, L’Avant-Garde Cinématographique en France dans les
Années Vingt, 305-317; Richard Abel, French Cinema, 59-65; and Abel, French Film Theory and
Criticism, vol. 2: 1929-1939, 5-37.
6
Germaine Dulac’s writings of the late 1920s offer some of the best articulations of a militant (but still
nuanced) concept of film specificity. See Dulac, Écrits sur le cinéma, 1919-1937, ed. Hillairet Prosper
(Paris: Paris Expérimental, 1994). Cinéa-Ciné Pour Tous, no. 138 (1-15 August 1929) offers a good
overview of the critical response and debates regarding the sound film, which is the topic of most of the
articles, including a feature “Qu’en pensent nos réalistateurs,” (What do our directors think?), with
statements on sound film from L’Herbier, Gance, Chomette, Dulac, Fescourt, and others.
176
more militant—which relates to Painlevé’s beliefs regarding the power of the image. On
a person level, it seems that part of Painlevé’s resistance to sound had to do with his
ability to maintain his economic and artistic independence. In a letter to Painlevé, Henri
Diamant-Berger, the proprietor of Studio Diamant, gave Painlevé the sound advice to
sonarize his “little silent films” as this was, in his opinion, “the only doorway to the
screen.”
7
If Painlevé held Diamant-Berger in slight suspicion (they would end their
relationship by the end of 1930) his friend Robert Lyon, the manager of the Salle Pleyel,
convinced Painlevé of the necessity for sound, and introduced him to the composer
Maurice Jaubert, who conducted the Paris symphony orchestra for the score for Caprelles
et Pantopodes, a documentary on the acrobatics of skeleton shrimp and spider crabs.
8
Based upon this experiment, Jaubert provided additional scores for sonarized versions of
Bernard-L’ermite and Hyas et Sténorinques. The sound versions of these films, along
with Crabes et Cravettes, were distributed by Gaumont in 1931.
In order to make the transition to sound and protect his independence, Painlevé
established two organizations with money inherited from a great aunt and his
grandparents.
9
The first, Cinégraphie documentaire (documentary cinegraphy), co-
founded with Léon Sors and Robert Lyon, was established for producing Painlevé’s films

7
Letter from Henri Diamant-Berger to Jean Painlevé, dated 9 April 1930, held in Correspondences C-D
dossier, FJP.
8
Brigitte Berg, “Jean Painlevé et l’Avant-Garde,” in Jeune, Dure et Pure!, ed. Nicole Brenez and Christian
Lebrat (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 2001), 111; and Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 80.
9
An article published in 1936, claims Painlevé spent over 2,000,000 francs of his own money on his films
and institutional endeavors. See L. P., “Jean Painlevé hors de l’eau: Des merveilles sortierent de deux
caves…,” L’Opinion Publique (Brussels), 13 November 1936, held in Presses 1935-1950 dossier, FJP.
177
(in 1960 he renamed it Les Documents Cinématographiques).
10
The second, the Institut
de Cinématographie Scientifique (The Institute of Scientific Cinematography or ICS),
was devised for the creation, distribution, and support of scientific films, including
research and surgical films.
11
The ICS boasted the physician Arsène d’Arsonval, the
chemist Georges Urbain, and the zoologist Georges Bohn amongst its officers, though for
all intents and purposes, Painlevé ran the Institute himself, from the cellar of 12 rue
Armand-Moisant in the 15
th
arrondissement.
12
In a letter to the filmmaker Sergei M.
Eisenstein he jokingly announced, “I have just formed the Institute of Scientific
Cinematography, which should not astonish you given my devotion and, on the other
hand, my old ambition for the title of director.”
13
By literally institutionalizing himself,
Painlevé found the means to continue making films in a largely autonomous manner,
though his attention turned more and more to scientific documents during the 1930s (his
filmography lists 20 research films between 1930 and 1939).
The debates over the coming of sound film, as well as questions of pure cinema
and medium specificity, clearly informed Painlevé’s thinking about filmmaking and the
stakes of documentary film. In a series of articles and interviews published between

10
For information on Documentaire cinégraphie, see Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 74.
11
Anon., “Un Institut de Cinématographe Scientifique,” Information Universitaire, 17 January 1931.
12
At the third congress of the Association de la documentation photographique et cinématographiques des
sciences, Painlevé described the modest organization behind “this pompous name” as consisting of “two
cellars, one where we build all the apparatuses I need, and the other where we shoot the footage.” Jean
Painlevé, “Interventions personnelles au Congrès,” unpublished typescript, 1935, 2, held in the ADPCS
dossier, FJP. For a depiction of the “bohemian air” of the ICS, see Léo Sauvage, “Institute in the Cellar,”
trans. Jeanine Herman, in Science is Fiction, 124-128, originally published as “Institut dans la cave,”
Regards (10 May 1935).
13
Letter from Jean Painlevé to Sergei M. Eisenstein, dated 4 January 1931, Ref. 1923-1-2058, Eisenstein
Archives, RGALI, Moscow.
178
roughly 1929 and 1932, a mixture of promotional pieces for his films and institutions and
polemics about the imperiled status of scientific filmmaking, Painlevé began to articulate
what can be reconstructed as his own theory documentary film.
14
His remarks about the
sound film are particularly useful for clarifying his ideas about the image, language, and
the documentary, and, as this section will argue, they serve as the occasion for
articulating a documentary ethos—immanent to his films—rooted in a critique of
anthropocentrism.
In an unpublished text simply titled “Le Cinéma,” Painlevé presents an imaginary
conversation with theater manager (likely a parody of Henri Berger-Diamant) that
summarizes the dilemma posed by the coming of sound.
—From now on, we can only ensure a serious run if you give us documentaries
with sound.
—Nevertheless, I cannot make an octopus speak…
—Why not? Ah, yes. Very well, speak yourself. But do not tell the audience
anything boring or difficult…
—I see: some pleasantries.
—That’s it, some pleasantries about the octopus. Or better some well-matched
music, that sticks well.
—For octopus music, a little slimy. We’ll tell the musicians not to empty their spit
valves…
—Do what you like provided that it will be evocative. If need be record noise, so
as long as it is sound; we have not spent millions transforming our theater in order
to project silent films.
15

14
Roxane Hamery gives an excellent overview of Painlevé’s writings in the 1930s as constituting the
architecture of a documentary ethics, which for Painlevé, comes down to a basic question of personal
integrity. See Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 121-132, esp. 128-130.
15
Jean Painlevé, “Le Cinéma,” undated typescript [1930], held in Écrits 2 dossier, FJP. Although further
archival research is necessary, I suspect this text comprises his notes for the lecture he gave at the galerie
d’art Manuel frères as part of a series on cinema held from 17 June to 4 July 1930, which also included
talks by Louis Lumière, Émile Vuillermoz, and Jean Cocteau. I raise this possibility given that his first
sonarized film, Caprelles et Pantopodes was not released until 23 December 1930, and at the end of this
text, he mentions that in several days he is recording commentary for a documentary on marine life (3).
Roxane Hamery mentions this lecture as a sign of the young director’s rising success in Jean Painlevé, 69.
179
Painlevé’s anecdote should not be taken simply as a militant plea for silence—sound,
noise, and music would come to play an increasingly important role in his work,
particularly in his postwar films—but rather as an expression of the incredible importance
he placed upon the image as visual document. His tone is often prescriptive and yet his
films and his programming tastes suggest a far more catholic and impure practice.
Painlevé’s initial reticence to the universal adaptation of sound was informed by
both the utilitarian and recreational uses of film. In a text published in fall 1929 under the
title “Les Film Biologiques” (Biological films), Painlevé posited that film’s specificity
lay not only in its capacity to reveal the invisible through microcinematography, slow
motion, and time lapse filming, but also in its capacity for concrete communication
through means that surpassed the limits of spoken and written language. Painlevé stated
that in the lecture hall, this aspect of film has a pragmatic, pedagogical use, its concrete
immediacy, which “renders much more comprehensible all the facts that the
word—whatever the attention of the listener—cannot evoke in the mind.”
16
In the context
of the article, Painlevé described the value of film as a pedagogical tool, a method for
documenting experiments, and a prosthetic enhancement for the senses, through
magnification, slow motion, and time lapse cinematography. He characterized his films,
with strategic elusiveness. as “biological films”: studies of the behavior, development,
morphology, and comparative anatomy of animals. Such films could take the form of an
educational documentary, a popular documentary (such as La Pieuvre), a ‘pure’ scientific
research communication (such as L’Œuf de l’épinoche), or, as he admitted in the

16
Jean Painlevé, “Les Films Biologiques,” Lumière et Radio, no. 1 (10 September 1929): 15.
180
conclusion of the text, pure cinema (cinéma pur). He repeated this definition with only
modest alteration under the name “documentary” four months later, explaining that it is a
“film treating the morphology, behavior, and evolution of a living being, from birth to
death, from a photogenic and scientific point of view.”
17
“Les Films Biologiques” argues that theatrical films ought to rely on nothing
beyond the image and its montage, eschewing the use of titles and music—though
Painlevé conceded that few directors can manage to make “pure films” that would
interest an audience.
18
In addition to film’s potential supra-linguistic precision, Painlevé
wanted to preserve the international aspect of cinema, the belief that silent film is on the
cusp on a universal language that transcends nationalist limitations, which the talkie
carelessly “tosses to the floor.”
19
Furthermore, Painlevé believed the voice was “in
contradiction to the photographic image” and threatened to over-stabilize or tame the
latent wildness of moving images. Besides limiting the unruly potential of images,
Painlevé was obviously concerned with the manner in which the voice, and title cards
too, could be used to cover up faulty filmmaking or to fabricate intentional falsehoods.
He continued “by definition the voice is made to be understood…it is thus incompatible
with all the plastic, deformable, and imaginative visuals that represent photographic art”
(a little over a year later, he modified this position to note the value of productively using

17
Ibid., 15, 18; and Jean Painlevé, “Beauté du Film Documentaire,” Monde, vol. 3, no. 85 (18 January
1930): 6 (my emphasis).
18
Jean Painlevé, “Les Films Biologiques,” 18. He echoes this point in “Beauté du Film Documentaire,” 6,
as “If a film is intended for the public the images must be self-sufficient; words will only be a disturbance.”
19
Ibid., 18. In his typescript “Le Cinéma,” 1, Painlevé jokingly acknowledges that on the other hand,
talkies may induce people to learn more languages: he may have to learn English in order to see the
hardboiled detective serials Bulldog Drummond.
181
the voice in contradiction with the image).
20
He feared that the voice would deprive the
spectator of the alluring ambiguity of images and the freedom of engagement it allows,
by predigesting meaning and hammering it into the heads of spectators (his description).
Doing this, according to Painlevé, sacrifices the potential “sensation of plenitude” that
well-crafted silent documentaries produce.
21
Painlevé’s position appears to be premised upon a slightly contradictory stance, or
at least what seems to be a rather arbitrary sense of the task of the image and its own
innate capacity to subvert this. Language and the word are not precise enough to
communicate certain facts in the context of scientific and pedagogical uses of
film—where the concrete materiality of film exerts its value. Language and the word,
particularly the human voice, were far too concrete in the context of theatrical
documentaries. Images should be able to convey meaning and be understood without the
aid of the voice (“sound…should never be part of its [the image’s] comprehension”
22
).
Likewise images must also being granted, Painlevé believed, a certain evocative
plasticity. While context, of course, counts, the interesting aspect of his argument is that
in most cases, he is speaking about the same raw footage, the same exact visual

20
Jean Painlevé, “Les Films Biologiques,” 18; and Jean Painlevé, “À propos du maintien des sous-tîtres
dans un documentaire parlant,” T. S. F. Programme, 3 January 1931, held in Écrits dossier, FJP.
21
Jean Painlevé, “Beauté du Film Documentaire,” 6.
22
Jean Painlevé, “A propos du maintien des sous-tîtres dans un documentaire parlant.” Painlevé, despite his
arguments against the use of sound and voice in films, used both—and title cards—as well. On the question
of subtitles, he believed that even in the face of sound they offered viewers a pause or oasis (his term)
amidst the work of viewing images, and pointed to two fiction films, L’Âge d’or and All’s Quiet on the
Western Front as excellent examples of the maintenance of title cards.
182
documents. Filmic images, as described by Painlevé, must utilize their potential for both
uncanny precision and elusiveness.
In subsequent years Painlevé became increasingly concerned with film’s
epistemological dimension, both in terms of the nature and limitations of knowledge film
produced and the ends to which it is used, in other words, its political consequences. His
reflections upon sound and its relationship to the task of the image, in conjunction with
his editing mishap while preparing L’Œuf de l’épinoche for presentation at the Academy
of Sciences, had already spurred thinking on the paradoxical status of the image its super-
linguistic precision and its evocativeness. The concerns with the effects of sound and the
voice seem to have also led to an intensified consideration—or at least elaboration—of
the potential problems with or within the image as well.
In a text Painlevé published in a special issue on cinema in the recently founded
journal La Revue des Vivants under the title “Le Cinéma au service de la Science,” he
wrote of the great potential of film for scientific research (particularly the study of the
“unsettling dramas” of the natural sciences), documenting experimentation, and for
“saving future brains…from the cretinism of current education.”
23
He concluded the
essay, however, with some words of caution. “[We] must not delude ourselves about the
value of the ‘impartial witness,’ according to a truly original expression, that we grant the
cinema.”
24
Film is never the final word, according to the text, since mistakes may be
introduced during filming. The apparatus is no guarantor of epistemological certitude. As

23
Jean Painlevé, “Le Cinéma au service de la Science,” La Revue des Vivants, no. 10 (October 1931): 494,
491.
24
Ibid., 494.
183
with microscopes and other tools of the lab, one must keep an “ever-alert critical spirit”
with regards to the apparatus, which, despite all its strengths, also “harbors its tiny
faults.”
25
This is particularly so, Painlevé observed, when varying frame rates during
filming. He thus recommended, following the protocols of such scientific filmmakers as
Lucien Bull and Jean Comandon, the placement of a time keeping device within the
frame for scientific research films. He also warned about potential complications and
confusions added to filmic images based upon contrast levels during development and
printing of film stock. He summarized his position “we should not automatically give
precedence [donner le pas] to a brilliant new-comer simply because it shows us things we
would not have expected”
26
In an almost off-hand observation, Roxane Hamery notes that with the coming of
sound, the animals of Painlevé’s bestiary become less horrific and more serene.
27
It is
interesting to note that Painlevé chose to sonarize the prettiest and most whimsical of his
first five films. Hyas et Sténorinques, a documentary about the manner in which
crustaceans “decorate” their shells with algae and sponges, features as a grand finale of
the opening and refraction of a fan worm’s respiratory plumage (figure 41), likened to
fireworks and made to ungulate (by being shaken by Painlevé’s hand) in the manner of a
Loïe Fuller dance. Bernard-L’ermite, about the “housing crisis” of hermit crabs, ends

25
Ibid., 495.
26
Ibid., 495. He gives a similar account in an interview he gave with a somewhat skeptical journalist,
explaining: “The cinema is a human test like any other. It does not offer an automatic guarantee.” Anon.,
“Entretien avec Jean Painlevé,” Le Vingtième Siècle (23 December 1932), cited in Roxane Hamery, Jean
Painlevé, 128. Pierre Werrie’s far more sympathetic article on Painlevé ran in the same issue.
27
Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 83.
184
Fig. 41. Fireworks or a Loïe Fuller dance? Frame capture from Hyas et Sténorinques, crustacés marins
(1929/1931).
Fig. 42. Frame capture of overhead shot of a sea anemone on top of hermit crab’s shell, appearing to
shimmy to Maurice Jaubert’s 1931 score. Le Bernard-L’ermite (1929/1931).
185
Fig. 43. Frame capture of a football match in Bernard-L’ermite (1929/1931).
Fig. 44. Frame capture from Bernard-L’ermite (1929/1931).
186
with a football match between crabs using a cork ball, recalling the amusing instruction
of Percy Smith’s films for Charles Urban such as The Strength and Agility of Insects
(1911), and features one of Painlevé’s first experiments with ironic synchronization,
making a sea anemone appear to shimmy to Maurice Jaubert’s score, an interpretation of
selections from Vincenzo Belllini (figure 42-43). This is not to say that the films are
devoid of Painlevé’s delight in the unusual and arresting image and the tension between
formal beauty and the grotesque (revealed to be one in the same), exemplified by
Painlevé’s remark that seen in magnification even hermit crabs appear monstrous. (Figure
44) Painlevé left La Pieuvre as well as his vertiginous microscopic studies La Daphnie
and Les Oursins in alluring silence.
28
The serenity Hamery perceives may have been
precisely this taming or sublimating function of music (and sound) that Painlevé alluded
to in his essays and interviews. The music soothed, as it were, the savage beastliness of
the films. As Painlevé would soon learn, however, sound also opened up the images to
different resonances.
Painlevé’s critical reflections regarding the apparatus, spurred by the coming of
sound and the use of music, appear to have also slightly shifted or modified the politics of
his documentary method and its underlying principles in comparative anatomy, bringing
greater attention to the question of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism. The use of
music almost irresistibly places the animals and organisms within an economy of

28
The issue of the presence or absence of musical accompaniment was most often out of the filmmaker’s
hands, but Painlevé expressed a preference for screening his films silently, with him acting as an occasional
barker for them. Ciné-clubs often deferred to the wishes of the filmmaker as to whether to show a film with
or without accompaniment (provided this was even an option). In a letter from Jean Vigo, director of the
ciné-club Amis du Cinéma in Nice, to Jean Painlevé, dated 31 August 1930, he requests Painlevé to express
whether he prefers his films to be shown silently or with music. Held in Correspondences Personnel
dossier, FJP.
187
movement, a choreography, fully set by human terms. Painlevé’s early film scores,
orchestrated by Maurice Jaubert and Darius Milhaud, and drawing upon Bellini,
Domenico Scarlatti, Marcel Delannoy, Frédéric Chopin, and military marches, added a
running commentary—often ironic—to the images, that produced a layer of coherence
and structure that sutures moments that might otherwise demand examination on their
own terms.
One of the most surprising elements of Painlevé’s early microcinematographic
footage, particularly in L’Œuf de l’épinoche, but also in La Daphnie and Les Oursins, is
the manner in which it reveals the multiplicity and polyrhythmic character of vital
functions, emphasizing a chaotic diversity and difference over a single, serene rhythm of
life. Roxane Hamery, in her insightful reading of Painlevé’s early films, argues that
Painlevé’s distinct contribution to the filmic avant-garde was to shift attention from
rhythms imposed by the artist in advance through metrical or musical determinations to
building films through an attention—and if not deference at least respect for—the diverse
micro-rhythms of vital functions of organisms.
29
Music alters this quality, adding a
counter-rhythm, but also imposing a certain teleology and coherence to such images,
potentially engulfing them. The saccadic bursts of blood globules in arteries of the newly
hatched stickleback scattered by muscular convulsions; the blind undulations of pedicels
covering the surface of the sea urchin; the frenetic tremors of cilia (magnified 150,000
times) on the surface of sea urchin pedicels and on the tips of the pulsating infusoria

29
Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 68-69.
188
Fig. 45. Frame capture of rapidly vibrating cilia of sea urchin pedicels, magnified to 150,000 times the
original size when projected on a standard movie screen. Les Oursins (1929).

Figs. 46 and 47. Frame captures of the multiple rhythms in La Daphnie (1929). Left: The twitching eye
muscles and rotating eye (the black blob), the circulation of blood (the globules are visible on the edge of
the daphnia’s head on the left side of the image), and the quivering antennae (the lateral, dark grey blur in
the foreground, running diagonally on the right side of the image). Right: Close-up of the eye muscles, set
against blood circulation.
189
affixed to a daphnia’s carapace; the spastic somersaults of the daphnia and the frantic
muscles twitches of its eyes, set in contrast to its blood circulation and quivering
antennae. (Figures 45-47)
These views all give the films, when projected silently, a distinct and complex
interplay of rhythms altered by the emotional shading of music. It is, of course, the
filmmaker’s right to orchestrate these rapports, and to point out this tension is not to
make an a priori evaluation of its value or worth. In wildlife films in general, music
serves as an often unmarked but significant imposition of anthropomorphism. Painlevé’s
response to the incorporation of music and sound into his theatrical films (it should be
emphasized, his research films never used music), registers, if not always directly, a
struggle with the implications of this.
3.3 Anthropomorphism, or Painlevé’s Cinema of Attraction
The history of wildlife cinema is the story of shifting approaches to and views on
anthropomorphism, and prewar scientific vernacular animal films were almost
universally structured around an unabashed anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism,
primarily born, as Thierry Lefebvre notes, from the emphasis placed (understandably so)
upon entertaining presentation rather than rigorous science.
30
Lefebvre describes the
formal properties of prewar animal films as based around what he calls the “identificatory
zoom” which simultaneously individualizes and humanizes the subjects being studied,

30
Thierry Lefebvre, “Popularization and Anthropomorphism,” 91. For a survey of anthropomorphism in
animal entertainment, see Cynthia Chris, Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2006). Chris is careful not to dismiss anthropomorphism out of hand as politically irredeemable, noting it is
a “mixed bag” (38).
190
literally removing them from their native milieu and placing them squarely within a
human framework. One even sees this impulse grafted onto films that ostensibly avoid it,
as with the early reviews of Jean Comandon’s ultramicrocinematic films, which make
recourse to war metaphors, celebrating the heroic struggles of white blood cells to ward
off—or, as in the case of the rat infected with sleeping sickness in Comandon’s La
Cinématographie des microbes (1910), be vanquished by—enemy invaders.
31
Fig. 48. Frame capture from La Vie d’une plante à fleurs (1926-1929).
Émile Vuillermoz, in a friendly critique of the pure cinema movement, claimed
anthropomorphic and anthropocentric projection as unavoidable even in the most abstract
visual symphonies, such as Germaine Dulac’s beloved readings of Comandon’s footage
of the germination of a grain of wheat. (Figure 48) “It is almost impossible for an auteur

31
See particularly Regis Gignoux, “Défiez-vous du Ciné…,” Le Journal, 26 December 1913, np, FJC,
Dossier: COM.D Presse; and Émile Vuillermoz, “La Cinématographie des Microbes (Le Docteur
Comandon),” Le Temps, 9 November 1922, republished in Jeune, Dure et Pure!, ed. Nicole Brenez and
Christian Lebrat (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 2001), 109-110. For a discussion of Comandon’s La
Cinématographie des microbes see Jean-Jacques Meusy, “La Diffusion des Films de ‘Non-Fiction’ dans les
Établissements Parisiens,” 188.
191
and above all a spectator to completely free oneself from this slavery…. Despite
everything, we egotistically submit all natural phenomena to human discipline.”
32
Painlevé was rather coy—or as Brigitte Berg observes, ambiguous and
confrontational—about anthropomorphism, justifying the playful fictions in Bernard-
L’ermite (namely the football match) by claiming, “one cannot entirely cure oneself of
anthropomorphism,” since it is in a sense, an ontological condition.
33
He later cautioned
that in making documentaries, one must “tickle as little as possible the
anthropomorphism which sleeps in each of us.”
34
This last remark may have been a personal reminder rather than an imputation, for
Painlevé’s dormant anthropomorpihst appears to have been quite ticklish. In practice,
anthropomorphism was not so much a problem for Painlevé as a tension and even an
analytic tool. Painlevé played with tropes of anthropomorphism, though he often defied
the convention of the identificatory zoom, turning it inside out, as in La Pieuvre, which
moves from laboratory to milieu, or by using the irreducible strangeness of his images to

32
Émile Vuillermoz, “Courrier Cinématographique: Anthropocentrisme,” Le Temps, 19 March 1927, 5.
The title is the only place that “anthropocentrism” appears in the text, but its application here implies a
conflation of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. Part of this chapter’s argument is to insist upon
their differences.
33
Brigitte Berg, “Jean Painlevé et l’Avant-Garde,” 112; and Jean Painlevé, “Les Film Biologiques,” 17.
34
Jean Painlevé, “Beauté du Film Documentaire,” 6. Later in life, Painlevé insisted, quite strongly, that
anthropomorphism is nothing short of a right and a responsibility. “We commit anthropomorphism. We
have the right to commit anthropomorphism. We have the duty to commit anthropomorphism. If not, we
would be incapable of appreciating any element around us.” Jean Painlevé interviewed in Jean Painlevé au
fil de ses films.
The critic Ralph Rugoff describes Painlevé’s œuvre as subversively engaging our “anthropomorphic lust.”
See Rugoff, “Fluid Mechanics,” in Science is Fiction, 55.
192
tear at the very process of identification itself.
35
Painlevé rarely used telephoto
lenses—and frankly the identificatory zoom Lefebvre writes about is anachronistically
named; it is not based upon using telephoto lenses to literally zoom in on subjects, but
rather methods of decoupage that move from long shots to close-ups.
36
Painlevé’s close-
ups and extreme magnifications often emphasize diversity and complication of organisms
over singularity. Painlevé’s close-ups vacillate from making the readily
anthropomorphized hermit crab appear as a charming protagonist and an overwhelmingly
monstrous creature, emphasizing the capacity of close-ups to produce sensationally
disturbing effects. (Figure 49) The close-up, fueled by Painlevé’s self-professed passion,
is at the heart of what, borrowing a term from Sergei Eisenstein (with resonances to Tom
Gunning’s appropriation of it), can be conceptualized as Painlevé’s cinema of attraction.
Painlevé’s films, by accident or design, often produce a tension between an
anthropomorphic and decentering effect. The sound and images vacillate between
transposition and abasement, often sustained by the same forces of attraction, what
Painlevé referred to as his “passion.” Painlevé’s early films possess moments of a
startling aggressiveness, sadism, and cruelty that refute clinical idealization. They do not
sanitize the engagement of the camera with a brute materiality. This violence is
particularly visible in La Pieuvre, but also in numerous experiments and demonstrations

35
Cf. Georges Didi-Huberman’s analysis of the lacerating function of images in Documents in La
ressemblance informe, ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Éditions Macula, 1995); Ralph
Rugoff, “Fluid Mechanics,” in Science is Fiction, 48-47; and Eva Shawn Hayward’s “Enfolded Vision:
Refracting The Love Life of the Octopus,” Octopus: A journal of visual studies, vol. 1 (2005): 29-44.
36
Jan-Christopher Horak notes that telephoto lenses for film cameras first appeared in 1923. He credits the
German company Kulturfilmmakers as using a very early use of telephoto lenses to capture animals in the
wild. Jan-Christopher Horak, “Wildlife documentaries: from classical forms to reality TV,” Film History,
no. 18 (2006): 459-475.
193
by means of vivisection peppered throughout his œuvre, such as footage in which he
removes the eyes of a hermit crab to see if it can find its shell through touch alone, or the
dissection of a living sand urchin in Les Oursins.
37
This approach to the production of
scientific representation participates in the history of violence Lisa Cartwright traces out
in Screening the Body as the legacy of Bernardian experimentation and positivist science,
which she calls, drawing from Bernard’s own terms, experiments with destruction.
38
Painlevé’s films participate in this history, but also engage in a materialist critique of
such a disavowal of the violence at the heart of the aesthetics of positivism.
Fig. 49. Frame caption from Crabes et Cravettes (1930/1931). This image also appeared in
Documents 6 (1929).

37
Removing the crab’s eyes is the recreation of a well-known comparative anatomy experiment from the
late nineteenth century.
38
Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body, 17-46.
194
The critical dimension of Painlevé’s theatrical documentaries echoes many of the
effects theorized by the rapport between Georges Bataille’s text and Jacques-André
Boiffard’s photographs published as “Le Gros Orteil,” in Documents, no. 6.
39
Jacques-
André Boiffard’s images of big toes—2 male specimens, one female specimen, presented
against abstract black backgrounds that recall the Marey aesthetic—are crucial to the
“The Big Toe,” which opens with a description of this particular appendage as the most
human and humiliating part of the body, one that is the condition of possibility of man’s
erection, the elevation from the ground towards the heaven, his separation from animal
life, the process of evolution, which in many ways becomes the master trope of human
systems of valuation, a reconfirmation of this achievement through a desire to ever
elevate, and in the process repress or refuse the muddy origins from whence he came.
40
Man’s posture is the source of an imperious anthropocentrism, but also the fuel of
anthropomorphism as expressions of the desire for identification and transposition. At the
same time, the big toe, soiled and riddled with bunions and corns, serves as a continuous
reminder of one’s animal origins, and one’s connection and groundedness in the base, the
lower functions. The text concludes with a theory of the visual close-up, conceived as a
mode of seduction, but one that counters the elevation and abstraction. The final lines of
Bataille’s text, calling direct attention to its images (as if they could be missed):

39
Georges Bataille, “The Big Toe,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-39, 20-23; and “Le Gros
Orteil,” in Documents, no. 6 (November 1929): 297-302. The English translation unfortunately, does not
include the images, which are essential to the essay.
40
Although it is beyond the present scope of this project, Bataille’s account of the emergence of humanity
in “The Big Toe” resonates with his theory of eros as marking the double-birth of the human being and the
work of art in his text of the cave paintings in Lascaux.
195
The meaning of this article lies in its insistence on a direct and explicit
questioning of seductiveness, without taking into account poetic concoctions that
are, ultimately, nothing but a diversion (most human beings are naturally feeble
and can only abandon themselves to their instincts when in a poetic haze). A
return to reality does not imply any new acceptances, but means that one is
seduced in a base manner, without transposition and to the point of screaming,
opening his eyes wide: opening them wide, then, before a big toe.
41
Boiffard’s images and Bataille’s text present insolent documents, that wield the close-up
as a disruption, an excessive confrontation. At the same time, these close-ups are also
something of a seduction, an incitement, a blush of eros compelled towards radical
differentiation (from the self) as much as unification (with the other) that deforms
anthropomorphism, that imagines the anthropomorphic impulse invested in the close-up
as potentially, productively leading astray. What should not be overlooked is amidst this
cruel passion, this strong attraction to get closer to the object being examined, to bring it
closer, close up, too close, is not only a violent tearing of beings from their context, and
from themselves, but also an amorous dimension. Painlevé’s practice of the document
viewed in close-up is not the identical to that presented by Bataille and his friend
Boiffard. Nevertheless, something of this critical spirit is present in the manner in which
Painlevé’s documents become documentaries.
If Painlevé’s films flirt with the lacerating anthropomorphism in Georges
Bataille’s “The Big Toe,” and participate in a heterogeneous logic exemplified by
Documents, distinctions must be maintained, for part of Painlevé’s heterogeneity is his
aesthetic and ideological impurity. This extends to his use of the close-up and his
practices of anthropomorphism. Without turning to idealist theories, one finds a helpful

41
Bataille, “The Big Toe,” 23; and “Le Gros Orteil,” 301.
196
point of reference in an early text on film by Antonin Artaud, “Cinema and Reality,”
which helps further situate Painlevé’s perspectives on anthropomorphism. This short
essay offers a theory of film in almost direct opposition to what can be drawn out of the
Bataillian notion of the close-up. Artaud emphasizes film’s relation to its own material
substrate, which is, as its name suggests, quite literally a film; a covering or coating. The
process of recording, for Artaud, effects a transposition through its sensuous contact with
the world. This film is a surface imbued with an irresistible anthropomorphic potential
that he refers to as “the human skin of things, the epidermis of reality.”
42
The human
coating that the cinematograph applies to and peels from reality like a decal, “exalts
matter.”
43
At the basic level of the apparatus, it quite literally elevates its scale, raises it
up, literally by blowing it up upon the screen, magnifying it in relation to the scale of
human perception, but also elevates its status through its transposition. This process,
Artaud writes, holds out the promise for the development of the same sort of immediate,
a- or supra-linguistic capacity that Painlevé attributed to the well-crafted image. It
promises a form of communication where “all translation would be unnecessary.”
44

42
Antonin Artaud, “Cinema and Reality,” trans. Helen Weaver, in French Film Theory and Criticism, vol.
1: 1907-1929, 412. Originally published as “Cinéma et réalité,” in La Nouvelle Revue française, no. 170 (1
November 1927). The concept of film as a coating, an exterior emulsion, is compellingly developed by
Michael Jay McClure in “Queered Cinema: Film, Matter, and Mathew Barney,” Discourse, forthcoming.
Skin, the epidermal surface, plays a pivotal role in Artaud’s theory of cruelty. In “Theater of Cruelty (First
Manifesto),” Artaud remarks, “it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.”
Artaud, “Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto),” in The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline
Richards (New York: Grove, 1958), 99; originally published as Le Théâtre et son Double (Paris: Gallimard,
1938).
43
Artaud, “Cinema and Reality,” 412.
44
Ibid., 411.
197
Artaud’s theory, and this returns us to the question of Painlevé’s emergent
documentary ethos, offers an intriguing contribution to film theory through its
consideration of the contact or mark made upon the object that is filmed. Painlevé’s
œuvre brings together the theory of the seductive close-up and the caress of the
camera—two forms of seduction towards the base and the exalted—suggesting a
generalized economy of film erotics that disperses its aims in multiple directions,
motivated by a search for knowledge and truth wherever it may lead. This suggests a
manner in which the supposedly distinct drives of eros and epistephilia support and even
fuel each other.
As a filmmaker, Painlevé often expressed a desire for an immediate form of
communication, one unmediated by language, the fusion of subject and object of
knowledge. Painlevé’s practice of placing the camera as close-up to the object of study as
possible, of entering into and passing through the skin or exterior of his subjects, is in
part a desire to produce images of a boundless plentitude, of images without boundaries,
unbound images, to make images by immersing himself, quite literally, in the milieu of
his subjects. This lead, during the 1930s, to experiments in underwater cinematography,
and the production of the first of a notable series of erotic films, L’Hippocampe (The
Seahorse, 1935). In turning attention to the production of this film, it will pay to situate
Painlevé’s cinematic eros within a concrete context that is also central to the concerns of
surrealist and parasurrealist thinking during the 1930s: the literary traditions of amateur
zoology.
198
Painlevé’s rather plastic anthropomorphism finds a model and context in such
work, exemplified by the enormously popular 19
th
century amateur zoologists Alphonse
Toussenel and Jean Henri Fabre. For all of his grounding in the laboratories of the
Sorbonne, Painlevé’s turn first to poetry and then film, pushed practices of comparative
anatomy and comparative biology, premised upon distinct but analogous categorical
resemblances, towards their limits, where they begin to intertwine and even contaminated
each other. Brigitte Berg notes that Painlevé’s work was conducted outside the usual
economy of film production, but also of scientific research—he quite literally lived with
the animals he filmed, storing them in aquariums, jars, and even the bathtub of his
home.
45
Here the excess energies contained by professional rigor take further leeway,
daring to more openly express and exhibit practices of a love (in all its tenderness and
sadism) of the study of nature as a wild or lay zoology—in a word, a passionate zoology.
3.4 Passionate Zoology: Toussenel, Fabre, Painlevé
Perversions regularly lead to zoophilia and have an animal character.
—Sigmund Freud
46
In1847, Alphonse Toussenel felt compelled to “offer a public testimony to his esteem and
gratitude” to the animals of France, whom as an avid hunter, he had spent the past thirty

45
Brigitte Berg, “Jean Painlevé et l’Avant-Garde,” 112. In a profile of Painlevé written by the journalist
Paule Hutzler, he mentions that during his first attempts to film L’Assassins d’eau douce in autumn 1933,
one of his insect actors, a water scorpion, escaped from the aquarium and attacked Painlevé, sleeping in his
bed only a few feet away, leaving his ear riddled with blisters. Paule Hutzler, “Dans le studio de celui qui
fait tourner les microbes et les insectes,” Ciné Miroir (15 September 1933), held in Presses 1930-1934
dossier, FJP.
46
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fleiss, 11 January 1897, in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to
Wilhelm Fliess, 1997-1904, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1985), 223. I am grateful to Akira Mizuta Lippit for first bringing this citation to my attention.
199
years tenderly pursuing. This testament took the form of L’Esprit des bêtes, vénerie
française et zoologie passionnelle (The Spirit of Animals, French venery and passionate
zoology), a 414 page study that its author presents as focusing on the zoology not taught
at the Sorbonne (an open disdain for the repressions of institutional science is a common
theme in the literature of amateur zoology).
47
Intended particularly for women and
children, Toussenel’s tome inaugurated its own field of inquiry: passionate zoology.
48
In the introduction to the text, Toussenel explains that during his miserable
“twelve mortal years in this odious penal colony of childhood that we call school,” a
“wild love” (l’amour désordonné) of birds and of vagabonding emerged in him (the kind
of impulse that might make a child skip school to hang out at the Jardin des Plantes).
Toussenel’s wild, disorderly love, charmed by Charles Fourier’s theory of “passionate
attraction,” compelled him to approach the study of animals through a method he calls
passionate analogy, which he locates in a passage between poetry and science.
49
Passionate analogy, a poetic parascientific companion to comparative anatomy, is
grounded in and driven by “the only law that rules the universe: Love.” Connecting
motion to emotion and vitality, Toussenel describes love as a God given “universal

47
Alphonse Toussenel, L’Esprit des bêtes vénerie française et zoologie passionnelle (Paris: Librarie
Sociétaire, 1847), 1. Fragments from Toussenel’s writings are peppered throughout Walter Benjamin’s
Arcades Project, where he is described as the literary counterpart to Grandville. As should already be
evident, love is not a sentiment devoid of violence, or even hatreds, and Toussenel had plenty. On
Toussenel’s politics, see Ceri Crossley “Anglophobia and anti-Semitism: the case of Alphonse Toussenel
(1803-1885),” Modern & Contemporary France, vol. 12, no. 4 (November 2004): 459-472.
48
Toussenel, L’Esprit des bêtes, 1.
49
Ibid., 1-2. Fourier’s passionate attraction might be likened to innate instincts or drives which draw beings
towards each other, and compel them towards the goals of the passions. Roland Barthes describes Fourier’s
concept of passions as an irreducible structural character, taste, or mania of beings, each passion being a
“happy, frank, natural monad.” Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 100.
200
principle of movement and of life.” He notes the word passion, etymologically connected
to passivity, is a force that humans, like their “little brothers” in the animal kingdom, do
best to submit to, to embrace, as they do not have access or recourse to its sources.
Toussenel gives as synonyms for this principle love, attraction, molecular affinity, and he
describes it as a universal and asubjective phenomenon, in fact it displaces the subject
from its operations—suggesting one could, with only modest alteration, also call this
conception of passionate attraction instinct or drive.
50
To give just a small taste of his method and style, consider Toussenel’s discussion
of the mole (taupe), which he considers to be the very embodiment of destructive, lusty
forces. This passage shows the practice of passionate analogy refers not only to the
examination of the analogous passions of different animals, but a passionate judgment of
these properties. Toussenel proposes the following experiment for demonstrating the
passions of the mole:
Compared to the mole, the Bengal tiger is a lizard in its sobriety and a lamb in its
sweetness, because the Bengal tiger never turns his teeth against his own blood.
Send two tigers to a friend in a box and they will arrive at their address without
problems. Put two moles in the same position and they will swallow each other
before arriving at the first stop.
51
The result of his observations may be described as emblemology, the minting of
emblematic images that, through the observation of wild animals, make sociological
diagnoses of the human society of its observers. The delirious nature of his texts,
intoxicated by their own presumed powers of observation and diagnosis, captivated not

50
Toussenel, L’Esprit des bêtes, 3.
51
Ibid., 230.
201
only his contemporaries but figures such as Walter Benjamin and the parasurrealist Roger
Caillois, and inspired a turn to natural history and biology as a source not only for
behaviors that shocked and challenged bourgeois decorum, but as a source for theorizing
in a far more rigorous manner the surrealist’s interest in automatic behavior in order to
account for necessity as much as chance.
52
The amateur entomologist Jean Henri Fabre, whom Thierry Lefebvre describes as
a “consummate anthropomorphist” and his English language translators as a “passionate
observer,” added greater scientific rigor to passionate zoology while still maintaining his
difference from institutional science.
53
Fabre, who caused scandal by inviting women to
attend his lectures in natural history, is noted for his public critique of the reigning
methods of institutional zoology—dissection and histology—expressing particular
distaste for marine biology (and we can construe from this, the work of such figures as
Laurent Chabry and Yves Delage and their embryological research with the dirty sea
squirt and sea urchin). As with the early champions of scientific cinema, Fabre calls for
the study of nature in its living conditions, and claimed as his laboratory, his
backyard—the Harmas—in Provence.

52
In her introduction to the English translation of Roger Caillois’s “La Mante religieuse” Minotaure, no. 5
(1934), Claudine Frank cites the importance Caillois placed in Toussenel’s Esprit des bêtes, particularly his
chapter on bats. See Claudine Frank, “Introduction to the Praying Mantis,” in The Edge of Surrealism: A
Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank, trans. Claudine Frank and Camille Naish (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2003), 66.
53
Thierry Lefebvre, “Popularization and Anthropomorphism,” 93; and Jean Henri Fabre, The Passionate
Observer: Writings from the world of nature, illustrated by Marlene McLoughlin, ed. Linda Davis, trans.
Teixiera de Mattos (San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1998). See also, Oliver Gaycken, “Devices of
Curiosity,” 127-128; and Paula Amad, “These Spectacles are Never Forgotten,” 132.
202
In his essay on his laboratory, “The Harmas,” a manifesto for passionate zoology,
he describes a practice of close observation of the strange wonders of quotidian existence,
differentiating his work from that of laboratory scientists.
You rip up the animal and I study it alive; you turn it into an object of horror and
pity, whereas I cause it to be loved; you labor in a torture-chamber and
dissecting-room, I make my observations under the blue sky to the song of the
Cicadas, you subject cell and protoplasm to chemical tests, I study instinct in its
loftiest manifestations; you pry into death, I pry into life. And why should I not
complete my thought: the boars have muddied the clear stream; natural history,
youth’s glorious study, has, by dint of cellular improvements, become a hateful
and repulsive thing…
54
Fabre, like Toussenel, whom he often cites (usually to correct), takes a particular interest
in instinctual behavior, which he never hesitates to relate to human society or to evaluate
along moral lines. His methods, however, found greater scientific credibility (Darwin
called him “an incomparable observer”).
55
And while he disparaged vivisection and other
Bernardian methods of experimental destruction at the hands of researchers, he was not
above staging experimental encounters between his research subjects.
The influence of his studies of praying mantises, scorpions, and other insects in
his Souvenirs Entomologiques: Etudes sur l’instinct et les mœurs des insectes were
widespread (they are the basis of the Scientia series which appear at the beginning of
entomology enthusiast Luis Buñuel’s L’Âge d’or) and are notable for their detailed
accounts of the frightful and uncanny comportment of insects. Writing of the love lives of
praying mantises, he gives particularly careful attention to what he considers the aberrant

54
Jean Henri Fabre, The Passionate Observer, 5 (original emphasis); published in French in Nouveau
Souvenirs Entomologiques: Études sur l’instinct et les moeurs des insects (Paris: Librarie Charles
Delagrave, 1882).
55
See the introduction to Jean Henri Fabre, The Passionate Observer, vii.
203
and insatiable sexual appetites of the female praying mantis, epitomized by the “cannibal
feasts” that occur during mating (wherein the female removes her mate’s head during the
act of copulation—possibly to initiate reflex behaviors that improve the performance of
the male’s vital function—and then begins to devour him. He depicts female praying
mantises as far more fearsome creatures than wolves who, at least have the decency not
to eat each other (like Toussenel’s Bengal tigers), and recounts a small experiment (a
passion play of sorts) in which he provided a captive female praying mantis with a stream
of capable bachelors in order to count how many she would feast upon: seven.
56
Like his predecessors in passionate zoology, Painlevé cites his attraction to the
study of animal life as the pursuit of a singular passion, a wild love, fueled by curiosity
and fascination that exceeds in some manner the boundaries of professional science,
particularly in its protocols of objectivity (which tend to carefully delimit the role of the
subject in the study of phenomena in order to guarantee repeatable results). Painlevé’s
method, rooted in institutional science and the practice of comparative anatomy, brings
together a passion for zoology (the study of animals), an alternation between a critique of
the limits of positivist science with an epistemological enthusiasm born from the
revelatory powers of the cinematograph (and other perceptual prosthesis) pushed towards
its ecstatic limits, and a plastic anthropomorphism that intermingles a critique of
anthropocentrism. These concerns come shimmering to the surface in Painlevé’s
L’Hippocampe, a film essay on tenderness and erotic possibility. The balance of this

56
Jean Henri Fabre, Souvenirs Entomologiques: Etudes sur l’instinct et les mœurs des insects, vol. 5 (Paris:
Charles Delagrave, 1897), 305-309. Roger Caillois’s “The Praying Mantis: From Biology to
Psychoanalysis,” draws heavily from Fabre’s chapters on the praying mantis.
204
chapter will now track this strand of ideas through a consideration of the production of
L’Hippocampe and a reading of its stylistic tendencies, emphasizing the manner in which
the film brings together epistephilia and eros. (Figure 50)
Fig. 50. “L’Hippocampe” poem by Jean Painlevé, 1935.
205
3.5 Comme dans une boisson: Amour flou
57
On 6 June 1933, Jean Painlevé signed a contract with Pathé Cinéma, then under the
direction of the ill-fated Bernard Natan.
58
The contract promised material support for
filming, distribution through Pathé-Consortium, and an optioning clause for 10 more
short films. According to reports in the press in 1933, Painlevé was at work on
L’Assassins d’eau douce (Freshwater Assassins), the first of a series of films about the
life and death nutritional travails of water-born insects in freshwater ponds described
along lines that recall his poem Drame néo-zoologique (1924).
59
On 29 June 1934
Painlevé received a letter from Roland Tual at Pathé giving him permission to substitute
the production of L’Assassins for L’Hippocampe, following the same terms of their
original agreement. The reasons for the switch are unstated—in an interview in February
1935 he claims he was having trouble getting actors—but two other important events

57
As in a drink. Cf. André Breton, “Comme dans un bois,” L’Âge du cinéma, nos. 4-5 (August-November
1951): 26-30, translated into English as “As in a Wood,” in The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist
Writings on the Cinema, 3
rd
edition, ed., trans., and introduced by Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City
Lights, 2000), 72-77.
58
Letter from Charles David, director of production, Pathé Cinéma, to Jean Painlevé, 6 June 1933,
L’Hippocampe dossier, FJP. For an overview of the making and release of L’Hippocampe, see Roxane
Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 83-87. According to my research the dates of production are slightly different.
Based upon Painlevé’s accounts, Hamery dates initial filming to summer of 1933 but this seems unlikely as
he was working on L’Assassins d’eau douce then, and his correspondences do not mention production for
L’Hippocampe until 1934.
On Bernard Natan and the bankruptcy of Pathé, 1935-1938, see Gilles Willems, “Aux origines des
Groupe Pathé-Natan,” in Une histoire économique du cinéma français (1895-1995), Regards croisés
franco-américains, ed. Pierre-Jean Benghozi and Christian Delage (Paris: Harmattan, 1997), 93-110, also
available in English translation by Annabelle de Croÿ at
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/reruns/rr1199/gwrr8b.htm.
59
Paule Hutzler, “Assassins d’eau douce: Pendant Jean Painlevé va pêcher les vedettes de son prochain
film,” L’Intransigeant, 16 August 1933, 2; and Hutzler, “Dans le studio de celui qui fait tourner les
microbes et les insects.”
206
may have influenced events.
60
On 30 October 1933 his father, with whom he lived, died
of a heart attack.
L’Hippocampe, a film about an animal whose “males take on the maternal
function,” as the commentary explains, seems a fitting tribute to Painlevé’s father, a
widower who raised his son without a spouse. Another important factor is that sometime
between 1933 and 1934 Jean Painlevé was introduced to Commandant Yves Le Prieur, a
French naval officer who had developed a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus
featuring a regulated valve system connecting a steel tank of compressed air with a full-
face mask, introducing Painlevé to the possibility of filming underwater without
assistance from an above the surface air-pump. Painlevé, a former race-car driver and
amateur airplane pilot, was immediately taken by the immersive promises of filming with
Le Prieur’s system, and of the opportunity to record aquatic animals in their natural
environment in a manner not possible with the traditional, rather restricting deep sea
diving gear.
Painlevé and Le Prieur, along with other enthusiasts (including Painlevé’s friend,
the photographer Philippe Halsman), formed an organization to promote the new
technology and sport, “Le Club des Scaphandres et de la Vie Sous-l’eau” (The Club for
Deep-Sea Divers and Underwater Life), often shortened as Le Club Sous-l’eau, a
homophonic pun playing on soule (drunk) and souz (an alcohol), translating as
drunkard’s club. At the third annual meeting of L’Association pour la documentation
photographique et cinématographique dans les sciences (The Association for the

60
Madeleine Epron, “Le Cinéma au Service de la Science,” Balzac, 15 February 1935, held in Presses
1935-1939 dossier, FJP.
207
Photographic and Cinematographic Documentation in the Sciences, or ADPCS), Painlevé
described the club’s interest in using scuba for “research of a zoological and scientific
order” and the production of underwater photography and cinematography as well as the
pursuit of the natural “charm and visual wonder, and the new sensations it gives divers.”
61
If Painlevé’s enthusiasm for the sensational experience of scuba diving was not
clear enough, in an article published to promote the release of L’Hippocampe, Painlevé
explained of the hardships of making films about subaquatic creatures: “This job has its
joys for those who love the sea, for those who love to the point of the exclusion of any
other possibility of natural joys… The ecstasy of any intoxicant…”
62
Painlevé describes
both scuba diving and the compulsion to produce zoological films in the water as a sort of
ecstatic intoxication. This ecstasy is not born not through the ingestion of any substance
but through the experience or encounter with limits, with pushing the bounds of the self,
to be drunk by being drunk, swallowed by the sea, as in a drink.
63
The unbridled
enthusiasm also has the effect of bringing the “secret intoxication” of realist scientific
representation to the surface, of revealing the ecstatic desires of the positivist project.

61
Jean Painlevé, “Interventions personnelles au Congrès,” unpublished typescript, October 1935, 4, held in
the ADPCS dossier, FJP. Painlevé lists the officially posted goals for the club as:
1. The vulgarization of methods of subaquatic exploration, individual and in groups.
2. The development of all activities relating to it.
3. The organization of all demonstrations, sporting or otherwise, based upon the subaquatic
conditions.
4. The implementation of inventions useful for the aforementioned aims.
62
Jean Painlevé, “Le pieds dans l’eau,” Violà, no. 214 (4 May 1935): 35. For a poetic rendering of this, see
Jean Painlevé, “Feet in the Water,” trans. Jeanine Herman, in Science is Fiction, 136.
63
In a letter from Jean Painlevé to Noëlle Margaritis dated 12 August 1934, he writes “je me suis perdu
dans l’eau, jamais plus la sortie”: “I have become lost in the water…” or “I have lost myself in the water,
never to leave it.” This letter was written from Paris upon the return from his attempts to film underwater in
the Bay of Arcachon in Southwest Atlantic coast of France. Held in Correspondences L-P dossier, FJP.
208
Roxane Hamery notes that Painlevé first produced footage of seahorses in 1931,
for inclusion in his compilation reel of his previous films La faune sous-marine, which he
showed at ciné-clubs and on the lecture circuit. This footage received a particularly
enthusiastic write-up in Cinémonde, a portent of the reception the completed film
received.
64
Based upon personal correspondences and materials in the L’Hippocampe
dossier, it appears that Painlevé decided to return to seahorses in spring of 1934. In a 5
May 1934 letter to a certain Professor Condom at the University of Bordeaux’s biology
station at Arcachon, Painlevé seeks information and aid regarding the care, keep, life-
cycles, and transportability of seahorses, which he needs “for experiments and a film on
the seahorse.”
65
Given the need to power high-voltage equipment, the filming primarily
occurred in Paris at ICS’s office at 12 rue Armand-Moisant, with Professor Condom
sending Painlevé a shipment of male seahorses “with fat bellies” by means of train—the
seahorses arrived at the Gare d’Austerlitz.
66
Painlevé and his team (André Raymond and
Geneviève Hamon) completed principle filming at the ICS on 21 July 1934. The shoot
was riddled with difficulties, including shattering aquariums and a 36 hour vigil waiting
for the male seahorses to deliver their young.

64
Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 83-84.
65
Letter from Jean Painlevé to Professor Condom, 5 May 1934. See the successive correspondence running
from 5 May through 23 July 1934. All correspondences between Painlevé and Condom are held in the
L’Hippocampe dossier, FJP.
66
Letter from Professor Condom, Université de Bordeaux, Société Scientifique d’Arcachon (Station
Biologique), to Jean Painlevé, 30 June 1934.
209
The team headed then by train to Arcachon, with the intention of filming
seahorses underwater in the Bay of Arcachon.
67
Between 27 July and 1 August, Painlevé
and his crew filmed underwater everyday from 11 am to 2 pm when the sun was at its
zenith, using a Sept camera encased in a watertight box furnished by Charles David, head
of production at Pathé.
68
Despite the much touted claims that L’Hippocampe is one of the
first films for which footage was taken underwater using scuba, this experiment seems to
have been less successful than Painlevé let on in public. In a letter to his friend Noëlle
Margaritis on 1 August 1934, and repeated in a subsequent postcard to her dated 12
August 1934, states “Water having ultimately penetrated into the ‘watertight’ cases, I
think that the film stock is fucked [foutre].”
69
A first cut of L’Hippocampe was privately screened at the Musée Pédagogique in
autumn 1934 (Painlevé often tells of learning of his friend Vigo’s death during this
screening, when Noëlle Margaritis showed up in all black, which would date the first
showing 5 October 1934). The film was presented in Pathé-Consortium theaters

67
Letters from Jean Painlevé to Professor Condom dated 21 July 1934 and 23 July 1934. On the difficulties
encountered during filming, see Léo Sauvage, “The Institute in the Cellar,” and Jean Painlevé, “Feet in the
Water,” in Science is Fiction; and Madeleine Epron, “Le Cinéma au Service de la Science.”
In an undated typescript held in the L’Hippocampe dossier, FJP, (post 1945, based upon the
citations to Jacques Cousteau), Painlevé describes his first scuba encounter with seahorses, claiming “some
wrapped their tails around my air tube and looked me in the eyes: we had nothing to say to each other but it
was pleasant and I noticed that many promenaded as couples.”
68
Ibid., and Letter from Jean Painlevé to Noëlle Margaritis, 1 August 1934, held in Correspondences L-P
dossier, FJP. Brigitte Berg, in “Contradictory Forces,” dates the use of the Sept camera to 1932, but given it
was furnished by Pathé, this could not have been earlier than 1933 (as Roxane Hamery suggests) or 1934,
as I claim.
69
Letters form Jean Painlevé to Noëlle Margaritis, 1 August 1934 and 12 August 1934, held in
Correspondences L-P, FJP.
210
beginning in May 1934 and quickly became a hit—Painlevé’s only film to recoup its
costs (estimated to be 90,000 francs).
70
Balancing the need to get sharp footage with attempts to preserve a semblance of
“nature” in human built environments, most of Painlevé and Raymond’s camera work
avoids revealing the edges of the aquariums. They mostly use close-up shots with
minimal camera movement and an incredibly shallow depth of field—the result of
filming through custom built micro-cinematic lenses and in conditions that required low
f-stops to achieve sharp exposures. Set against the black walls of the basement, the salt
water in the aquariums glistens under the bright camera lights, giving much of this
footage the otherworldly appearance of an uncanny “second” nature or starry sky.
Despite the confined, controlled circumstances of the filming, the seahorses make
rather fugitive actors. The creatures drift on and off frame, wiggle into focus and just as
quickly pivot into the obscuring blur of the foreground and background, no more than a
few centimeters away from the focal point. The sequences documenting the unique
reproductive lives of the seahorse shifts between clarity and abstraction, familiarization
and estrangement, and offers a compelling interpretive key for understanding the film as
a whole. (Figures 51-62) These sequences rapidly document the entire life cycle of the
seahorse, from courtship to mating to birth and death, giving special focus to the blurring
boundaries of male and female sexual roles amongst seahorses. The address combines an
expository transmission of biological data with intoxicating images climaxing with what
Painlevé describes as the agonized, libratory spasms

of male seahorses as they “perform

70
Jean Painlevé interviewed by Philippe Ensault, “La Vie de Jean Painlevé,” unpublished transcript (1982),
17, Radio and Television dossier, FJP.
211
Fig. 51. Frame capture of a bisected seahorse from L’Hippocampe (1935).
Fig. 52. Frame capture of a magnified seahorse eye from L’Hippocampe (1935).
212
Fig. 53. “Amour Flou.” Frame capture from L’Hippocampe (1935).
Fig. 54. “Amour Flou” close-up. Frame capture from L’Hippocampe (1935).
213
Fig. 55. Frame capture from L’Hippocampe (1935).
Fig. 56. Coupling seahorses. Frame capture from L’Hippocampe (1935).
214
Fig. 57. Seahorse giving birth. Frame capture from L’Hippocampe (1935).
Fig. 58. Seahorse vivisection. Frame capture from L’Hippocampe (1935).
215
Fig. 59. Close-up of seahorse embryos. Frame capture from L’Hippocampe (1935).
Fig. 60. Juvenile seahorse. Frame capture from L’Hippocampe (1935).
216
Fig. 61. See horses? Frame capture from L’Hippocampe (1935).
Fig. 62. Painlevé signature ending. Frame capture from L’Hippocampe (1935).
217
the female function.” The sequence concludes with the dissection of a seahorse to
demonstrate through immense magnification the development of the organism’s
life—seahorse embryos in vitro—through the event of its death.
The voice over commentary, written by Painlevé and read by radio personality
and actualities voice Ben Danou, offers an interpretation of the images, but Painlevé’s
script remains strategically allusive. These scenes depict the upending of familiar sexual
orders with images verging on jouissance, exemplified by the male seahorses giving birth
by ejaculating clouds of offspring from their ventral pouches. The seahorses, already
partially occluded by the water, a medium made densely visible by the salt particles and
microbes gleaming in it under the film lights, takes on a fantastic appearance, sharply
present one moment, a shadow presence the next, transformed by the reflexive spasm of
the tail. The fluctuation between clarity and obscurity in relation to the appearance of
animals sets up an economy of emergence and retreat that structures the spectator’s desire
for an encounter with the unfamiliar, continually deferred.
The footage in L’Hippocampe often suggest a correlation to what André Breton
described as “convulsive beauty”—the “veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-
circumstantial” images so central to his notion of amour fou, mad love.
71
And yet,
Painlevé’s images move. They do not correspond to Breton’s demand that convulsive
beauty be still or not be: “The word ‘convulsive’…would lose any meaning in my eyes
were it to be conceived in motion.” They do not participate in the same Hegelian

71
“La beauté sera convulsive ou ne sera pas,” originally appeared in Minotaure, no. 5 (1934), and was
reprinted in Breton’s Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 19;
originally published as Amour Fou (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), 26.
218
idealism.
72
The rapid motions of the animals produce blurry images, and this motion is
central to the limited, but important agency the animals are allowed in the film, which in
its collapse of categories, effects an amour flou, an amour floué, a blurred love. This
formal quality stands as an emblem of blurring operation of the film more broadly, which
plays with elements of positivism, surrealism, eros, thanatos, anthropomorphism,
objectivity, etc. Amour flou suggests a reconceptualization of eros, both maintaining a
plurality within it, and understand it as a more fleeting and unsettled phenomenon than
the traditional Freudian description of eros’ as an aim “to establish ever greater unities
and to preserve them thus.”
73
The film sets in motion a politics of the image that foregrounds both the
remarkable, intoxicating representational capacities and structuring limits of the
cinematic apparatus as a technology of positivism. In effect it stains the scientific gaze,
rendering its architecture, its constructed nature visible—but not for purposes of
wholesale dismissal. The spectacle of technologically mediated super-vision, presented
through the underwater cameras, the magnifications of microscopic lenses, alternate with
the spectacles of their failure and of a wildness signified through creatures darting out of

72
André Breton, Mad Love, 10; and Amour Fou, 15.
73
Sigmund Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,” in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 22: 1932-1936, ed. and trans. J. Strachey (London:
Hogarth, 1964).
The Motion Picture division of the New York State Board of Censors seemed to have had a
similar reading. The film was refused a permit to screen. The explanation given was: “Your picture entitled
‘HIPPOCAMPE’ (ou CHEVAL MARIN) (Sea Horse)—with synchronization and dialogue—has been
reviewed. The following eliminations are directed to be made in all prints to be shown in New York State:
Eliminate all views of actual copulation and all views of male evicting its young. REASON ‘INDECENT.’
See the letter from Irwin Esmond, director of the Motion Picture division of the New York State Board of
Censors to Rose Tapernoux of the French Motion Picture Corp., dated 14 August 1936, held in the New
York State Archives, Cultural Education Room, #31517, Box 462.
219
view, off frame, absenting themselves. Lisa Cartwright’s engaging analysis of
microscopic cinema in Screening the Body, describes the shallow depth of field of
magnification as a form of modernist abstraction that enacts a strategy for containing and
disciplining the dimensionality and depth of unruly bodies.
74
The cinematography in
L’Hippocampe suggests another, slightly different effect of the shallow depth of
magnification. Here, the unruly, wild movements of the docile seahorses bring to the
surface the failure of the recording apparatus to produce a total field knowledge from its
specimens. They maintain, in other words, a critical lacuna, of the sort he described in his
1931 essay “Mysteries and Miracles of Nature.”
Does the complete understanding of a natural phenomenon strip always its
miraculous qualities? It is certainly a risk. But it should at least maintain all of its
poetry, for poetry subverts reason and is never dulled by repetition. Besides, a few
gaps in our knowledge will always allow for a joyous confusion of the mysterious,
simply unknown, and the miraculous.
75
If L’Hippocampe suggests both a maturing of Painlevé’s style, and a shift from a
sadistic to a more tender and even erotic filmmaker, following the film’s release he

74
Cartwright, Screening the Body, 95.
75
Painlevé, “Mysteries and Miracles of Nature,” trans. Jeanine Herman, in Science is Fiction, 119 (trans.
slightly modified). Herman’s poetic interpretation is almost irresistibly too perfect in the present context,
but the original is slightly different and it should be noted the word “joyous” never appears in print, though
certainly is there in spirit, and the absence of the definite article “le” before “simplement inconnu” suggests
“simply unknown” is not a separate phenomenon but rather a modifier of the mysterious, as suggested by
the article’s title (mysteries and miracles). The original reads:
La connaissance complète des phénomènes suprimerait-elle leur côté miraculeux? Il devrait en ce
cas, au moins en subsister tout le poétique—qui abolit le raisonnement et ne s’émousse pas à la
répétition. D’ailleurs quelques instants manquant à notre connaissance nous permettront toujours
de confondre le mystérieux, simplement inconnu, et le miraculeux.
Jean Painlevé, “Mystères et Miracles de Nature,” Vu, no. 158 (1931): 421.
Painlevé’s position differs starkly from that of André Breton, who refused to cut open a Mexican
jumping bean in order to preserve the mysterious origins of its mobility. Roger Caillois claims this as the
definitive moment of his break with surrealism. See Roger Caillois, “Letter to André Breton,” in The Edge
of Surrealism, 84-85.
220
became increasing involved in the political questions of film’s epistemological uses. This
pushed him from critical thinking about the life sciences to a science of life, a gay
science.
221
CHAPTER 4
FORGETTING LESSONS: REALIST EDUCATION, DOCUMENTARY, AND
PAINLEVÉ’S CINEMATIC GAY SCIENCE, 1935-1938
4.1. For the total abolition of secondary education
I have the intention of contributing, with my modest means, to the total abolition
of secondary education, which has always profoundly disgusted me.
1
With these words, written in 1935, Jean Painlevé sent his regrets to an invitation to be
honored, alongside his deceased father (the celebrated mathematician, academy president,
and politician Paul Painlevé). The recipient was the president of the alumni association of
Paris’s elite Lycée Louis-Le-Grand, which he had attended between 1914-1918.
Painlevé’s vituperative note certainly resonates with his accounts of his own unhappy
adolescent experiences at Louis-Le-Grand, where his egalitarian ideas and his father’s
progressive politics and controversial decisions as Minister of War during World War
One made Jean the target of many students’ scorn (they accused Jean of having a Boche
[Kraut] father).
2
In addition to his troubled relations with his peers, the dogmatic

1
“J’ai l’intention de contribuer, avec mes modestes moyens à l’abolition complète de l’éducation
secondaire qui m’a toujours profondément dégoûté…” Letter from Jean Painlevé to the President of the
Association des Anciens Élèves du Lycée Louis-Le-Grand, 1935, Correspondences, fonds Jean Painlevé,
Les Documents Cinématographiques, Paris. “L’abolition complète” is translated as “complete undoing”
when this letter is cited in Brigitte Berg, “Contradictory Forces: Jean Painlevé, 1902-1989,” in Science is
Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé, ed. Andy Masaki Bellows and Marina McDougall with Brigitte Berg
(San Francisco: Brico Press and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 7-9. I have provided my own, more
literal translation of this letter in order to emphasize the violence of Painlevé’s sentiments in the phrase.
However, my discussion will at times also evoke “complete undoing” with relation to the transvaluations of
a cinematic gay science.
2
As Minister of War, Paul Painlevé took considerable heat for his ambivalent support of the disastrous
Champagne offensive of April 1917, and his subsequent replacement of its mastermind, General Robert
Georges Nivelle, by Henri Philippe Pétain. In September of the same year, Painlevé succeeded Alexandre
Ribot as Prime Minister, a post he held for 31 days, at which point he was succeeded by the militant
222
pedagogy and rigid structure of the course work for lycéens held little interest for him.
His report cards from the period emphasize the fact that he rarely attended class or
completed his homework, choosing instead to play hooky in the zoological park of the
Jardin des Plantes, where he pursued his own education by helping the laboratory
assistants care for the animals.
3
The sentiments of Painlevé’s words, apparently
undiminished by time, echo the concluding scene of Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite
(1933), when the students Caussat, Tabard, Breul, and Colin raise the black flag over the

Georges “Le Tigre” Clemenceau. Right wing nationalists, who nicked named him “Paul-Prudent Painlevé,”
accused Painlevé of being a collaborator with defeatist forces under the sway of Berlin, including his fellow
Radical Socialists, the former President of the Council Joseph Caillaux (1863-1944) and Minster of the
Interior Louis Malvy (1875-1949), both of whom were tried for treason by Clemenceau.
Severance Johnson’s novelistic The Enemy Within: Hitherto Unpublished Details of the Great
Conspiracy to Corrupt and Destroy France (New York: James A. McCann, 1919) exemplifies the
nationalist critiques of the day, helping to illuminate the sorts of accusations of Boches leveled against Paul
Painlevé (and in the schoolyard, his son). Johnson traces out links (genuine and fanciful) between Caillaux
and Malvy and such corrupting and destructive elements as the editor of the anarchist paper Le Bonnet
Rouge Miguel Almereyda (an anagram for “there is shit/y a de la merde,” née Eugène Bonaventure de
Vigo, father of the filmmaker Jean Vigo), the German state, Karl Marx (through his heirs), and operatives
of the newly formed Soviet state. Johnson depicts Paul Painlevé as a weak and ineffectual leader whose
government faltered due to the French citizenry’s demands for Clemenceau to ride to the rescue by taking a
tough stance in ridding the nation of its subversive elements (201).
A rather economic account of Almereyda’s often-shady connections to the French state (as well as
the origin of his nom-de-plume) can be found in P. E. Salles Gomes, Jean Vigo (London: Faber and Faber,
1998), 10, 16-31 (originally published 1957).
3
Teacher’s remarks for Painlevé’s second trimester report card from Lycée Louis Le Grand read:
Math: “Not a single piece of homework, not a single test”
Descriptive Geometry: “Has not appeared”
Physics and Chemistry: “Almost always absent”
Natural Sciences: No comments
French: “No results”
Philosophy: No comments
History and Geography: No comments
German: “Has not appeared”
A note from the headmaster at the bottom of the report card states “Jean has, so to say, done nothing during
this quarter. It would seem more reasonable for him to give up this class.” He literally received a zéro de
conduite. See the report card reproduced in Jean Painlevé [English version, translator uncredited], ed.
Brigitte Berg (Paris: Les Documents Cinématographiques, 1991), 42, 87. For more on Jean Painlevé’s
school days, see, Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé: le cinéma au coeur de la vie (Rennes: Presses
Universitaires de Rennes, 2008), 24-26.
223
school yard, and one can only speculate upon the role the film itself played in reigniting
or reaffirming his hostility.
4
While Painlevé’s remarks make sense in light of his biography and generational
experience, their violence still manages to produce a shock for appearing at a moment
when Painlevé was energetically engaged in pedagogical activities as a filmmaker,
organizer, and educator. Even if one discounts the educational value of his films,
beginning in 1930, he had embarked upon lecture and screening tours of ciné-clubs,
youth organizations, and continuing education centers throughout France and western
Europe, playing the role of scientific vulgarizer.
5
In 1933 Painlevé, the plastic surgeon

4
Painlevé describes Zéro de Conduite as “perfectly capturing the rebellions and sadness of our childhood”
and asserts that it should be among the list of “indispensable” films “to be projected at every school and
university...” See Jean Painlevé interviewed by Philippe Ensault, “La Vie de Jean Painlevé,” unpublished
transcript (1982), 8, Radio and Television dossier, FJP.; and “Un bon film ne vieillit pas,” undated note (ca.
1970?), Écrits dossier, box A2, FJP.
Painlevé’s love of Zéro de Conduite directly impressed itself upon his own teaching. The film
appears on Painlevé’s screening list for his course on film aesthetics and technique at Vincennes (Paris VII)
in 1970. See film course list included in fiche Vincennes, FJP.
In his interview with Philippe Esnault, Painlevé describes his brief but intense friendship with Jean
Vigo (1905-1934), whom he first encountered in Nice 11 November, 1931, as rooted in part in their similar
experiences of alienation at school, largely caused by the unpopular politics of their famous
fathers—Vigo’s father Almereyda was an outspoken anarchist, dandy, and radical journalist, who was
murdered in prison by the police. They shared an interest in anarchism, mutual admiration for each other’s
films, and a love of practical jokes. Painlevé explained that both he and Vigo also shared “a quixotic side,
ardently working to fight for causes lost in advance, the will to crack authority when it strangles life and
sterilizes the mind” (“La Vie de Jean Painlevé,” 3, 8). Extracts of this interview are also quoted in the more
readily available Berg, “Jean Painlevé et l’avant-garde,” in Jeune, Dure et Pure! Une histoire du cinéma
d’avant-garde et expérimental en France, ed. Nicole Brenez and Christian Lebrat (Paris: Cinémathèque
Française, 2001), 111 and Painlevé interviewed by Philippe Esnault, “Jean Vigo, c’était un frère. Un frère,”
Jeune Cinéma 197, October-November (1997): 12-16. For Vigo’s school experiences (and their influence
on his filmmaking) see P. E. Salles Gomes, Jean Vigo (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), 36-44, 97-100
(originally published 1957).
5
The earliest reference that I have found so far to Painlevé lecturing outside of the Isle de Paris dates to late
winter of 1930: Gr. Br., “La Nature et Le Cinéma: La Conférence de M. Jean Painlevé,” Journal d’Alsace
et de Lorraine, 14 Mars 1930. Beginning in 1931, Painlevé made numerous tours in the winter months
under the name “La Nature Dévoilée Par Le Cinéma” (Nature unveiled by Cinema), a revision of the
zoologist Georges Cuvier’s rather disturbing definition of the experiment as forcing nature to reveal herself,
as well as Louis Ernest Barrias’ allegorical sculpture “La Nature se dévoil[e] devant la science” (Nature
224
Charles Claoué, and Michel Servanne, editor of Le Cinéma privé (a journal promoting
non-theatrical modes of filmmaking, such as scientific, educational, and amateur
filmmaking, to which Painlevé was a semi-regular contributor) co-founded L’Association
pour la documentation photographique et cinématographique dans les sciences (The
Association for the Photographic and Cinematographic Documentation in the Sciences,
or ADPCS). At the time that Painlevé sent his letter to the lycée Louis-Le-Grand, the
ADPCS was preparing its third conference devoted to international scientific,
documentary, and educational filmmaking. Furthermore, in 1937 Painlevé would become
the director of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers’ (CNAM’s) Center for the
Production of Scientific Teaching Films and commenced CNAM’s series of free public
lectures and practical laboratories on film technique, a course he would maintain, with
the exception of the war years, for nearly five decades.
Within documentary studies, the pedagogical dimensions of documentary film
have been taken for granted as a given—even when it is acknowledged that a proper
formula has yet to be perfected. Indeed, one of the most durable theorizations of
documentary’s dominant drive is premised upon this. Bill Nichols’ overarching
description of documentary epistephilia, a pleasure or desire to know rooted in a
demonstrative, sober discourse buttressed by appeals to rational argumentation and
institutional investment.
6
A sizable body of work has been dedicated in France to

unveiling herself before science), installed at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in 1895, and
today located at the Musée d’Orsay.
6
Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1991), 31, 178-80; and Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2001), 38-41.
225
filmmakers and institutions involved in the educational use of film and other visual
materials, including excellent histories of such figures as Jean Brérault and Jean Benoit-
Lévy, as well as work supported by efforts of national patrimony to showcase archival
collections.
7
In anglophone film studies, converging interests in non-theatrical cinema
and the history of film study have recently spurred explorations of the educational use of
film as part of the archaeology of the discipline.
8
With respect to documentary, Zoë
Druick makes an important genealogical intervention into the intersections of patronage,
institutionalization, and film study in her insightful essay “‘Reaching the Multimillions’:

7
Pierre Thévenard and Guy Tassel, Le Cinéma Scientifique Français, preface by Jean Painlevé (Paris: La
Jeune Parque, 1948); Paul Ariès, “Le Cinéma éducateur dans les années trente ou la laïcité au service du
cinéma,” 1895, no. 14 (1993); François de La Bretèque and Pierre Guibbert, “Mission Moralisatrice et
Romantisme Social du Cinéma des Premiers Temps,” in Les Vingt premières années de cinéma français:
actes de colloque international de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 4, 5, et 6 novembre 1993 (Paris: Presses de la
Sorbonne nouvelle, 1995); Christine Buzzini, “La propagande par le cinéma au ministère de l’Agriculture,”
1895, no. 18, Images du Réel, La Non-fiction en France (1995); Béatrice De Pastre-Robert and
Emmanuelle Devos, “La Cinémathèque de la Ville de Paris,” 1895 no. 18, Images du Réel, La Non-fiction
en France (1890-1930), ed. Thierry Lefebvre (1995); Béatrice de Pastre, “Cinéma éducateur et propagande
coloniale à Paris au début des années 1930,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, vol. 51, no. 4
(2004); Béatrice de Pastre-Robert, Monique Dubost, and Françoise Massit-Folléa, eds., Cinéma
pédagogique et scientifique. À la redécouverte des archives (Lyon: ENS, 2004); Valérie Vignaux, Jean
Benoit-Lévy ou le corps comme utopie (Paris: Association Française de Recherche sur L’Histoire du
Cinéma, 2007); Josette Ueberschlag, Jean Brérault, l’instituteur cinéaste (1898-1973) (Saint-Étienne:
Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2007); as well as excellent work on visual education such as
Bruno Beguet, “La Vulgarisation scientifique au XIXe siècle,” in La Science pour tous, ed. Bruno Beguet
(Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1994); and Armelle Sentilhes, “L’Audio-Visuel Au
Service de L’Enseignement: Projections Lumineuses et Cinéma Scolaire, 1880-1940,” La Gazette des
archives, no. 173 (1996). The past decade has also seen a proliferation of work in English on film education
in France, including Paula Amad “These Spectacles Are Never Forgotten”: Memory and Reception in
Colette’s Film Criticism, Camera Obscura 59, vol. 20, no. 2 (2005): 118-163; and Oliver Alexander
Gaycken’s “Devices of Curiosity: Cinema and the Scientific Vernacular” (PhD dissertation, University of
Chicago, 2005).
8
See especially Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, eds., Inventing Film Studies (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2008); and Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
226
Liberal Internationalism and the Establishment of Documentary Film.”
9
Druick traces the
mobilization of film for humanist and educational ends by the League of Nations and
UNESCO, arguing that these groups tended to conflate documentary and educational
films, accelerated the homongenization and banalization of documentary aesthetics, while
also serving as one of the conditions of possibility for the discipline of film study. If, as
Druick convincingly argues, “by means of institutions of international relations the banal
and instrumental documentary film was forged out of the exciting nonfiction work done
in the European avant-garde movements during the 1920s.”
10
The questions of patronage, institutional support, and networks of
institutionalization are pivotal to the history documentary in the 1930s, and thus for a
fuller understanding of the nascent form. The coming of sound at the end of the 1920s,
coupled with the growing ripples of the global economic crisis caused by the crash of the
financial markets in 1929, were death knells for the vibrant avant-garde film cultures of
Paris.
11
Painlevé, who had self-produced his first eight theatrical documentaries and

9
Zoë Druick, “‘Reaching the Multimillions’: Liberal Internationalism and the Establishment of
Documentary Film,” Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2008), 66-92.
10
Ibid., 87. In the case of France, the influence of Jean Benoit-Lévy, as a director and producer of over 300
films, advocate, and participant in the League of Nations and UNESCO’s film efforts cannot be
understated. His own aesthetic sensibilities, as developed making propaganda and educational films, seems
to have had an incredible impact upon the overall aesthetic of documentary of the time, and, unfortunately,
tend to be rather mawkish, moralizing, and even banal. His fiction films fare better, suggesting a naturalist
interest in social conditions, but still seem mired in a condescending bourgeois sentimentality. The
exception to this, however, are his incredibly daring surgical films. Jean Benoit-Lévy’s role in France
during the interwar period is, in many ways, analogous to that of John Grierson’s in the United Kingdom.
11
See Jacques Bernard Brunius, En marge du cinéma français (Paris: Arcanes, 1954); Noureddine Ghali,
L’Avant-Garde Cinématographique en France dans les Années Vingt: Idées, Conceptions, Théories (Paris:
Paris Expérimental, 1995); as well as Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
227
benefited from the explosion of small specialty cinemas in the late 1920s, suddenly found
the cost of production skyrocketing and the opportunities for exploitation rapidly
diminishing. Independent filmmakers like Painlevé had to finding other means of
financing, be it the rare patron of the arts such as Vicomte Charles de Noaille, integration
in some manner with the industrial system, sponsorship from state or private institutions,
if they wished to remain active as filmmakers. Faced with possible extinction, many
nascent documentarians found a possible source of funding in the production of
educational and propaganda films. In France, thanks in no small part to the incentives of
Painlevé’s father when he was Minister of Education, the public school system and
burgeoning continuing education movements showed great interest incorporating film
into their curricula. They also remained a viable market for silent films well after the
introduction of sound, presenting a possible (if reduced) form of revenue through the sale
and rental of prints, in addition to possible funding for films deemed to be of an
educational value—a rather hazy categorization.
Situated within this context, Painlevé’s pedagogical work and his violent critique
of the educational system and its incorporation of film suggest that he—and other
filmmakers and advocates of educational film—were not unaware or complicit with the
forces of appropriation and homogenization that Druick discusses. Painlevé’s actions and
protests, as this chapter argues, also belong to a larger and longer history of debates over
educational reform and scientific vulgarization during the course of the Third Republic
(1870-1940). Under the aegis of “realist pedagogy”—a method of teaching rooted in a
positivist epistemology of empirical observation—the introduction and teaching of
228
science and the implementation of experimental and visual education methods often
became a form of social critique. The establishment of educational realism in France
required the articulation and justification of a visual based epistemology and teaching
practice that not only informed a generation of future filmmakers, but also produced a
pivotal and under-examined condition of possibility for documentary cinema and its
pedagogical aesthetics. Realist education has a specificity all its own, that merits
examination alongside contemporaneous scientific and literary realisms (which in many
cases are co-constituative of each other). The aesthetics of the French educational system,
like those of positivism, should not be overlooked or reduced to a homogenous style or
ideology. Attention to this history brings Painlevé’s interventions into relief with respect
to the traditions of realist education to which he belongs and which he also aims to
subvert. In tracing lines of a previsional history of visual education and realist pedagogy
with respect to what cinema and documentary film in particular inherit from it, I aim to
assert another key strand in the alternative genealogy of French documentary film.
The chapter begins with a consideration of the aesthetics of educational reform as
first articulated in the Second Empire by Auguste Comte and his fellow positivists.
Comte in particular advocated that a genuine positivist education must be founded in the
development of a common sense, itself built from the education of the senses. This is
based in an aesthetic theory premised upon a dialectic of subservience to and idealization
of reality, but is complicated, at least in its articulation by the prominent literary positivist
Hippolyte Taine, by a theory of sense perception that gives priority to hallucination. I
then trace the impact of this positivist epistemology on the implementation of realist
229
education in France in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, giving special attention
to its two major methods: object lessons (leçons des choses) and visual education
(éducation par l’aspect). In the process, I examine the manner in which technologies and
protocols of visual representation were incorporated into them, emphasizing how realist
education premised its claims to representation of the real through the necessary absence
and abstraction of it. This same historical overview provides the conditions and practices
through which film was introduced into the educational system in France, and traces the
imprint that the Third Republic’s ethos of producing modern, moral, patriotic citizens
through education left upon the development of the educational use of film. Of particular
importance to this process was the concern how film, perceived by many politicians and
educators to be a “school of crime,” could be properly tamed and reformed for use in the
classroom.
This detour into a long view of the educational use of film then allows a
reconsideration of the seeming contradiction between Painlevé’s expressed intention “of
contributing … to the total abolition of secondary education” and his pedagogical
activities with the ADPCS and CNAM. The stakes of this inquiry concern, to be sure, the
further elaboration of a Painlevéan hermeneutics, but they do not stop at the register of
the particular. They help illuminate contours of the early history of film study itself,
12
in

12
I adopt the term “film study” from Michael Zryd, who defines it as “a more general term that most
accurately describes the eclecticism and overlap of film studies [an academic discipline] and film
production teaching…” Zryd, “Experimental Film and the Development of Film Study in America,” in
Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008),
208. Although Zryd develops the term with regards to the post-war North American context, the term
merits importation into the French interwar context, when the study of film began to emerge from a
heterogeneous mixture of informal and institutional settings, ranging from ciné-clubs, film journals, public
lectures, museum and adult education programs, studio and union training efforts, and public and private
institutions of education such as the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM), the École
230
this case the uses of documentary with relation to educational film and film education as
objects unto themselves and as part of longer histories of scientific popularization and
visual education in France, both of which were nourished by the ideologies mobilized by
progressive educational reforms of moral uplift dominant during the Third Republic. I
thus take account of the critical ambivalence regarding education that pervades his films
and discourse during the 1930s and theorize the effect or work of such an ambivalence, in
the strong sense of the word, within a documentary aesthetic, which I conceptualize in the
latter part of this chapter as a cinematic gay science: a transvaluative, experimental ethos
that draws from but also cuts across the dominant understandings of “experiment” in the
scientific and artistic senses. The chapter asks whether alongside documentary’s
traditionally recognized pedagogical dimensions there might be traces of an anarchic,
destructive, anti-educational force at work in Painlevé’s films? Can they be read as part
of the project of abolishing a particular kind of education, and if so what creative
pressures might such a force assert upon the development a different pedagogical
aesthetics, both on film and in the classroom? In answering this question I return a second
time to Painlevé’s film Les Oursins (Sea Urchins, 1929) and L’Hippocampe (The
Seahorse, 1935) to speculate how Painlevé’s work develops a cinematic gay science,
whose first object is teaching viewers how to forget. Forget what? The habituation and
disciplinary formation of Realist education’s common sense.

Technique de Photographie et de Cinématographie (ETPC, or Vaugirard), and even the League of Nations
and after the Second World War, UNESCO.
231
4.2 Aesthetics of Education Reform, A Brief Detour into a Long View
When Painlevé began responding to questions around the educational value of the
cinematograph and the place of film in the classroom, these debates had already been
underway for at least two decades. Even in the midst of the First World War the use of
the cinematograph in the (or as a) classroom was already gaining critical momentum on a
national level. In December of 1915, Jean’s father Paul Painlevé, then Minister of Public
Instruction and Inventions, appointed Jules-Louis Breton to head a committee responsible
for “researching the best means for generalizing the utilization of the cinematograph in
the different branches of teaching,” a project energetically pursued following 1920
publication of the commission’s findings, commonly referred to as the Bessou Report.
13
Cinema’s educational proponents were, in fact, the beneficiaries of the efforts to establish
and rationalize a universal, secular, public education system grounded in the tenents of a
generalized philosophical positivism and the secular “religion of progress.” Educational
reform served as the centerpiece of the Third Republic’s reconstruction of France as

13
Auguste Bessou, Rapport général, commission extraparlementaire chargée d’étudier les moyens de
généraliser l’application du cinématographe dans les différentes branches de l’enseignement, Ministère de
l’Instruction publique et des Beaux-Arts (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1920), 1. From hereon cited as
“Bessou Report,” named for Auguste Bessou, secretary of the extraparliamentary commission and future
director of the Office du cinéma educateur de Paris. See also Armelle Sentilhes, “L’Audio-Visuel Au
Service de L’Enseignement: Projections Lumineuses et Cinéma Scolaire, 1880-1940,” La Gazette des
archives, no. 173 (1996): 174; Paul Painlevé, “La valeur éducative du Cinématographe,” in Jubilé Louis
Lumière: 6 Novembre 1935 (Paris: Renaissance Française, 1936), no pagination; and Valérie Vignaux,
Jean Benoit-Lévy ou le corps comme utopie, ch. 1.
Pierre Thévenard and Guy Tassel date the beginning of serious interest in educational cinema to
1919. Their key touchstones include the presentation of the Bessou Report and the first allotment of a
budget for a cinémathèque at the Musée pédagogique in 1921. Thévenard and Tassel, Le Cinéma
Scientifique Français, preface by Jean Painlevé (Paris: La Jeune Parque, 1948), 90. For all of its
indisputable strengths in its overview of the history and uses of cinema for scientific ends, Thévenard and
Tassel’s book is often loose with dates and documentation: the Bessou Report was published in 1920 and
the film service of the Musée pédagogique dates to 1920 (see the Bessou Report, Sentilhes, and Vignaux
for comparison).
232
distinctly modern; mobilized by what Bruno Beguet, in his history of scientific
vulgarization, refers to as the reigning faith of “science, progress, instruction” in Western
Europe during the nineteenth century.
14
The cinematograph participated in well-rehearsed
dialogues, on the part of both educators and entrepreneurs, that promoted the use of
emerging media for instructional purposes; including the embrace of color lithography
for textbooks and deluxe scientific books, photographic printing (on paper and glass
slides), philosophical or scientific toys aimed at cultivating, as Baudelaire wrote in 1853,
“a taste for marvelous and unexpected effects,”
15
and especially illuminated projection
devices such as the magic lantern.
16
Such devices of an emergent mass culture—to the
extent that they were a product of modern technology—were touted as possible solutions
to the challenges of implementing education en masse, of reaching and teaching a room, a
nation, filled with little Émiles (and the adult counterparts served by the burgeoning
forms of adult education, such as at CNAM). This embrace of new media was itself

14
Bruno Beguet, “La Vulgarisation scientifique au XIXe siècle,” in La Science pour tous, ed. Bruno Beguet
(Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1994), 5. For excellent historical discussions of the
relationships between nineteenth and early twentieth century scientific vulgarization and visual media and
the performing arts, see Oliver Alexander Gaycken’s “Devices of Curiosity: Cinema and the Scientific
Vernacular” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2005); Barbara Larson, The Dark Side of Nature:
Science, Society, and the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University, 2005); and Daniel Raichvarg, Science et spectacle: figures d’un rencontre (Nice: Z’éditions,
1993).
15
Charles Baudelaire, “A Philosophy of Toys,” in The Painter of Modern Life and other essays, trans. and
ed. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Phaidon, 1995), 202.
16
For discussions of the use of the magic lantern in education see: Euler letter of 8 January 1762 in his
1789 Letters of Euler on Different Subjects in Natural Philosophy Addressed to A German Princess, vol. 2,
with notes and a life of Euler by David Brewster and John Griscom (New York: Harper, 1833), 286-290;
and Lettres de L. Euler à une Princesse d’Allemagne (Paris: Hachette, 1842); as well as the discussion of
Zahn, Paroy, and Moigno in Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the
Cinema, trans. Richard Crangle (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 63-66, 84-85, 95, 98-102, 111,
125-131, 268-72 (originally published 1995); and Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments
and the Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 37-71, esp. 64-65.
233
informed and informing the creation of a program for a modern, science-based “Realist”
education (championed by the “gentlemen,” as art historian Molly Nesbit refers to such
figures as Jules Ferry and his associates in her imaginative exploration of the training of
common sense
17
), especially its two primary pedagogical methods: object lessons [leçons
de choses] and visual education [éducation par l’aspect].
Scientific and visual education initiatives were key components of the vast efforts
for educational reform and reformation during the nineteenth century, and while they did
not gain institutional traction until the establishment of the Third Republic, their basic
philosophical tenants were already in development. What is more, the philosophical and
political ideas taken up by Jules Ferry’s administration themselves have a considerable
impact upon the thinking and ideas of the generation of gentlemen they educated: figures
such as Paul Painlevé, Édouard Herriot, Férdinand Buisson, Auguste Bessou, and
Antoine Borrel (who attempted to found the Office National du Cinématographe), all
beneficiaries of a republican education, who would used their offices to forward the
educational application of cinema.
18

17
Molly Nesbit, Their Common Sense (London: Black Dog, 2000).
18
Although it lies outside of the constraints of this dissertation to give Their Common Sense the direct and
sustained attention it deserves, this chapter attempts to engage in an indirect dialogue with Nesbit’s most
uncommon and willfully difficult book, which traces the role of technical drawing, rationalized grammar,
and object lessons in the production of common sense in service of industry and the commodity fetish,
following its imprint in cubism, Duchamp, and ending with cinema’s close-up and the emergence of a new
regime of common sense. With the arrival of cinema, and the fascination with American stars in particular,
she concludes, “No longer was the subject the same effect of school and things. Things were deferred,
outmoded….” “It was only an idea of representation based on a miracle. It was only representation based
upon a denial of matter….” “Memory let go.” (Nesbit, Their Common Sense, 286, 288, 291). This last line
haunts, in a very different register, my own theorization of Painlevé’s pedagogical politics.
One may wonder what a consideration of the magic lantern, whose presence in the classroom was
pivotal to the campaigns of l’éducation par aspect and leçons de choses, and which was capable of
projecting photographic slides by the mid-1860s, would do to the oblique arc of the book’s arguments.
And, how the cinematograph’s entry in the classroom (coextensive with the historical moment of her
234
During the first half of the nineteenth century, Saint-Simonists, positivists, and
republicans of varied stripes advocated for the expansion of an education founded in what
Saint-Simon called the “positive sciences” where rigorous and systematic empirical
observation provides the only certain foundation for knowledge.
19
According to such
thinkers, a stable and prosperous future for France required a well-educated citizenry, and
public courses in the sciences were seen as a pivotal to this project. Saint-Simon’s former
secretary Auguste Comte (1798-1857) placed particular emphasis on a reformed and
modern approach to education.
20
He in fact situated it at the center of his philosophical
system, claiming, “The task of founding an efficient system of popular education belongs
to Positivism.”
21
The considerable impact that Comte (and such younger and in their time

conclusion), as a teaching tool and object lesson, might both extend and complicate these ideas (particularly
her claims of cinema’s dematerializing powers).
Joachim Pissarro’s call for greater illumination of the context and influences of the “gentlemen”
(and for my purposes, the gentlemen molded by those gentlemen) makes its value felt here, where the long
lineage from Comtean common sense to Nietzschean uncommon sense play out in the classrooms and
cinemas. As my reading of Comte argues, the displacement of art that she sees as an outcome of the
restructured, rationalized curriculum also has a source in the positivists’ incorporation of art—a sort of
engulfing of art which both maintains and mutates it, but never completely banishes a sensitivity to
aesthetics and its surpluses or supplements. See Joachim Pissarro, “Review: Their Common Sense and Le
sens du beau,” Art Bulletin, vol. 84, no. 1 (March 2002): 181-86. See also Steve Edwards, “Yes. It Hurts,”
Review of Their Common Sense, Oxford Art Journal, 25.1 (2002): 127-136.
19
Beguet, “La Vulgurisation scientifique,” 7; and Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, Henri
de Saint-Simon (1760-1825): Selected Writings on Science, Industry, and Social Organization, trans. and
ed. Keith Taylor (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975). Taylor points out in his introduction that the first
known publication by Saint-Simon (1760-1825) is a set of letters to the director of the Lycée Republicain
of Paris, criticizing the absence of science in their curriculum, and offering his own services in teaching
such courses (19).
20
Comte, who served as Saint-Simon’s secretary between 1817 and 1824, believed Saint-Simon placed too
much attention on the administration of a non-existent utopia, rather than on the philosophical foundations
of such a social project.
21
Auguste Comte, A General View of Positivism, trans. J. H. Bridges (London: Trübner, 1865), 183.
Originally published in France in 1848, and revised in 1851 as Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme
(Paris: Société Positiviste Internationale, 1907). Bridges’ translation is based upon the 1851 revision; the
French copy consulted is based upon the 1851 revision but includes the chapter headings imported and
translated back into French from Bridges’ translation. When comparison of the language in the translation
235
better known positivist thinkers as Émile Littré and Hippolyte Taine) had upon the Third
Republic’s educational system as well as upon early theories of visual epistemology,
demand the rehearsal of Comte’s ideas regarding the mission of positivism and the
intimate links he forges between education and aesthetics.
D. G. Charlton provides a useful general definition of positivism, from which one
can then enter into its specific variants. He finds the commonalities of the different
strains rooted in an approach to thinking whereby
science provides the model of the only kind of knowledge we can attain. All that
we can know of reality is what we can observe or can legitimately deduce from
what we observe. That is to say, we can only know phenomena and the laws of
relation and succession of phenomena, and it follows that everything we can
claim to know must be capable of empirical verification.
22
In A General View of Positivism (1848), Comte declares that one of the central aims of
positivism is the reunification of reason with feeling and imagination.
23
Such a
reunification, however, does not open itself to speculative metaphysical thinking or
sustained engagement with any such “insoluble questions” or “inaccessible mystery”

and original are necessary or noteworthy, the page numbers will be given first in English and then in
French.
Annie Petit, in her introduction to Comte’s Discours sur l’esprit positif (1844; Paris: Librairie
philosophique J. Vrin, 1995), notes that Discours sur l’esprit positif and Discours sur l’ensemble du
positivisme not only presented the material from his 6 volume Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42) to
popular audiences in condensed form, but also further developed and revised his these ideas.
22
D. G. Charlton, Positivist Thought in France During the Second Empire, 1852-1870 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1959), 4-5.
23
Comte, General View of Positivism, 292.
Following the interventions of Richard Shiff, I want to emphasize that despite the shared
investment in empirical observation, “positivism” signifies a rather heterogeneous set of philosophical and
political tenets, and that it did not remain unreflexive about its grounding in perception. Even specific
variants, such as Comtean positivism, should not be read reductively. Shiff, Cézanne and the End of
Impressionism: A Study in Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1984), 13, 21-26. I thank Jean-Claude Lebenzstejn for this citation.
236
[mystère inaccessible], which he admits are appropriate for children (which he intends to
resonate in an ontogenic and phylogenic sense) but irrelevant and in fact counter-
productive to the historical progress of the modern age.
24
Comte is equally unconcerned
with questions of origin and ontology, preferring instead to focus on answers to questions
of “how instead of why.”
25
Comte’s positivism intended to counter the metaphysical and
theological biases of the “vicious” and “absurd” French educational system and its
relationship with the Catholic Church, which continued to exert considerable influence
over France’s educational system and political life (in 1870 almost 40% of all boys and

24
Comte, General View of Positivism, 49; and Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme, 50. This position is
articulated even more severely by Émile Littré, who emphasizes the role (and limits) of embodiment in the
positivist epistemology:
Supposing that man and similar animals disappeared from the world, it is impossible for us to
conceive how the world would appear to beings constituted differently [than us], or, absolutely,
what it would be in itself. By disappearing, we would take away all phenomenality that is relative
only to our impression; and nobody can conceive what exists behind this phenomenality.
Littré, “De quelques points de physiologie psychique,” La Science au point de vue philosophique, 3
rd
edition (Paris: Didier et cie, 1873), 311-12 (originally published in the March-April 1860 volume of La
philosophie positive). This positivist refusal of metaphysics, the physiological retort of Descartes,
returns—poetically—to a potentially destabilizing unknown through Taine’s discussion of perception as a
“true hallucination”:
Thus our external perception is an internal dream that finds itself in harmony with things on the
outside; and, instead of saying that the hallucination is a false external perception, it is necessary
to say that external perception is a true hallucination.
Taine then argues that there is an aspect of hallucination in all perceptual processes, and makes an
evolutionary analogy of the relationship between the hallucination and the idea as one of the seed or germ
to the fully developed plant or animal. He describes consciousness as “a series of unrealized
hallucinations” held in check by the ensemble of sensual data which keeps any one element from
developing on its own (as it does when cut off from the continuous stream of sense datum in waking life,
such as during sleep). Hippolyte Taine, De L’Intelligence, t. 2, 3
e
ed. (Paris, Hachette, 1878), 13, 25 (first
edition published 1870).
On this point, as discussed later in the chapter, the positivists and Nietzsche share a certain relation
to Kant’s notion of noumenon and the X.
25
Comte, General View of Positivism, 49.
237
60% of all girls received parochial education).
26
Acknowledging the Church’s innovation
in introducing a limited model of the concept of universal education in Europe, Comte
criticizes its educational system for ultimately serving but a single end: its own
tautological propagation, and thus not a true education at all. He instead insists that
education must ultimately serve the establishment of a new moral system dedicated solely

26
Ibid., 3, 240, 321. For a discussion of the struggles between the Church and the state over education, and
Jules Ferry’s commitment to positivism, see Pierre Chevallier, La séparation de l’Eglise et de l’Ecole:
Jules Ferry et Leon XIII (Paris: Fayard, 1982). For statistics on clerical-led education, see Robert Alun
Jones, The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, and particularly after France’s defeat in the
Franco-Prussian war, waves of Catholic resurgence, including such extreme, anti-republican, anti-
democratic papalists as the ultramontanists, attempted to restore the Church’s authority in the public and
private spheres and maintain such concessions to the Church as the Falloux laws of 1850, which gave the
clergy a strong role in the educational system. The presence of such reactionary forces—particularly around
questions of education, where the erosion of their influence was particularly marked with the rise of
republican influence—help contextualize the harsh words that Comte, and later Littré, held for Catholics,
protestants, and spiritualists.
For example, in his correspondences with John Stuart Mill, Comte discusses the attacks launched
against him by the Church and Catholic press. In a letter from Comte to Mills dated 30 December 1842, he
writes
You perhaps know that, last year, the theological rabble had, regarding my course [“Popular
Astronomy”], haughtily demanded from the government my official dismissal, for having claimed
during it the present necessity of separating morals from any religious intervention. The minister
was thus obliged to send in supervision; which resulted in nothing other than a very favorable
report.
Mill and Comte, Lettres inédites de John Stuart Mill à Auguste Comte, 1841-1846, with an introduction by
L. Lévy-Bruhl (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1899), 146-47.
Comte’s positivism also found itself enmeshed in “the silent but intimate war” within the
Academy of Sciences (spurred by Comte’s friend, the zoologist and anatomist Henri Marie Ducrotay de
Blainville [1777-1850]) between geometricians [géomètres] and biologists, which he characterizes as a
struggle between an old guard invested in exploring science of “la nature morte” [lifeless nature, a still life]
and innovative scientists engaging with “la nature vivante” [living, moving nature]. He goes further,
remarking that he sees little difference between the religious devotion and the perceived scientific
dogmatism of the geometricians, who he believes are too “set in their ways” and who show such hostility
for any science that engages with society (e.g. sociology) (147-48).
For a discussion of the contemporaneous, related struggles over the role of scientist as passive
observer or active participant (and its implications for the concepts regarding objectivity, subjectivity, and
experiment), particularly around the work of Claude Bernard, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison,
Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007).
Émile Littré, in his critical preface to the posthumous publication of Comte’s Principes de
philosophie positive (Paris: J. B. Baillière et fils, 1868), bluntly states that to the devout, “the [positive]
philosophy has nothing to say, it is not addressed to them” (74).
238
to the betterment of Humanity (with a capital H, a tautology of its own).
27
Comte situated
teaching at the heart of his own positivist praxis, exemplified by his scientific
vulgarization course “Popular Astronomy,” delivered free of charge to an open public at
the town hall of the 3
rd
arrondissement between 1831 and 1848 (Bruno Beguet credits
Comte with coining the term “scientific vulgarization”).
28
Comte—inspired by a sociological adaptation of theories of phylogenesis being
developed and debated in France in the 1820s and 1830s, by figures such as Étienne
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire—proposed that education be completely restructured to
compliment the child’s natural development as an individual and as a part of a species so
as to properly prepare students for an engagement with the “moral science” (“la vraie
moralité” as he calls positivism).
29
Although the empirical observation of the positive

27
Despite his virulent anticlericism, Comte does not wholly break with the concept of religion. In place of
the Church, he imagines another clergy, dedicated to the “religion of Humanity” under the spiritual
guidance of “philosophical priests” who must balance a “combination of poetic feeling with scientific
insight.” As with the Church, however, Comte’s anthropocentric proto-humanism accommodates its own
forms of human degradation. Comte, General View of Positivism, 327, 328, 350. In anticipation of the
arguments made at the conclusion of the chapter, it is clear why a thinker like Nietzsche would be rather
dismissive of Comte on these questions.
28
Annie Petit’s introduction to Discours sur l’esprit positif emphasizes the importance of popular education
to Comte’s positivism. His engagement with popular education began in the aftermath of the July
Revolution of 1830, when Comte helped found the Polytechnical Association [l’Association
Polytechnique], an organization dedicated to providing free public instruction to workers. The group was
born from the solidarity that the students of the École Polytechnique felt for the workers during the Three
Glorious Days of 27-29 July. Comte and his colleagues (revealing a touch of paternalistic condescension)
believed that an education in the science spurred moral uplift and conferred a sense of dignity to laborers
(14, 17-20, 28).
In two letters to John Stuart Mill, dated 30 December 1842 and 27 February 1843, Comte
described his astronomy courses as the inauguration of the “social establishment” of this new philosophy,
and called it a “little social experiment” intended to demonstrate “the moral superiority of positivism over
theology” and static modes of thinking (such as dogmatic geometricians [géomètres] (Petit, 22; and Mill
and Comte, Lettres inédites, 147, 159-160). See also Beguet, “La vulguraisation scientifique,” 7-8.
29
Comte, General View of Positivism, 183; and Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme, 184. Comte
expresses his debt to phylogenic thinking quite clearly in his formulation: “In human development aesthetic
development precedes scientific development and it should be the same in education” (321). He believes
children start out as fetishists, develop into pantheists, then through education towards monotheism. His
239
sciences provides the epistemological model for positivism, Comte makes the often-
overlooked point that this philosophy should not be conflated with “the scientific studies
on which it is based,” and thus any “reproach that Positivism is incompatible with Art” is
mistaken.
30
Art, in fact, provides the foundation for Comte’s re-imagined educational
system. Comte stresses the need to engage aesthetics throughout education, but places
special emphasis on its importance for early education, starting at home with a physical
education—not as mere muscular exercise, but aiming “to cultivate [cultiver] at the same
time our senses and our dexterity, already preparing us for observation and action.”
31
This
is followed, between second dentation (age 7) and the onset of puberty by a more formal
“cultivation [la culture] of the imaginative powers,” through the study of culture and the
fine arts (particularly occidental poetry, music, and drawing).
32
Only from this may one
proceed to the formal six year program, consisting of public lectures in the sciences (two
years of astronomy and math, two years of chemistry and physics, one year of biology,

aim is to usher people from monotheism to the next evolutionary stage: positivism (185, 188). On Saint-
Hilaire and 19
th
century theories of evolution and degeneration, see Larson, The Dark Side of Nature,
chapter 3. On the geographic assignment of temporal theories of evolution (whereby the present is the west,
and its others exist in prior historical and evolutionary epochs), and its pivotal role in global
colonialization, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
30
Comte, General View of Positivism, 292. He later adds that such a perceived incompatibility between art
and science is also due to the ahistorical “absolute spirit of metaphysical philosophy, which so often leads
us to mistake a transitory phase for the permanent order” (329). Even such sensitive scholars of the period
as Barbara Larson, in The Dark Side of Nature, momentarily lapse into the characterization of positivism as
“the cult of absolute logic and empirical quantifiable evidence—which opposed metaphysical speculation,
spirituality, and the imagination” (11).
31
Comte, General View of Positivism, 184 (translation modified in consultation with Discours sur
l’ensemble du positivisme, 183). Jean-Jacques Rousseau advocates a similar approach to the education of
the senses in book two of Émile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979)
(originally published in French in 1762).
32
Comte, General View of Positivism, 185, 186 (translation modified in consultation with Discourse sur
l’ensemble du positivisme, 185).
240
and one year of sociology), followed by an additional year of lectures in moral science,
which recapitulates the information from the previous 14 or so years and expounds upon
its social application.
33
It should be clear enough, through this brief excursus of Comte’s
ideas about the reformation of the educational system, that positivism places great
emphasis upon the training or cultivation of the senses, and aesthetic sensibility. But what
exactly does Comte mean to cultivate—what are positivism’s aesthetics and theory of
art?
Comte’s understanding of art is, in a sense, both instrumental and potentially
radical. Art and aesthetics should, in Comte’s estimation, ultimately serve one end: moral
progress.
34
This emphasis on the social utility of art directly informs the central tenet of
his aesthetic theory—that art produce an idealization of reality.
35
Artists’ “special
function is to idealize and stimulate” Comte asserts (without specifying what or who), but
never to guide or direct life in a political sense, as this can only result in delirium and
“mental and moral anarchy.”
36
Here, through an allusive and rapid presentation of the
history of what Comte refers to as “modern art,” which seems to name processes of
secularization and individualization beginning of the fourteenth century, he alludes to
art’s and artists’ potentially destructive power, a negative, or in his idiom negativist (as
opposed to positive and positivist) capacity.
37
He limits his remarks on this subject to

33
Comte, Discourse sur l’ensemble du positivisme, 187-188.
34
Comte, General View of Positivism, 292, 305.
35
Ibid., 302, 320.
36
Ibid., 297, 296; and Comte, Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme, 293, 294, 295.
37
Ibid., 296; and Comte, Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme, 295.
241
noting the role of art in the “destructive movement” [mouvement de decomposition] and
“destruction of the old system,” that characterizes the historical changes that brought
about the dismantling of the ancien regime (the monarchy and Church) and the
Revolution of 1789.
38
Although he offers little elaboration, one detects here—if not
exactly an echo of Plato’s advice to exile poets—a certain respect, with a quotient of
suspicion with regard to the role of artists in the construction of common sense and
sensibility. He praises the potential of artists to guide the aspirations of a society, but he
believes they must remain outside of politics, due to their excess sensitivity to the
imagination, which can too readily transform into an anti-social decadence. Nevertheless,
Comte lists as a primary goal of positivism the reincorporation of art into society—as
both an embrace (to the extent artists serve as cheerleaders and external critics of the
positivist project) and restriction (to the extent they remain in their circumscribed role) of
its powers.
39
Art historian Richard Shiff’s examination of the relationship between
impressionism and positivism emphasizes the wide extent to which Comte and company
have been misread, particularly on the question of art and aesthetics. Shiff explains,
the most prominent positivist thinkers believed that the direct observation and
recording of external phenomena were the tasks of the scientist, while the artist
should instead apply his imaginative vision to this world of fact. According to
both Comte and Littré (and also Taine), art has its origin in fact but departs from
it; the artist must imaginatively “idealize” and “perfect” what he observes; thus art
becomes inspirational and leads to the betterment of society.
40

38
Comte, Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme, 295.
39
Comte, A General View of Positivism, 318.
40
Shiff, Cézanne, 24 (emphasis in original).
242
This could not be laid out more clearly than in Comte’s own definition of art. “Art is
always an ideal representation of what exists, destined to cultivate our instinct for
perfection.” He continues, “Its domain is co-extensive with that of science. Both
encompass, in their own manner, the ensemble of realities; one assesses it and the other
embellishes it.”
41
This is a far cry, as Shiff notes, from Baudelaire’s caricature of
positivism as a “banal realism” or unmediated form of observation.
42
In fact, Baudelaire’s
critique of Realism’s susceptibility to a “riot of details all clamoring for justice with the
fury of a mob in love with absolute equality” shares more with Comte than he would
probably like to admit (this suspicion is reciprocal: one can easily imagine that
Baudelaire is precisely the kind of decadent poet Comte is wary of).
43

41
Comte, Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme, 299.
L’art consiste toujours en une répresentation idéale de ce qui est, destinée à cultiver notre instinct
de la perfection. Son domaine est donc aussi étendu que celui de la science. Tous deux
embrassant, à leur manière, l’ensemble des réalités, que l’une apprécie, et l’autre embellit.
The first sentence is from Shiff’s translation of this passage (based upon the 1848 edition) in Cézanne, 24.
The subsequent sentences are my own translations.
For an interesting comparison that resonates with André Bazin’s citation of Taine, as translated by
Hugh Gray as “a hallucination that is also a fact,” here is Bridges’ translation:
Art may be defined as an ideal representation of Fact [de ce qui est]; and its object is to cultivate
our sense of perfection. Its sphere therefore is coextensive with that of Science. Both deal in their
own way with the world of Fact [l’ensemble des réalitiés]; the one explains it, the other beautifies
it.
See Comte, General View of Positivism, 300.
42
Shiff, Cézanne, 21, 24.
43
Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” (1863) in The Painter of Modern Life, 16. For Baudelaire’s
critique of photography, see section II of his review of the Salon de 1859 in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed.
Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 614-19.
243
Comte rejects the distinction between imitative and inventive art. Positivism’s
aesthetic, to Comte’s reasoning, prioritizes the interplay of art’s mimetic and idealizing
functions. In this context, as Shiff clarifies, idealization does not refer to the platonic
sense of corresponding to a set of ahistoric and universal values, but rather signifies an
individual artist’s ability to abstract an essence from his or her subject, which is to say,
idealizing is understood in certain respects as a subjective operation.
44
“The
representation thus becomes in reality more faithful, because the principal features are
brought prominently forward, instead of being obscured by a mass of unmeaning detail.
This is what constitutes Idealization…”
45
This definition should trouble any tidy
presumptions regarding photographic-based media as automatically exemplary of the
positivist aesthetic, at least in the terms laid out by Comte. Comte stresses that “the ideal
[idealité—ideality] must always be subordinate to the real” but also that art should
“surpass realities so as to stimulate and amend them.”
46
In its initial form at least, the
relationship of the real and ideal in positivism’s aesthetics resembles a double helix that
accommodates expansion and reduction, excess and subordination, destructive unruliness
and a sublimated instrumentality.

44
Shiff, Cézanne, 4.
45
Comte, General View of Positivism, 306. Compare notions of the excess stimulation of the real as
presented by Baudelaire and Comte in their original idiom: “une émuete de details” and “un mélange
empirique.”
46
Comte, General View of Positivism, 302, 320. This aesthetic is shared—with different emphasis and
iterations—by a variety of modes of expression, including naturalism, impressionism, and even symbolism.
For a discussion that complicates the distinctions (and perceived oppositions) between impressionism and
symbolism along these lines, see Shiff, Cézanne, 39-52; and Larson, The Dark Side of Nature.
244
4.3 Seeing Things Things! Things! I cannot repeat it too often. —Jean-Jacques
Rousseau
47
Comte’s ideas regarding the foundational role of aesthetics, of a positivist aesthetics, in a
reformed educational system informed the pedagogical practices of the republican
politician-pedagogues who came to power early in the Third Republic, most notably the
avowed positivist Jules Ferry (1832-1893), who served as Minister of Public Instruction
and Beaux-Arts (1879-80 and 1882) and Prime Minister (1880-81 and 1883-85).
48
The
bloody events of the “terrible year”—the Franco-Prussian war (1870-71) and the brutal
suppression of the Paris Communes (1871)—increased the sense of political urgency for
reform, which republicans endorsed as both a project of national preservation and the
pathway to modernization and renewed prosperity, in a word, revitalization.
49
The “Ferry

47
Rousseau, Émile, 180. The original French: “Les choses! Les choses! Je ne répéterai jamais assez que
donnons de trop pouvoir aux mots...” Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Chez Furne, 1835), 504.
Bloom’s judiciously placed period brings to the surface of his translation the manic compulsion to repeat
coursing through this less famous confession of Rousseau.
48
See Louis Legrand, L’influence du positivisme dans l’oeuvre scolaire de Jules Ferry (Paris, 1959); and
Françoise Mayeur, “Le positivisme et l’Ecole républicaine,” Romantisme, vol. 8, no. 21 (1978): 137-147.
Comte’s imprint is telegraphed through Ferry’s famous proclamation: “My aim is to organize
humanity without God and without king” [Mon but est organiser l'humanite sans Dieu et sans roi], which
comes strikingly close to Comte’s: “Reorganization, without god or king, through the systematic worship
of Humanity” [Réorganiser, sans dieu ni roi, par le culte systématique de l’Humanité]. See Louis Capéran,
Histoire contemporaine de la laïcité française, tome 1, (Paris: Rivière, 1957), 12; and the title page of
Comte, General View of Positivism.
49
France’s defeat in 1871 spurred widespread reflection regarding France’s diminishing standing within
Europe. Many explanations drew upon the popular theories of devolution and degeneration then in
circulation, which depicted a once vigorous nation as sapped of its vitality and in need of regeneration. The
historian Ernest Renan, in La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (1872) viewed the outcome of the war as a
defeat of the French educational system by Prussia’s more modern—rational and scientific—system of
higher education; what Pierre Laszlo has anachronistically compared to the Sputnik effect of the early
space race. This moment is often cited as marking a critical shift in the development of modern academic
disciplines in France, under the auspices of the “New Sorbonne.” At the same time, as Robert Alun Jones
notes, the founding of the Comenius Pedagogical Library in Liepzig in 1871 had a significant impact on
educational reform throughout Europe through the distribution of Realschulen literature.
See Pierre Laszlo, “Lessons from Things,” SubStance, 71-72 (1993): 277; Antoine Compagnon,
“Literature in the Classroom,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989), 819; Robert Alun Jones, The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism
245
Laws” of 16 June 1881 and 28 March 1882, establishing free, secular, and compulsory
education for all children between the ages of 6 and 13 mark a significant first step in this
project of a revivified nation.
50
The secularization of education and the turn away from the Jesuit-inspired
classical humanist curriculum required the reinvention of school curricula and the
creation of entirely new sets of textbooks and pedagogical manuals firmly rooted in
republican values of progress and modernization through science and industry.
51
If in

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 70-71; and Joseph Moody, French Education Since
Napoleon (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1978), 87-89, 115-16. See also, Antoine Prost, Histoire
de l’enseignement en France, 1800-1967 (Paris: A. Colin, 1968).
“L’année terrible” is the title of Victor Hugo’s poem, dedicated to his deceased son, about these
same events.
50
The educational problems in France were not—by any stretch—resolved by the Ferry laws and its regime
changes, though they did mark a considerable advance for primary education and university education.
Secondary education, however, still remained rooted in the classical curricula favored by the Church and
Empire. This schooling remained closed to most of the population, due to the cultural and economic
barriers inherent to the system, particularly costly fees that placed it beyond the means of most working
class and lower middle class families. Democratizing reforms aimed at ameliorating these deeply ingrained
inequities met considerable resistance from the bourgeoisie and would take almost the entire duration of the
Third Republic to effect change.
At the end of the First World War, an group of educators calling themselves the Compagnons de
l’université nouvelles published a tract calling for the creation of the école unique [single school],
following a universal curriculum for students age 11 to 14, which would culminate in advancement tests
that would (theoretically) open secondary and higher education to students based upon merit rather than
wealth. The ideas in this proposal informed the educational platforms of the French left in the 1920s-40s,
culminating in the Popular Front’s young education minister Jean Zay’s attempts to bring about such
reform, only to be disrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War and Zay’s assassination. While little
progress was made in changing the curricula or opening the lycées to all but a tiny percent of scholarship
students during this period, fees for secondary education were finally retracted in the late 1930s.
Within this context, Painlevé’s revulsion for Louis-Le-Grand and secondary education in general
reveals the larger political context to his remarks. See Lisa Michelle Herzog, “The École Unique
Movement in France: Hope and Disappointment,” Masters of Arts Thesis, Simon Fraiser University, 1991,
14-38, 43-53; and Moody, French Education, 128, 133-35.
51
The textbook market was a lucrative trade: the vast expansion of a centralized public education
curriculum required the distribution of millions of new text books, exemplified by G. Bruno’s (the
pseudonym for Augustine Fouillée) Republican educational primer Le tour de la France par deux enfants,
devoir et patrie (1877), which sold 3 million copies by 1887 and 8 million copies by 1914. Figures cited in
Jacques and Mona Ozouf, “Le Tour de la France par deux enfants: The Little Red Book of the Republic,”
in Realms of Memory, vol. 2, Traditions: The Construction of the French Past, eds. Pierre Nora and
246
direct opposition to the metaphysical horizons of the classical education associated with
parochial administration, the emergent educational model embraced a realist educational
philosophy that combined positivist and materialist aspects.
52
The realist curriculum, with
its strong emphasis on empirical observation and the sciences, embraced object lessons
[leçons de choses] and visual education [éducation par l’aspect]—which often stood as
metonyms for the intuitive education of and by the senses—as the primary forms of
teaching.
53
These two methods, while not without their critics, proved to be incredibly

Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 125.
This book, as the Ozouf’s note, is particularly invested in the “art of memory.”
52
C.f. Emile-Frederic Riéder’s treatise, “Comenius, ou le Réalisme dans l'enseignement, discours prononcé
à la distribution solennelle des prix du Lycée impérial de Strasbourg, le 10 août 1867, par M. Riéder,”
(Strasbourg: G. Silbermann, 1867), held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Strasbourg was the
capital of intellectual exchange between France and the German speaking nations, and a natural point of
exchange between the two educational cultures. See also the entry “Réalisme et Humanisme,” in
Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d’instruction primaire, 2
nd
ed., pt. 1, t. 2, ed. Férdinand Buisson (Paris:
Hachette, 1887-1888), 2543-2544.
In a series of lectures delivered at the École Normale Supérieur between 1904 and 1913 and
posthumously published as The Evolution of Educational Thought: Lectures on the Formation and
Development of Secondary Education in France, trans. Paul Collins (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1977) (originally published in 1938 as L'Évolution pédagogique en France), Émile Durkheim describes the
basis of realist education as the rectification of Cartesian thought with scientific positivism.
Gabriel Compayré asserts in History of Pedagogy, trans. William Harold Payne (Boston: D. C.
Heath, 1905) (originally published in French as Histoire de la pédagogie in 1886), 91, that the roots of
realist education in France belong to the pedagogical writings of Rabelais, whose own anti-clerical program
for education presented through Pantagruel’s rearing of Gargantua, emphasizes a focus on human
endeavors and observations of nature as well as hearty physical activity.
In describing the realist philosophy as combining elements of positivism and materialism, I want
to be sure to underscore that they encompass distinct philosophies. Comte emphasized that they were very
different, particularly regarding recent materialist’s flirtation with immorality (he believed positivism to be
a evolutionarily progressive synthesis of aspects of spiritualism and materialism). Comte, General View of
Positivism, 48-57. I do wish through this citation to Rabelais, and the echoes it elicits with Georges
Bataille’s base materialism, to note the historical possibility of a realist pedagogy not afraid to feast. One
might draw out from this a very different sense of Gaston Bachelard’s pronouncement “realists are eaters”
with respect to the feast for the eyes that is realist pedagogy in its cinematic forms and Painlevéan
deformations.
53
Anon., “Intuition et Méthod Intuitive,” Dictionnaire de pédagogie, 2
nd
ed., pt. 1, t. 2, 1374-1375. The
entry opens by noting the etymological link between intuition and sight [la vue], not as a superficial seeing,
but as a “sight that grasps fully and before an object, an immediate [unmediated] sight, certain, easy,
distinct, and learns, so to speak, in a single glance.” The discussion of the insaisissable towards the end of
this chapter will complicate such a line of thinking.
247
durable, remaining central to the state’s pedagogical programs throughout the duration of
the Third Republic.
54
This new curriculum was designed, in the words of naturalist and comparative
anatomist Georges Pouchet (1833-1894), “to better prepare schoolboys for the world,
whereas the old education seemed, on the whole, made for the cloister.”
55
Ferry himself
referred to object lessons as “the basis of everything” and they are referred to in the
second edition of the Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d’instruction primaire as “the
foundation and soul of all elementary teaching.”
56
According to the logic of the Third
Republic educational reformation, the thing’s the thing—but as we will see, sometimes
the thing is something else or no thing at all.
Since object lessons and visual education provided the practical and ideological
foundations for the later implementation of film for education, as well as the ideological
projects film inherited from this application, it is worth sketching a few key moments
from the history of their development for the manner in which they fortify the through

54
One can already register a sense of the distaste for the overuse of object lessons in Compayré’s History of
Pedagogy. See for example the ironic citation to the disgust with which he images Descartes would have
greeted the “interminable series of object lessons without the thought of developing intelligence itself”
(192). Compayré’s text was produced in response to the Resolution of 3 August 1881, declaring that the
history of pedagogy be instituted as part of the curriculum for the newly formed Écoles Normale
Supérieure des Instituteurs (xvii, xxv). Durkheim’s lectures, later published as The Evolution of
Educational Thought, also emerge from this same movement of educational reform.
55
Georges Pouchet quoted in M. Plâtrier, “Leçons de choses,” in Dictionnaire de pédagogie, 2
nd
ed., pt. 1,
t.2, 1534.
56
Nesbit, Their Common Sense, 56; and M. Plâtrier, “Leçons de choses,” in Dictionnaire de pédagogie, 2
nd
ed., pt.1, t. 2, 1533.
Marie Pape-Carpantier, credited by many as coining the term leçons de choses, proclaimed that
object lessons were the method of teaching: “there is only one method, as there is only one truth.” Pape-
Carpantier, Introduction de la Méthode des Salles d’Aisle dans l’Enseignement Primaire: Conférences
faites aux instituteurs réunis à la Sorbonne à l’occasion de l’Exposition Universelle de 1867, 2
nd
ed. (Paris:
Librarie DelaGrave, 1879), 10.
248
line of the positivist aesthetic as taken up and expanded by the state’s educational
reforms.
57
Rousseau’s plea to place the thing before the word, and of the importance for
training the senses, stages the genesis for a new pedagogical practice based upon material
encounters with concrete objects. The idea was already in circulation thanks to the work
of Czech-born Jan [Johann] Amos Comenius (1592-1671), who developed an approach to
pedagogy modeled upon Baconian inductive method and the study of the natural world
through the senses: “one must present all things [objects], as much as one can do so, to
the senses which correspond to them: so that the student learns to know visible things
through vision, sounds through hearing, odor through smell, sapid things through taste,
tangible things through touch...”
58
Comenius is also credited with publishing one of the
first illustrated textbooks for children, his Orbis sensualium pictus (1658), which featured

57
The primary sources consulted for this information include Félix Cadet, “Leçons de choses,” in
Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d’instruction primaire, pt. 2, t. 2, ed. Férdinand Buisson (Paris: Hachette,
1882-1883), 1134-1141; and particularly M. Plâtrier, “Leçons de choses,” in Dictionnaire de pédagogie, 2
nd
ed., pt. 1, t. 2, 1528-1534. Plâtrier’s entry is also available online in the Nouveau dictionnaire de pédagogie
et d’instruction primaire publié sous la direction de Ferdinand Buisson (édition de 1911):
http://www.inrp.fr/edition-electronique/lodel/dictionnaire-ferdinand-buisson/.
The volumes of the dictionary are an indispensable resource for scholars and historians, not only
of education but also of the ambitions and mentalities of the administrators of the Third Republic. In his
note to the readers at the end of the 2
nd
edition, pt. 1, t. 2, Buisson himself makes this point, explaining that
the text is valuable for its mixture of observations taken on the fly from life [sur le vif] but also for its self-
consciously historical status, as a document of the decade in which Ferry and his associated “collaborated
in the creation of a new regime” (3097). See also Nesbit’s lengthy note on the history and impact of the
Dictionnaire. She cites that one copy of the first edition was sold for every four teachers in France. Nesbit,
Their Common Sense, 304-305n21.
In addition to the previously cited texts by Laszlo and Nesbit, which emphasize the artistic
responses of object lessons and drawing education, see Pierre Kahn, La leçon de choses: naissance de
l’enseignement des sciences à l’école primaire (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion,
2002). Kahn aims to complicate the “Ferry myth” of a radical rupture between Second Empire and Third
Republic education by considering object lessons and early scientific instruction as the institutionalization
of a positive (if not always strictly positivist) “intellectual education” that is rooted in movements of the
1830s and onwards.
58
Comenius, Didactica magna, quoted in Plâtrier, “Leçons de choses,” Dictionnaire de pédagogie, 2
nd
ed.,
pt. 1, t. 2, 1528.
249
ornate, numbered illustrations with corresponding descriptive sentences that in many
ways lay out the procedure of the object lesson (see Figure 63). For example, Comenius’
lesson of the outward and inward senses begins with the visual presentation of distinct
components and then proceeds to their description in a specific technical vocabulary.
Each of the five outward senses—represented by a disembodied eye, ear, nose, tongue,
and hand—are arranged, as if laid out for display on a dissection table, in a halo around a
man’s head. The man’s scalp is peeled back and the skullcap removed to reveal the brain
and seat of the three inward senses—common sense, which “under the forepart of the
head, apprehendeth things taken from the outward senses,” phantasy, which “under the
crown of the head, judgeth of those things thinketh and dreameth,” and memory, “under
the hinder part of the head, layeth up everything and fetcheth them out: it loseth some,
and this is forgetfulness.”
59
Although the techniques will be refined and concretized,
Comenius’ illustration of common sense (and with it phantasy and memory) as an
exquisite corpse stitched together from assorted objects—eyes, ears, noses, tongues,

59
Comenius, Orbis sensualium pictus, 12
th
ed., trans. Charles Hoolf (London: S. Leacroft, 1777), 55-56.
The corresponding text appears in French in Johann Amos Comenius, Orbis Pictus. Die Welt in Bildern.
Swet w Obrazych. Swiat w Obrazach. Le Monde en Tableaux (Königgrätz, Bohemia: Jan Pospísil, 1833),
108.
According to contemporary understanding, Comenius’ anatomy of the brain is a bit askew. He
places “the common sense” in the frontal lobe, whereas his description of its functions in coordinating the
external impressions of the senses should place it in the temporal lobe (for him the seat of phantasy).
A precise account of the life of Comenius’ text is beyond the bounds of this project. Nevertheless,
the 1805 edition of Orbis sensualium pictus published by W. B. Korna of Wroclaw, Poland, provides the
text in Latin, Polish, French, and German, suggesting that the text was long available to French readers.
Another version of the text is held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and published in Latin, German,
and French under the title Nouveau orbis pictus à l'usage de la jeunesse, ou, Spectacle de la nature, des
arts et de la vie human: en 322 figures lithograpiées et avec une description exacte in langue allemande,
latine et française, 2
nd
ed. (Stuttgart: chez Chrétien Guillaume Loeflund, 1833). This version features
updated anatomical information and new drawings.
250
hands, heads, draping—and words, set the terms that advocates of a realist education
would pursue in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Fig. 63. Detail from the 1833 quad-lingual edition of Jan Amos Comenius’s Orbis pictus (1658).
The object lesson’s introduction into educational practice in France owes much of
its early success to two pedagogical pioneers. First, the Swiss philosopher and educator
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), who applied the things from Rousseau’s Émile
to the education of his son, as well as the orphans and impoverished boys he taught at
Stanz, Burgdorf, and Yverdun at the beginning of the 19
th
century, and whose “intuitive”
theories and method became very popular in German states as part of the Realschulen
60
and Anschauung
61
movements, making a resurgence in France in the late 1860s and

60
Realschulen, literally real schools, are secondary schools that place an emphasis on practical and
technical training rather than classical humanist education. They provided a model for the technical school
movement in France during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
61
Anschauung translates into English as “experience” or “contemplation” as in learning from experience. It
also has visual connotations—to learn from seeing or with the help of visual aids, Anschauungs, and is in
fact the German term used for leçons de choses and object lessons. See Anon., “Intuition et Méthode
Intuitive,” [Intuition and the Intuitive Method] in Dictionnaire de pédagogie, 2
nd
ed., pt. 1, t. 2, 1375.
251
1870s.
62
Second, and more directly, Marie Pape-Carpantier (1815-1878), a pioneer in
French pedagogy and founder of the écoles maternelles (nursery schools in English),
which served as a laboratory for the development of object lessons, which also functioned
as their primary method.
63
Pape-Carpantier introduced the concept and method of object
lessons to an important and attentive audience during a series of lectures given at the
Sorbonne for teachers attending the 1867 Universal Exposition. The aim of the lectures
was to instruct teachers in how to adapt her method to primary school. Unlike other
methods, Pape-Carpantier claims that “the object lesson teaches by actual realities, and
from each reality it brings about useful knowledge, a good sentiment, or a good idea.”
64
She makes a point of emphasizing that although rooted in intuition, they follow a fixed
method, physiologically-based upon the “workings of the senses,” with simple
observations of color and form leading to more complex inquiries about usage, materials,
and origins. She stresses, however, that her method remains “entirely independent of the
fantasy of teachers.”
65
In other words, an education that proceeds by seeing things must
fortify itself against seeing things.
The demonstration of her first object lesson during her lectures, nevertheless,
spurs an evocative string of associations that aim to engage a childish “pleasure in

62
C.f. The entry for Realschulen in Dictionnaire de pédagogie, 2
nd
ed., pt. 1, t. 2, 2544; Riéder’s text cited
above; and on Comenius, Léon Didelot, Un pédagogue oublié, par M. L. Didelot (Lyon: Pitrat aîné, 1884).
63
Compayré, History of Pedagogy, 413-445, 501-504; Laszlo, “La Leçon de choses,” 277; and Oliver
Gaycken, “Devices of Curiosity,” 103-104.
64
Pape-Carpantier, Introduction de la Méthode des Salles d’Aisle dans l’Enseignement Primaire, 11.
65
Ibid., 11-12.
252
surprise” and “desire to know.”
66
She begins by removing an ornate basket out of a crate,
which she claims contains one of the most valuable treasures in the entire world. She
pulls outs a piece of bread.
67
This prompts a discourse on bread’s primary ingredient, a
white powder called flour and its vital differences from lime, another white powder that
happens to be a deadly poison. She follows this by presenting a young wheat sprout and
then some mature ears of wheat, the source of flour, in quick succession. She then
presents a scythe used to harvest wheat, and discusses milling. She gives special attention
to the role played in milling by man’s “generous and faithful friends” horses, and here her
associative lesson on bread, flour, poison, and technology turns toward a moral lesson on
the need to be kind to animals, lest one appear to be—in the words of Lord Byron—an
ingrate.
68
Pape-Carpantier likens her “natural method” to how a mother teaches a child.
69
Her approach to the education of and through the senses finds echo and fortification in
Comte’s philosophies, particularly his insistence upon the importance of the aesthetic and
sensual dimensions of education, as well the role of early physical education in the
cultivation of the senses in order to develop powers of observation and physical skill, the

66
Ibid., 22. Object lessons solicit childrens epistephilic drives.
67
Gaston Bachelard The Formation of the Scientific Mind (1938; repr. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2002),
172; and Bachelard, La formation de l’esprit scientifique (Paris: J. Vrin, 1993), 169.
68
Ibid., 22- 27. One may wonder if such lessons inspired the footage of a germinating grain of wheat shot
by Jean Comandon, and its importance to Germaine Dulac’s film theory. See Figure 4.2. After Pape-
Carpantier’s remarks concerning kindness to animals, she notes how a horse-wagon resembles a cannon,
and then ruminates about war and destruction and the need for peace.
69
Ibid., 10.
253
empirical basis of a positivist common sense.
70
Félix Cadet, in his definition of object
lessons in the Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d’instruction primaire (1882-1883), also
reiterates this assertion in his opening lines, adding one crucial modification, “Object
lessons—application of the intuitive method to knowledge of the realm of
perception—are the reasoned continuation, in day care and nursery schools, of the initial
education given by the mother.”
71
The purported addition of reason (to make up for its
earlier “lack of program”) would come in 1879 with the formalized application of object
lessons based around the seasons and integrated with a program of drawing, moral
lessons, and games and songs. First tested in two schools in the fifteenth arrondissement
of Paris and then implemented nationally, each month’s lesson was organized around
several key words and accompanying drawings—in October the wine harvest with
drawings of grapes, vines, fermentation tanks (among others); in December heating with
drawings of skates, thermometers, chimneys, billows; in April vegetation and birds’ nests
with drawings of flowers, leaves, beans; in August the harvest and travel with drawings
of ears of wheat, scales, trains, stream boats, etc.—as well as songs and games with a
nationalist, patriotic bent (Figure 64).
72

70
Comte’s educational philosophy reveals a phantasmic dimension in his location of this sensual classroom
within the scene of family romance and mother’s hem. The practical realities of popular education
necessitated maternal schools; Pape-Carpantier’s choice of name is not insignificant. Although it is not my
primary intention here to invent a Barthesean Comte, one cannot help but note a certain voluptuousness that
hazes the fringes of his description of early education. For Comte’s not particularly enlightened views on
the role of women and mothers in a positivist society (and an outline of his sexual division of labor), see
chapter four of General View of Positivism.
71
Cadet, “Leçons de Choses,” Dictionnaire de pédagogie, 1
st
ed., pt. 2, t. 2, 1134 (my emphasis). Cadet’s
opening sentence, and the article as a whole, suggests a rather ambivalent attitude regarding the role of
women in education.
72
Ibid., 1135-1139. Plâtrier presents Pape-Carpantier’s theory of object lessons as being “much less
rigorous, much less focused, and much less definite” but praises it as “rather more popular and accessible.”
254
Fig. 64. Detail from the first program for object lessons published in Félix Cadet, “Leçons de Choses,” in
Dictionnaire de pédagogie (1882-1883).
The reasoned or rationalized adaptation of the method for national application
took, as Pierre Laszlo notes, a rather rigid form that, somewhat ironically, mirrors the
nominalism of the parochial education.
73
In official practice, they quickly strayed from
the spirit of the inductive method, becoming encased in an often rigidly narrativized
teleology. The trip to the beach where a dead octopus, an empty sardine can, sea urchins,
and other found objects serve as the subjects of spontaneous natural history lessons, and
other such scenarios presented in the eminent physiologist Paul Bert’s Lectures et Leçons
de Choses (1887), one of the textbooks produced explicitly for the new curriculum, serve
as an idealized fantasy rather than a road map for such experiences. Indeed, one quickly
sees the intuitive, hands-on principles of the object lesson displaced by readings about

His primary concern is that her understanding of object lessons exceeds it proper and precise function.
Plâtrier, “Leçons de Choses,” Dictionnaire de pédagogie, 2
nd
ed., pt. 1, t. 2, 1532-1533.
73
Laszlo, “La Leçon de choses,” 288n15.
255
such experiences (Figure 65).
74
In practice, Laszlo remarks, encounters instituted an
almost parodic regulation of the spontaneity and student-centered ideals of the object
lesson.
Each of the lectures has three parts. In the first, the gospel for the day, so to speak,
was announced. The teacher would write the topic on the blackboard, and show
the actual object or a picture of it, and gather remarks from the class. This
observation stage was followed by a stage of formalization. The spontaneous
speech of the pupils was replaced by scholarly language, or at least by correct
French; a lexically rich and difficult vocabulary was introduced. The teacher
would then tell the pupils not only what they had seen, but also how they were
supposed to describe it. Finally, he would write on the board or dictate a
summary. They were supposed to learn it by rote for the next day’s class.
75
Fig. 65. Detail from Paul Bert’s Lectures et Leçons de Choses (1887).
Noting that this method remained largely unchanged between the wars (of 1870 and
1940), Laszlo emphasizes the degree to which object lessons emphasized patriotic ideals
and the socialization of citizens over any actual engagement with experimental methods

74
Paul Bert, Lectures et Leçons de Choses (Paris: Picard-Bernheim, 1887). The book is labeled as “a work
responding to the most recent official programs.” Most of the bestiary of Painlevé’s first set of films (the
daphnia excluded) is represented in the brief chapter “La Plage” [The Beach], 190-195.
75
Laszlo, “La Leçon de choses,” 280.
256
of science. Furthermore, if the spirit of this educational reinvention was decidedly
modern, much of the content of the new curricula, at least at the primary level, was
tempered by the fact that the scientific knowledge imparted was for the most part over a
century old.
76
Laszlo notes that the formalized object lesson “denies itself the resources of
dissatisfaction. More generally, it refrains from preparing itself or its pupils for anything
unexpected.”
77
In Nesbit’s view, such a pretence to mastery was itself an illusion, as the
objects presented and words assigned to them often introduced forces of a destabilizing
polysemy, though one can note that this polysemy was not officially authorized for the
mouths of the students.
78
Nesbit compellingly depicts object lessons and visual education
(as emphasized through the curriculum for technical drawing) as rather ambivalent
exercises, whereby the Third Republic curricula cultivated an industrial common sense, a
thing based common sense in excess of the subject-based bounds of a Kantian or even,
perhaps, Comtean common sense, though he barely figures directly in her study. It was a
product specific to the machine of the French educational system itself, a realist
education wherein an almost hallucinatory practice of only seeing things, and seeing
through things, would prevail.
79
Without ascribing a single intentionality or signature to

76
In their studies of the impact of object lessons on twentieth century arts—literature and visual arts
respectively—Laszlo and Nesbit both note the relatively conservative content of the new curricula. Laszlo
comments that “The subject matter is a century old,” and Nesbit writes of the republican reformers that
“They would not rush to incorporate the latest developments in the human sciences; they had not made
much at all of Hippolyte Taine’s otherwise greatly influential De l’intelligence, where both matter and the
moi were set out as optical illusions.” See Laszlo, “La Leçon de choses,” 279; and Nesbit Their Common
Sense, 93.
77
Laszlo, “La Leçon de choses,” 274, 279, 282.
78
Nesbit, Their Common Sense, 59.
79
Ibid., 15-17. This common sense “was not exactly anyone’s idea and it was not, cannot be written down
as such. Education had led to it.”
257
it, one might describe this common sense produced by the Ferry program as containing
reserves of a certain féerique (fairy-esque, magical, enchanted) potential already at the
heart of positivism (Taine’s description of sense perception as a true hallucination),
suggesting that what the curriculum designers repressed at the level of content, would
perpetually haunt its exercise.
Laszlo and Nesbit both examine object lessons with an eye for their surplus
aesthetic effects. Nesbit traces its imprint upon and presence within Cubist and Dada art,
and Laszlo examines its influence upon several generations of modernist writers,
positioned “between symbolism and scientific objectivity,” for whom object lessons
produced a sensibility attuned to encountering the world as a set of texts to be read
through a detailed observation and a poetics of description, what he calls the “museum of
beautiful images with which France adorned itself between the two wars.”
80
In a similar
manner, I would like to emphasize the impression of positivist aesthetics and object
lessons upon the group of filmmakers who participated to various degrees in the
documentary avant-garde: Germaine Dulac, Henri Chomette, René Clair, Jean Grémillon,
Georges Lacombe, Marcel Carné, Marc Allégret, Jacques Brunius, Jean Mitry, André

80
Laszlo, “La Leçon de choses,” 274, 275.
One could equally read the work of a generation of French philosophers, Jacques Lacan and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty in particular, as touched by this method. Consider, for instance, Lacan’s little
object lesson on the sardine can in the waves (an episode also found Bert’s Lectures et Leçons de choses,
192) in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), 95; and Merleau-Ponty’s
description of being honeyed from his 1948 radio lectures published as The World of Perception, trans.
Oliver Davis (New York: Routledge, 2004), 60-61.
We might also consider these observations about the lasting impressions of object lessons
alongside an insight from Jean-Jacques Meusy, who notes the pronounced preference amongst many
writers of the early twentieth century for nonfiction films. See Meusy, “La Diffusion des Films de ‘Non-
Fiction’ dans les Établissements Parisiens,” 1895, no. 18, Images du Réel: La Non-Fiction en France (1890-
1930), ed. Thierry Lefebvre (Summer 1995): 169-199, esp. 176-180.
258
Sauvage, Éli Lotar, Jacques-André Boiffard, and perhaps most intensely, Jean Painlevé.
81
For Painlevé the scrupulous observation of material reality suggested by the object lesson
is revisited and revised, this time without the repression of its excesses and with the
recourse to disappointment (to use Laszlo’s vocabulary), in order to realize and develop
its latent poetry of description and to contend, in manners critical and intoxicating, with
the enchantments of the real. The expressive and associative potential of the object lesson
as described by Pape-Carpantier discover here a second life. Furthermore, spectators
were also well prepared for such images, both by their own experiences in school and
through the adventurous critical practices practiced by a generation of critics gifted in the
art of description—Blaise Cendrars, Émile Vuillermoz, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein,
Colette, and Germaine Dulac.
82
This cultivation of an eye for detail, even if primarily
molded to an industrial common sense, contained reservoirs of unfulfilled and expectant
sensual delight ready to be reawakened. Could one of the legacies of Realist pedagogy
and its development of object lessons, in their particular production of contradiction,

81
This list is simply the French-born and educated filmmakers who, during the 1920s and early 1930s,
produced works straddling avant-garde and documentary filmmaking practices. Were one to look beyond
those who would certainly have been educated with object lessons according to the methods outlines in this
chapter, Alberto Calvacanti (Brazil), Jean Epstein (Poland), Man Ray (USA), and Luis Buñuel (Spain;
whom Oliver Gaycken convincingly demonstrates was an avid reader of Jean Fabre in “Devices of
Curiosity,” 4-11) would need to be mentioned. Although he is of a previous generation, and not directly
engaged in avant-garde circles, Jean Comandon would also certainly qualify as part of this group.
There are several conspicuous absences in this list. Most notably Jean Vigo, whose violent
documentary images—despite their descriptive power—never allow for anything of the educational system
to surface in a manner other than through negation. Additionally, Jean Benoit-Lévy and Jean Brérault,
whose important and noteworthy work in educational film stand in a less critical relationship to the
educational status quo and thus do not engage, at least intentionally, in the same process of revision.
Georges Franju best embodies this aesthetic in the post-war scene.
82
Paula Amad anticipates this argument in her essay on Colette and film reception “These Spectacles Are
Never Forgotten”: Memory and Reception in Colette’s Film Criticism, Camera Obscura 59, vol. 20, no. 2
(2005): 118-163.
259
frustration, and unanswered questions, be the cultivation of a sensibility and even desire
for the documentary object?
Did not, after all, the critic and poet Champfleury write in his entry for the
Dictionnaire de pédagogie “the eyes of children and men need images”?
83
4.4 Projections: Illuminating and Animating Things
The creation of a worldly, modern curriculum demanded more than what could be fit in
to a box and brought into a classroom, or rather it required a sort of pandora’s box. This
is particularly true since the expansion of schools required new techniques for teaching
more to more students. One of the proposed solutions to this challenge was the
introduction into the classroom of the forms of luminous projections long used by
scientific vulgarizers—a solution that promised to be even more realist and, as the French
say, hallucinant (incredible). The years 1879-1880 were crucial to the institutionalization
of visual education and the use of projection in particular. As previously discussed,
scientific vulgarization efforts of the 19
th
century passionately championed new media,
especially luminous projection (magic lanterns), as teaching tools. A vibrant lantern and
slide industry produced hundreds of thousands of painted and photographic slides during
these decades, serving secular and religious organizations that embraced the ethos of
“amusing instruction.”
84
“The only effective means of instruction,” the former chaplain of

83
Champfleury [Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson], “Image, Imagerie,” in Dictionnaire de
pédagogie, 2
nd
ed., pt. 1, t. 2, 1320.
84
See Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow, 264-296; and Beguet, “La Vulgarisation
scientifique,” 39. In addition to Moigno’s prolific slide collection, the largest producers of slides were the
Molteni company, the Musée pédagogique, and the Ligue de l’Enseignement.
260
Lycée Louis-Le-Grand and so-called Apostle of the lantern Abby Moigno proclaimed in
1872, “is through the eyes, experiments, and lively lit paintings.”
85
During Jules Ferry’s
tenure as Minister of Public Instruction and then President, the state took a far more
active interest in the promotion and integration (as opposed to suppression, as had
happened under Napoleon III) of projection technologies for popular education and use in
the classroom. On 13 May 1879, Ferry and Férdinand Buisson established the Musée
Pédagogique (The Pedagogical Museum), which was the repository for textbooks and
scholastic imagery. Shortly after opening, the Musée Pédagogique became a central
library and distributor of lantern slides and—beginning in 1920—films for educational
uses. The museum supplied schools and educational organizations with slides up until the
outbreak of the Second World War, by which time the slide collection boasted over half a
million views. Likewise, by the end of the 1920s distributing over 43,800 prints of their
films.
86
Through the implementation of luminous projection, the Musée Pédagogique
helped to devise and to coordinate models for the circulation and use of media in the
classroom on a national scale. This system later provided the road map and bureaucratic
apparatus for the integration of film into curricula.

85
Beguet, “La Vulgarisation scientifique,” 39; and for remarks on “education through the eyes” in general,
39-48. Mannoni depicts Moigno in The Great Art of Light and Shadow as a rather liberal Jesuit who did not
shy away from frank scientific truths.
86
Anon, “Musée Pédagogique,” in Dictionnaire de pédagogie, 2
nd
ed., pt. 1, t. 2, 1982-1989; and Sentilhes,
“L’Audio-Visuel au Service de L’Enseignement,” 171, 177. For a sampling of the Musée Pédagogique’s
slide collection in 1905, see Gilbaut, Conférences populaires: Guide practique à l’usage des conférences
populaires, avec une lettre-préface de M. Édouard Petit (Paris: Bibliothèque d’Éducation, 1905), 41-49. A
gloss of the Musée Pédagogique’s film acquisitions can be seen in “L’Effort du Musée Pédagogique,” Les
Documents Scolaires et Post-Scolaires, 2
e
année, no. 7, Mai 1936, 11-12. The list is dominated by
Painlevé’s films.
261
The fact that the Musée Pédagogique became the loci of visual education is itself
a consequence of the ideological investments and institutionalization of a disposition
towards media as scientific and pedagogical instruments. In order to further develop the
new curricula emphasizing visual education and object lessons, Ferry established the
Commission de la decoration des écoles et de l’imagerie scolaire (Commission for the
decoration of schools and scholastic imagery, or CDEIS) in May 1880 “to research
methods for employing the aesthetic education of the eyes in teaching at all levels.”
87
The
commission’s findings, presented in April 1881 by educator Charles Bigot, stated it was
necessary to:
make school itself a museum, a sort of sanctuary where beauty rules as much as
science and virtue. The child must live surrounded by noble works that constantly
speak to his eyes, awaken his curiosity, elevate his soul; harmonious forms must
be maintained throughout, bathed in an atmosphere of serenity and joy; art must
come to him from all directions like the ambient air he breathes…
88
It did not take very long for these airy aspirations of classrooms outfitted like the autumn
salons to quickly settle into the rather uninspiring miasma of functionary thinking,
expressed by the commission’s initial recommendations, which primarily focused on
offering students uplifting stamps, prints, and photographs as prizes for academic
contests. But in addition to the suggestions to increase and rationalize the use of

87
Charles Bigot quoted in A. Gresse, “Imagerie Scolaire,” in Dictionnaire de pédagogie, 2
nd
ed., pt. 1, t. 2,
1320-21.
88
Ibid., 1321. Such a project had found an earlier champion in Victor Duruy, one of the Ministers of Public
Instruction under Napoléon III, who later served the Ferry administration as well. Duruy expressed the
desire “for the walls of our 70,000 schools to be covered from floor to ceiling in images.” Duruy’s
quotation appears Léon Riotor’s updated entry for “Imagerie Scolaire,” in Nouveau dictionnaire de
pédagogie et d’instruction primaire publié sous la direction de Ferdinand Buisson (édition de 1911):
http://www.inrp.fr/edition-electronique/lodel/dictionnaire-ferdinand-buisson/. It is worth noting that Léon
Riotor acted as a very influential advocate for educational cinema through his role at president of Société
française de l’art à l’école (French Society of Art in School), founded in Bourdeaux in 1912.
262
scholastic imagery and the creation of “school museums” (usually an armoire filled with
lavishly detailed illustrated posters, such as the taxonomic charts of plants and animals
produced by Deyrolle), the commission gave initiative to the use of lantern projections as
a means for teaching science in a manner that bridged the empirical imperatives of a
positivist-inflected realist pedagogy with the sort of aesthetic education imagined by
Comte and Pape-Carpantier and instrumentalized under Ferry.
89
Scholastic imagery and
lantern slides were championed as extensions and supplements of object lessons, but
often were called up to stand in for the thing itself, as rare were the occasions when a
classroom would have access to a dead, let alone a living octopus (to evoke a lesson from
Bert’s Lecteurs et leçons de choses and a future lesson from Painlevé, which provides
both).
The geologist Stanislas Meunier made these points alluringly clear in his opening
address to the 1880 Congrès pédagogique (Pedagogical Congress), held in the grand
amphitheater of the Sorbonne, which certainly left an impression with the CDEIS. Using
a Molteni lantern, Meunier gave an illustrated lecture on its value for teaching, projecting
an array of photographic slides relating to astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry,
botany, zoology, and biology, including views of a solar eclipse, blood globules,
microscopic views of diatoms (“with their exquisite shapes of infinite variety”), as well
as live demonstrations of simple but visually intriguing experiments (such as the “bizarre
motion made by small fragments of camphor when thrown onto water”).
90
Clearly

89
Ibid., 1320.
90
A transcript of his lecture was later published in three installments as Stanislas Meunier, “Conférence
faite dans le grand Amphithéâtre de la Sorbonne aux Membres du Congrès pédagogique,” Journal des
263
impressed by the lantern’s aesthetic appeal (with it ability to reveal exquisite shapes and
bizarre motions), Meunier suggests how projection can significantly enhance the realism
of realist education, while also expanding the epistemological stakes of object lessons:
When it comes to the reproduction of natural facts, one cannot be too accurate, so
it is a veritable good fortune when teaching natural sciences, to be able to call
upon the services of the wonderful invention of photography. This [the Molteni
lantern, presumably] can offer the eyes of the spectators, not only a reproduction
of an object, but truly the object itself, in conditions such as one can examine
under a magnifying glass, and in this manner make discoveries remaining
unperceived by those who examine the model with the naked eye.
91
Significantly, his demonstrations combine an enthusiasm for the documentary value of
the photographic image with the uncanny impressions of presence provided by the
writhing insects and even the “bizarre” dance of fragments of camphor projected upon
the screen (a useful reminder that even before film, projections were already teeming
with a strange life—as suggested by such lantern programs about microbes as Les
Invisibles: Voyage au Monde des Infiniement Petits Vus au Microscope Geant Electrique,

Instituteurs, 30 année, no. 32, 7 Août 1887, 504-506; Meunier, “Conférence faite dans le grand
Amphithéâtre de la Sorbonne aux Membres du Congrès pédagogique,” Journal des Instituteurs, 30 année,
no. 34, 21 Août 1887, 534-535, qt. 534; and Meunier, “Conférence faite dans le grand Amphithéâtre de la
Sorbonne aux Membres du Congrès pédagogique,” Journal des Instituteurs, 30 année, no. 35, 28 Août
1887, 552-553, qt. 553. Henceforth referred to as “Conférence” pt. 1, pt. 2, and pt. 3. See also, Meunier,
“Causerie Scientifique: La Lanterne Magique et L’Enseignement des Sciences,” Journal des Instituteurs,
35
e
année, no. 36, 4 Septembre 1892, 569-570; Beguet, “La Vulgurisation scientifique au XIX siècle,” 41;
and Sentilhes, “Audio-Visuel au Service de l’Enseignement,” 166-167.
91
Stanislas Meunier, “Conférence” pt. 1, 505 (my emphasis).
The vagueness of Meunier’s language here—in his use of “this” or “this one” [celle-ci]—opens up
the possibility that he is not using “this” in a deictic sense to refer to the Molteni projector and its capacity
to function like a solar microscope, but rather in reference to the “wonderful invention of photography” just
referred to in his previous sentence, and taken up again in the following sentence. This second, admittedly
less probable reading, comes tantalizingly close to presenting an early formulation of an idea André Bazin
will pursue 65 years later in his essay “Ontologie de l’image photographique” (1945), that the photographic
image is not a simple representation, but in some sense, “is the object itself,” and “is the model.” See
Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (1957; repr. Paris: Cerf-Corlet, 2007), 14; What is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans.
Hugh Gray (1967; repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 14; and What is Cinema?, trans.
Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), 8. Further archival research on Meunier’s address is
necessary to clarify this point.
264
1884).
92
The temptation and enthusiasm for conflating representational realism and the
thing-in-itself within the epistemological/perceptual frame of seeing things, is already
present in Meunier’s influential lectures. It only grows stronger (somewhat ironically)
with the introduction of the cinematograph fifteen years later, which removes the
presence of the “real life” thing from the scene of education altogether, offering instead
an intensified, even hallucinatory presence of the thing capture in life, sur la vif.
Photographic slides expanded the grasp of both the teacher and students in terms
of how object lessons and visual education were implemented and also what they could
address. Sentilhes describes the effects of projections as “push[ing] the walls of the
classroom as far back as the horizon”—a sentiment Meunier emphasized in his
pronouncement, “from this tiny device the entire world can emerge.”
93
Citing a report of
an educational lantern program in Marseilles published in the Revue Pédagogique in
1884, Sentilhes notes the enthusiasm educators and children alike felt for the dazzling
clarity of projected photographic slides (whose contours and details would remain
superior to those of printed photographs and motion pictures for quite some time) and the
stunning dimensions of the images (a Molteni projector could sharply magnify an image

92
Microscopic and invisible agents were the objects of an intense and often morbid fascination during the
Third Republic, when the triumphs of Pasteur were equally by the unsettling realization of microbes’
omnipresence. See Daniel Raichvarg, “Vers la compréhension des êtres infinement petits…,” in Histoire de
la Biologie, t. 1, ed. A. Giordan (Paris: Lavoisier, 1987), 91-198; and Larson, Dark Side of Nature, 85-106.
This obsession is perhaps most fascinatingly examined through Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s character
Doctor Tribulat Bonhomet, who jealously guards the secret content of his research on infusoria. Any time
the subject of his research comes up, he quickly redirects the conversation, often to the subjects of love and
matchmaking. The entire novel can in fact be read as motivated by microbes, which are the screened or
displaced subject of the entire text. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Claire Lenoir et autre contes insolites, with an
introduction and notes by Jacques Noiray (1887; repr. Paris: Flammarion, 1984), 29.
93
Sentilhes, “L’Audio-Visuel au Service de l’Enseignement,” 170; and Meunier quoted in Beguet, “La
Vulgarisation scientifique au XIX siècle,” 41.
265
by 2,500 times).
94
The lantern’s super-sized, super [sur] realism was seen as leaving a
formidable impression upon young minds, capable of igniting their imaginations.
Sentilhes quotes a little boy who exclaimed, after a lantern show in 1895, a “flea was
shown to us the size of a horse.”
95
Yet, in practice, educators were warned to carefully
monitor such sparks of inspiration, lest they blaze out of control. The seductive capacities
had to be carefully monitored, to keep their hallucinatory properties contained, to prevent
them from undermining the training of a realist common sense. In the words of one
Professor Henri Gilbaut, “the projection apparatus must not become a magic lantern.”
96
4.5 Cinémile
The cinematograph appeared as if right on cue to nourish the pursuit of a realist education
based in visual teaching and object lessons. The educational potential of film was, from
the very start—or even beforehand—touted as one of its primary assets. Its scientific
parentage in physiology was well known, and in advance of its official its arrival,
Edison—as recounted by Octave Uzanne in an 1893 article for Figaro and then in his
1895 short story “La Fin des Livres”—was already promoting its sentimental value as a
sort of luminous taxidermy, but also for educational and legal purposes as a precise form
of historical record.
97
The Polish-born Lumière cinematographer and medical filmmaker

94
Sentilhes, “L’Audio-Visuel au Service de l’Enseignement,” 170.
95
Ibid.
96
Henri Gilbaut, Conférences populaires, 40.
97
Octave Uzanne, “Sensations d’Amérique: Une Visite chez Edison,” Le Figaro, Lundi 8 Mai 1893, 1; and
Octave Uzanne and Albert Robida’s “La Fin des Livres,” in Contes pour les bibliophiles (Paris: Ancienne
Maison Quantin, 1895), 125–45. For a discussion of the broader philosophical implications of the
266
Boleslas Matuszewski—whose footage of Félix Faure’s visit to St. Petersburg furnished
decisive proof, contrary to accusations by Otto von Bismarck, that the French President
had indeed respectfully tipped his hat before the Russian flag, preserving French
honor—also championed the historical and educational potential of the medium (and the
need to archive it) in his 1897 pamphlet “A New Source of History” [Une nouvelle
source de l’histoire].
Moreover, animated photography could become a singularly efficacious teaching
process. How many lines of vague description in books intended for young people
will be rendered unnecessary, the day we unroll in front of a classroom in a
precise, moving picture the more or less agitated aspect of a deliberative
assembly; the meeting of Heads of State about to ratify an alliance; a departure of
troops or squadrons; or even the changing, mobile physiognomy of the city! But
necessarily a good deal of time must pass before we can have recourse to this
resource for teaching History. In order to unfold graphic, external history before
the eyes of those who did not witness it, it is necessary first to store it.
98
In addition to the creation of a cinémathèque, Matuszewski called for the creation of an
Encyclopedia of Surgical Films for teaching medical students.
99
In 1899, according to
George-Michel Coissac, l’Oeuvre française des conférences populaires
cinématographiques hosted the first program focused explicitly on cinema’s pedagogical

discourses of early cinema’s promises and its impact on later film theory, see Louis-Georges Schwartz,
“Cinema and the Meaning of Life,” Discourse 28, nos. 2-3 (2006): 7-27.
98
Boleslas Matuszewski, “A New Source of History,” trans. Laura U. Marks and Diane Koszarski, Film
History, vol. 7, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 322 (originally written in 1897).
99
According to Béatrice De Pastre-Robert and Emmanuelle Devos, the creation of a cinémathèque—or
musée d’archives cinématographiques—was brought before local officials in 1898 in the “Proposition du
conseiller municipal Marsoulan.” See, De Pastre-Robert and Devos, “La Cinémathèque de la Ville de
Paris,” 1895 no. 18, Images du Réel, La Non-fiction en France (1890-1930), ed. Thierry Lefebvre (1995):
108. On surgical cinema, see Valérie Vignaux, “Contribution à une histoire de l’emploi du cinéma dans
l’enseignement de la chirurgie,” 1895, no. 44 (2004), ¶ 2. Online edition:
http://1895revues.org/document305.html; Eugène-Louis Doyen, “Le Cinématographe et l’Enseignement de
la Chirurgie,” Revue Critique de Médecine et de Chirurgie, 1
e
année, no. 1, 15 Août 1899, 1-6; and Thierry
Lefebvre, La Chair et le celluloïd: Le cinéma chirugical du docteur Doyen (Brionne: Jean Doyen, 2004).
267
potential, consisting of seven actualities, including L’Industrie de la bouteille, Nos amis
les chiens, Les mines et les forges de Decazeville, étude saisissante de l’industrie
métallurgique [sic], Une colonie scolaire en vacances, La poetrie au Japon, La
fabrication de la colle forte, and Le dirigeable militaire Bayard-Clément.
100
The
enthusiasm for cinema’s potential was also a marketing point beyond the walls of
institutional education. The 1901 Pathé-Frères catalog, echoing Edison’s discourse of
technological progressivism, boasted, “The cinema is the schoolhouse, newspaper, and
theater of tomorrow.”
101
The first teachers in France to use film in the classroom primarily did so on their
own initiative. In 1911 a certain M. Brücker, a natural history teacher at the Lycée Hoche
in Versailles, began to illustrate his lectures with films. In the following two years, a
number of elite lycées in the environs of Paris also began using film for teaching,
including the boys’ lycées Condorcet, Janson-de-Sailly, Voltaire, the girls’ lycées
Fénelon and Jules-Ferry, and most notably, Louis-le-Grand, where a young Jean Painlevé
had just matriculated. Around the same time, Adrien Collette, one of the “apostles of
educational cinema” (as Georges-Michel Coissac, film historian and editor of the
Catholic visual education journals Le Fascinateur and then the educational film journal
Cinéopse, dubbed him) began using cinema in his classes, and in 1914 brought them to a

100
Letter from Georges-Michel Coissac to Léon Moussinac quoted in Christophe Gauthier, “Au risqué du
spectacle. Les projections cinématographiques en milieu scolaire dans les années 1920,” in Cinéma
pédagogique et scientifique. À la redécouverte des archives, ed. Béatrice de Pastre-Robert, Monique
Dubost, and Françoise Massit-Folléa (Lyon: ENS, 2004), 73.
101
Pathé-Frères catalog cited as an epigraph to Part One of French Film Theory and Criticism: 1907-1939,
A History/Anthology, vol. 1, 1907-1929, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1988), 4.
268
larger public as “cinematographic lessons” [leçons cinématographiques]. Like a
cinematic version of Bert’s Lectures et leçons de choses, Collette developed complete
series of lessons on primary education and manual labor using the cinematograph to
“excite curiosity, awaken, retain, and concentrate attention; to permit at will the
expansion of the limits of the field of observation; to summarize or condense facts of
which the development or repetition requires a relatively long time; rendering possible
the collective study of phenomena of a microscopic order.”
102
Alas, like all aspects of life
at the moment, the gathering momentum for the educational application of cinema was
diminished by the outbreak of war on the Western Front in August 1914.
In a response parallel to that of the war of 1870, the war of 1914 pushed educators
and politicians—most notably the Minister of Public Instruction and soon-to-be Minister
of War Paul Painlevé—to reconsider the state of France’s educational system. As
previously noted, on 15 December 1915, Painlevé Sr. appointed Jules-Louis Breton to
head the Commision de l’Enseignement et des beaux-arts à la Chambre des députés’ team
for exploring the use of the cinematograph in teaching at all levels, initiating the state’s
investment in educational cinema. On 23 March 1916, Breton recommended the
formation of a commission to go forward with research into the question, which
eventually resulted in the Bessou Report of 1920—the master text for the development
and deployment of film in education, setting the agenda for the next 19 years. Prior to

102
Bessou Report, 5; Léon Moussinac, La Naissance du Cinéma (1925; repr. Paris: Éditions d’Aujourd’hui,
1983), 159-170; Armelle Sentilhes, “L’Audio-Visuel Au Service de L’Enseignement,” 172; and Christophe
Gauthier, La Passion du Cinéma: Cinéphiles, ciné-clubs, et salles specialisées à Paris de 1920 à 1929
(Paris: Association Française de Recherche sur l’Histoire du Cinéma, 1999), 34. The Collette quotations are
from Gauthier—citing Georges-Michel Coissac, Le Cinématographe et L’Enseignement: Nouveau guide
pratique (Paris: Cinéopse, 1926)—and Moussinac, 160.
269
this, a report of the commission’s initial findings published in the Hebdo-film by M.
Ballot in May 1916 (an article sufficiently venomous to merit a disclaimer note from the
editors), gives a sense of what the state had in mind for the nation’s future Émiles and
Sophies. “After pompous praise from M. Painlevé, M. Bény-Levoit—Oh! Pardon! A
lapsus calami!—M. [Edmond] Benoit-Lévy read us a text expressing the wishes of the
Commission.”
103
Voicing the concerns of his fellow committee member Édouard
Herriot—mayor of Lyon and senator, soon to occupy the offices of President of the
Chamber of Deputies and Prime Minister, who fretted that cinema was a “school of
crime”
104
—Benoit-Lévy spoke of the hopes of the committee to excise the cinema from
its latent degenerate forces. The commission’s wishes, in Benoit-Lévy’s words, were to
“invite the Chambre Syndicale de la Cinématographie (Motion Pictures Employer’s
Association) to make every effort to replace films likely to unfavorably influence the
imaginations of children and even the popular classes with films likely to excite noble

103
M. Ballot, “Commision du Cinéma à l’École: Première Séance,” Hebdo-Film, 1
e
année, no. 11, 13 Mai
1916, 4. “Beny Levoit,” or “ben [eh bien] y le voit” appears to be a double play on words. It can translate
as “well see it there,” a reference to Edmond Benoit-Lévy’s role as one of the most powerful film
exhibitors in France (as the founder of the Omnia theaters). It can also be translated, a little loosely, as
“we’ll see” or “so it appears,” obviously a dig at the commission’s conclusion that they should form
another commission.
Edmond Benoit-Lévy’s nephew, the filmmaker and producer Jean Benoit-Lévy, then mobilized in
the army, would become a—and perhaps the—pivotal figure in educational film in France between the
wars.
104
The Bessou Report makes direct reference to “the eloquent vigor” of Herriot’s condemnation of the
salacious aspects of the cinema and its harmful impression on the youth. “The robberies and murders which
unroll on the screen, would haunt…the imagination of children and adolescents who, in their games,
reenact the precision of the gestures of robbers and murderers” (3). These concerns were duplicated in
Édouard Poulain, Contre le cinéma, école du vice et du crime. Pour le cinéma, école d’éducation,
moralisation et vulgarisation (Besançon, 1917). For a hilarious critical response to Herriot’s and Poulain’s
“School of Crime” polemic, see Anonymous, “Le Cinéma, École de Crime,” Cinéa (30 December 1921):
14. The letter, purportedly written by a professional burglar, professing a great appreciation for the films of
Maurice de Marsan (director of Le Traquenard)—scoffs at the idea that one could properly learn his trade
from the screen. As part of his retort, the author asks if, after seeing an actuality about a piano factory in
Connecticut, audience members were moved to go home and build a piano themselves.
270
feelings, such as patriotic feelings.”
105
Ballot, incredulous as to why a commission
created to address pedagogical issues is making programming suggestions for the
cinemas, mocks the suggestion that an additional review board constituted of good family
fathers be established to grant visas to films before they are shown to children. Invoking
Rousseau, Ballot condemns their efforts as mere “words…words…nothing else, not a
reality, not even an idea.”
106
The commission’s recommendations in the 1920 report maintain a strong
continuity and commitment to the realist educational agenda set forth by the Ferry
administration, including its moralistic and patriotic fervor. As if in direct response to
Ballot’s complaints, the report emphasizes the benefits of cinema for “the reduction of
verbalism, which delays and weakens the idea: it [cinema] presents the eyes with the
living synthesis of beings and things.”
107
The Bessou Report situates its investigation of
cinema for education not only as beneficial to pedagogy but as central to a sense national
recovery; a project also aimed at “utilizing and extending” a greatly diminished film
industry:
In the aftermath of the war…national school will have to accomplish a work more
important than in the past. It will have to contribute to hastening and expanding
the moral and intellectual development of the country…

105
Ballot, “Commision du Cinéma à l’École: Première Séance,” 4. These and other quotations, which
Ballot attributes to Edmond Benoit-Lévy, reappear verbatim in the Bessou Report.
106
Ibid. Much of the moralist language present in the discourses of the commission was already in
circulation prior to the war. For more on the moralist critique of film in France, see Richard Abel, “Before
the Canon,” in French Film Theory and Criticism, vol. 1, 10-14.
107
Bessou Report, 4.
271
The rational application of the cinematograph can have very beneficial
consequences for our schools. It is important to establish a comprehensive plan, to
conceive a methodical organization.
108
The stakes of the initiative were nothing short of the reformation of common sense of a
new generation potentially extended and accelerated, but also endangered by the torments
of modern warfare and sensual assaults of urban modernity (including cinema). The
Bessou Report, read in this manner, provides a revision of Rousseau’s famous treatise of
education, working on the reinvention of common sense that both preserved the founding
projects of the Third Republic and opened itself to the creation of a nation of cinÉmiles.
The report consists of three lines of action: (1) programs; (2) equipment and films
intended for teaching; and (3) ways and means. The programs for film cover nearly all
disciplines, but place a special emphasis upon the application in experimental fields such
as natural history and the sciences. In all cases emphasis is placed upon the necessity to
use films only as an auxiliary to the teacher. The equipment needs outline the
requirements for the implementation of film: that the apparatuses be sturdy and simple,
easy to use, completely safe (particularly from fires), and affordable; and that

108
Ibid., 3, 2. Gaumont and Benoit-Lévy, who both participated in the commission responsible for the
Bessou Report, showed a long and genuinely altruistic commitment to republican education. But their
presence on the committee also reflects an understanding of the potential mutual benefits for education and
the ailing film industry (which a few short years earlier was the dominant force in the global film market)
through the adaptation of new media to education. For more on Gaumont’s interest in education and the
interest of the film industry in educational markets, see Gaycken, “Devices of Curiosity,” 102; and Thierry
Lefebvre, “Film scientifique et grand public. Une rencontre différée,” in E J Marey: Actes du colloque du
centenaire, ed. Dominique de Font-Réaulx, Thierry Lefebvre, and Laurent Mannoni (Paris: Arcadia, 2006),
165.
The use, or at least promise of the utilization of film for moralizing aims, is as old as the medium
itself. See, for example, François de La Bretèque and Pierre Guibbert, “Mission Moralisatrice et
Romantisme Social du Cinéma des Premiers Temps,” in Les Vingt premières années de cinéma français:
actes de colloque international de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 4, 5, et 6 novembre 1993 (Paris: Presses de la
Sorbonne nouvelle, 1995): 223-247.
272
inflammable, safety film stocks be developed as quickly as possible (the standard film
stock up through World War II were made with incredibly flammable nitrate). In terms of
implementation of the program (ways and means) the commission recommends
beginning by outfitting teacher’s colleges, then elite universities, middle schools and high
schools, etc. They also recommend the creation of means for archiving and distributing
educational prints (note that 1920 is the year the Musée Pédagogique takes up this task).
The report estimates the total cost of equipping France’s schools for film projection at 20-
25 million francs, and recommend immediately asking the senate for 4-5 million francs to
get the project underway, with the goal of reaching critical mass by 1929. Although they
did not reach their initial goals, by the end of the decade there were, according to
Sentilhes, 10-12,000 projectors in schools.
109
Like the lantern before it, the cinematograph—so long as used
properly—garnered praise for its potential to push back the walls of the classroom. The
commission imagined it capable of also combatting the image of France as a provincial
country (as German nationalists often portrayed France) by exposing
students—particularly in rural areas—to the wonders of the modern world. The
commission rhapsodized that film would, through its powers of exposure, combat small
mindedness and ignorance born of isolation from the metropolis, without any of the
unsavory or corrupting elements of the city.
It initiates the child, from the earliest age, into the complex mechanisms of
modern life. Broadening horizons, suppressing barriers, it reveals the diversity of
the world’s aspects, relating and rendering almost tangible the most distant beings

109
Bessou Report, 6-13 (programs), 13-16 (equipment), 16-18 (ways and means), esp. 8-10, 14, 18; and
Sentilhes, “L’Audio-Visuel au Service de l’Enseignement,” 177.
273
and things, resuscitating vanished epochs, showing truths more beautiful than the
most beautiful legends. Not only does it nourish the mind with useful knowledge,
it can uproot it from vulgarities and baseness, raising it towards the ideal. By the
varied beauty of the spectacles that it can represent: landscapes, nature scenes,
works of art, it awakens and satisfies the healthiest curiosity, it develops aesthetic
senses and through beauty drives toward morality.
110
Quick on the heels of the reprise of Herriot’s concerns about cinema’s corrupting powers,
the commission celebrates film for possessing a sort of hygienic, cleansing effect that
matches Comte’s loftiest fantasies of the benefits of aesthetic education.
As an institutionalizing gesture, the Bessou Report reaffirmed the state’s
commitment to realism as a method for bringing life to teaching and teaching to life. The
cinematograph exemplified the Republican myth of progress through science, improving
upon even the luminous photographic lanterns projections by imbuing the images with
motion. The commission endorsed the cinema as a considerable advance in the
development of visual education, and one imbued with a sense of national pride owing to
France’s chauvinistic claims to the invention the motion pictures. The report affirms the
value of imagery for “intellectual and moral apprenticeship” but notes that even the best
illustrations tend to interpose a veil (their metaphor) between representation and reality,
which, no matter how transparent, tends to feed the imagination but not reason. Film,
with its greater capacity for verisimilitude, “has advantages over the image and story
without having any of their disadvantages. It is life.”
111
(Life is often presented in the
educational literature of the period as a self-evident term and the apotheosis of education.

110
Ibid., 4-5. These lines originally appeared in the report given 23 March 1916.
111
Bessou Report, 3-4 (my emphasis). Bessou repeats this argument verbatim in “Le Cinématographe et
l’Enseignement Primaire,” in Jubilé Louis Lumière: 6 Novembre 1935, np.
274
The educator G. Thévenard, in his contribution to the celebration of the 40
th
anniversary
of the Lumière dominator in 1935, describes the cinematograph as “the best means that
we possess for helping to realize this pedagogical ideal: to bring life, as much as possible,
into school.”
112
)
In his appendix to the report, Adrien Collette, a practicing teacher with perhaps
the most experience using film in the classroom at that moment, clarifies film’s role in
the national curriculum as primarily that of a supplement and synthesis for object lessons.
Collette recommends film as the best solution to the problem of representing the missing
objects of object lessons. But even in the presence of the object itself, film helps
“complete” the object lesson: “demonstrating the origin, transformations, and utilization
of the things observed.”
113
It is on these grounds that the deeply ambivalent Herriot
eventually gives his support to the educational use of film, claiming “I am interested in
the cinematograph for the same reasons that previously brought Paul Bert to his
impassioned interest in ‘object lessons’…” Likewise, Herriot compared the task of the
cinematograph to be equivalent to that of object lessons in an earlier era, giving “to future
young minds, more precision than in previous generations.”
114

112
G. Thévenot, “Le Cinématographe dans L’Enseignement Secondaire,” in Jubilé Louis Lumière: 6
Novembre 1935, np. A rare exception to this is the writer Pierre-Henry Proust, who writes of the value of
film as providing the teacher with “quasi-living examples.” Proust, “La Science par le Plaisir: la valeur
éducative de l’écran,” Ciné-Comoedia, no. 6879, vendredi 20 Novembre 1931, 7.
113
Adrien Collette, “Report from M. Collette on the use of the cinematograph in primary schools,” in
Bessou Report, 21, 25-26.
114
Édouard Herriot in Cinéopse, Nov. 1930, cited in Vignaux, Jean Benoit-Lévy, 39; and Herriot, “Le
valeur éducative du Cinématographe,” in Jubilé Louis Lumière: 6 Novembre 1935 (Paris: Renaissance
Française, 1936), np.
275
The Bessou Report provided a critical momentum to the employment of film for
pedagogical ends within France and, as Valérie Vignaux’s and Zoë Druick’s research on
such international organs as the League of Nations and UNESCO suggests, on the
international stage (such as the remnants of the League of Nation’s efforts at intellectual
cooperation on a cultural level: the International Congress of Motion Pictures [Congrès
International du Cinématographe] held in Paris in Autumn 1926 and the eventual
founding of the International Institute of Educational Cinema [L’Institut International du
Cinématographe Éducatif de Rome] in Rome).
115
In April of 1922, the Conservatoire
National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) hosted a conference for Art à l’école on the subject
of cinema in education, inaugurated by the Minister of Public Instruction Léon Bérard
and the Undersecretary of State for Technical Education Gaston Vidal. In addition to
conferences on cinema’s development and deployment, CNAM also hosted an exposition
of documentary and educational films and film equipment.
116
The conclusion of the
CNAM conference reaffirmed the findings of the Bessou Report, emphasizing the
necessity to limit the application of film in the classroom (“The lesson will be given
through the word and fixed view, the cinema is an instrument of synthesis”
117
).

115
Vignaux, Jean Benoit-Lévy, 24-34; and Druick, “‘Reaching the Multimillions’,” 66-92.
116
Léon Moussinac, La Naissance du Cinéma (1925; repr. Paris: Éditions d’Aujourd’hui, 1983), 160-163;
Vignaux, Jean Benoit-Lévy, 126; De Pastre and Devos, “La Cinémathèque de la Ville de Paris,” 109; and
Christophe Gauthier, La Passion du Cinéma: Cinéphiles, ciné-clubs, et salles specialisées à Paris de 1920
à 1929 (Paris: Association Française de Recherche sur l’Histoire du Cinéma, 1999), 68.
117
CNAM conference conclusion quoted in M. Arnould, “Le Cinéma à L’École Primaire,” in Association
Française pour l’Avancement des Sciences fuisionnée avec l’Association Scientifique de France,
Conférences: Compte Rendu de la 50
e
session, Lyon, 1926 (Paris: Masson, 1927), 771.
276
On 14 December 1925 the municipal council of Paris founded the Cinémathèque
de la Ville de Paris, dedicated to conserving prints and equipment for educational uses,
but which also commissioned a number of significant educational films, drawing upon
resources of Adrien Bruneau and Jean Benoit-Lévy for films proposed by technical
schools, as well as compilation and re-edited films from their collections for classroom
use.
118
In a similar spirit, on 11 March 1927 the Musée du Cinéma was inaugurated at
CNAM in the presence of President Gaston Doumergue as well as Herriot (then Minister
of Public Instruction) and Painlevé (Minister of War).
119
Along with the Musée Pédagogique and such institutions as Cinéma Éducateur,
founded in Lyon in 1921 and reconstituted as the Office Régional du Cinéma Éducateur
(ORCEL) in 1924, and the Office Cinématographique de Nîmes, the Musée du Cinéma
helped support the realization of integrating cinema into teaching at all levels.
120
These
early cinémathèques—along with the 1920s burgeoning film culture supported by film
journals, specialist cinemas, and conferences and lectures (such as those sponsored by the
Musée Galliera in 1924 and the Vieux-Colombier in 1926, and the year long course on
cinematography organized by the Association Philomathique at the École Nationale

118
De Pastre and Devos, “La Cinémathèque de la Ville de Paris,” 119-120.
119
Christophe Gauthier, La Passion du Cinéma, 68-69, 218.
120
See Paul Ariès, “Le Cinéma éducateur dans les années trente ou la laïcité au service du cinéma,” 1895,
no. 14 (1993): 62-75; and Béatrice de Pastre, “Cinéma éducateur et propagande coloniale à Paris au début
des années 1930.”
277
d’Arts et Métiers in the 13
th
arrondissement), served as pivotal instruments in the
conceptualization of historical and theoretical work on cinema.
121
A number of prominent educational filmmakers working concurrent to Jean
Painlevé helped establish a lively educational film network. Jean Bréreault, Marc
Cantagrel, and Jean Benoit-Lévy—whose names appear frequently in the programming
notes of the ADPCS congresses—were responsible for producing hundreds of films for
educational use and pioneering teaching techniques with film during the interwar period.
Brérault taught primary school for seven years before self-producing films for use in his
classes, primarily based upon his travels throughout France during his vacations.
Between 1927-1930, largely using his own resources, Brérault produced 26 films that
very much follow the object lesson model (e.g. plaster, modern processes for the
cultivation of wheat, basket making, the reproduction of goats, etc.) and the exploration
of the Hexagon’s geography and regional industries reminiscent of Le Tour de la France
par deux enfants.
122
He then teamed up with Pathé to produce a series of 32 sound films
on the geography and industry of France, once again specifically produced for

121
The work of Noureddine Ghali and Christophe Gauthier on the subject of 1920s film cultures and
cinéphilia. For advertisements listing the topics and speakers for the course at the École Nationale d’Arts et
Métiers and the Vieux-Colombier, see Cinéa-Ciné Pour Tous, no. 50, 1 décembre 1925; and Cinéa-Ciné
Pour Tous, no. 56, 1 mars 1926.
122
On Brérault, see Thévenard and Tessel, Le Cinéma Scientifique Française, 113-121; and Josette
Ueberschlag, Jean Brérault, l'instituteur cinéaste: 1898-1973 (Presses Universitaires Sainte-Etienne, 2007).
Brérault’s self-produced films include such titles as: La plâtre, L’Ozone, Procédés modernes de la
culture du blé, Fabrication mécanique du pain, L’osiériculture, La vannerie rustique, La vannerie de luxe,
Élevage de la chèvre, Parturition de la chèvre, Élevage du cheval, Reproduction de cheval, Une course de
lévriers, Silos métalliques à fourrage, Construction d’une maison métallique, Pas de pneus trop petits,
Comment peut agir le remède homéopathique, Préparation industrielle du remède homeopathique,
Méthodes du Docteur Georges Pascalin pour la réduction mécanique des fractures récentes, Une journée
internationale coopérative, Une belle réalisation coopérative, Une belle manifestation du scoutisme
féminin, Une colonie scolaire (Le Carolue), Si nos aïeux ressuscitaient, Au pays de l’éternel printemps, Au
bord de la mer, Idée d’une carte (Musée Pédagogique).
278
educational markets, and later produced propaganda films for unoccupied France during
the war.
Marc Cantagrel, a professor of technical education and business, began using
films with his lectures on industrial processes in the early 1920s, and soon turned to
producing technical films (on metallurgy, beer brewing, fabric-making) with the
Compagnie Universelle Cinématographique. In 1931 he joined CNAM as its Technical
Advisor and helped found the Centre de Production de Films Cinématographiques
d’Enseignement Scientifique [Center for the Production of Cinematographic Films for
Scientific Teaching], which Painlevé would take over in 1937.
123
Jean Benoit-Lévy, as previously mentioned, produced an immense body of almost
300 hygiene, documentary, instructional, medical and surgical, and fiction films with a
strong moralist bent, the most famous of which are Pasteur (1922, with Jean Epstein),
Peau de Pêche (1928), La Maternelle (1934, with Marie Epstein), and Hélène (1936). An
ardent republican, he produced films for the ministries of health, agriculture, and
professional education, and also served as a spokesman (official and unofficial) for the
state’s adaptation of film through his theoretical writing and institutional activism (on
extra-parliamentary commissions, as a fellow with the Rockefeller Foundation, as an
exiled French-Jew teaching at the New School for Social Research during World War II),

123
See Anon. [Marc Cantagrel?], “Budget de l’Exercise 1934: Création au Conservatoire National des Arts
et Métiers d’un Centre de Production de Films Cinématographiques d’Enseignement Scientifique” (1934),
CNAM dossier, FJP; and Thévenard and Tessel, Le Cinéma Scientifique Française, 103-111. The author
of the “Budget de l’Exercise 1934: Création au Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers d’un Centre de
Production de Films Cinématographiques d’Enseignement Scientifique”—from hereon cited as “Création
au CNAM d’un Centre”—is most likely Marc Cantagrel, but in absence of further archival evidence to
confirm this, I have chosen to cite it as Anonymous.
279
earning himself the position as one of the primary voices in the debates regarding cinema
and pedagogy.
124
As a well regarded voice with strong institutional ties in the film industry,
government, and non-governmental organizations like the Rockefeller foundation,
Benoit-Lévy’s numerous published texts on film and pedagogy offer valuable insight into
the manner in which film was incorporated and institutionalized in the name of public
instruction. In terms of generating in interest in films produced specifically for teaching,
Benoit-Lévy insisted upon a sharp distinction between the educational film [film
d’éducation] and the instructional or teaching film [film d’enseignement] despite their
shared “utilitarian” and instrumental aims. Whereas educational films were aimed at a
general public and often took the form of simple documentaries, he defined the
instructional film as “that which is conceived and produced with the aim of exclusively
serving a teacher as a new means, added to all the others, for use in his classroom.”
125
Significantly, his writing and advocacy emphasize the moralizing contributions of cinema
in service of and sponsored by the state, in many respects a direct transposition of the
Ferry administration’s emphasis on education as first and foremost dedicated to the

124
Like Painlevé, Benoit-Lévy, despite his incredible activity and contributions to French cinema, for a
long period was a rather forgotten figure. Valérie Vignaux’s Jean Benoit-Lévy ou le corps comme utopie
makes considerable strides to correct this oversight and offers a valuable contextualization of educational
reform during this period. The text is equally valuable for its accompanying DVD featuring a number of
Benoit-Lévy’s difficult to see propaganda, hygiene, documentary, and docu-drama films.
125
Jean Benoit-Lévy, “Film d’enseignement et film d’éducation,” Comoedia, no. 5197, année 21, vendredi
25 mars 1928, 3; and Benoit-Lévy, Les Films d’enseignement et d’éducation, s.d., 5, cited in Vignaux, Jean
Benoit-Lévy, 116.
280
formation of the nation’s children into proper citizens.
126
Benoit-Lévy and Painlevé stand
as two significant figures in the history of the pedagogical use of film that in many ways
worked in parallel with each other. They shared a cordial sense of mutual respect, but
their activities were rooted in significantly different political and philosophical projects,
particularly with respect to the formation of their student-audiences, the cinémiles of a
future France.
127
4.6 Painlevé and the Association pour la Documentation Photographique et
Cinématographique dans les Sciences
Jean Benoit-Lévy suggests a model of effective advocacy for increased state and
industrial sponsorship of educational and instructional films. His calls for more rigorous
commitments took place largely from within institutions of the state, as well as such
international organs as the League of Nations, where he served a member of its
Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and UNESCO.

126
Benoit-Lévy, “La Situation actuelle du cinéma d’enseignement,” Bulletin du Musée pédagogique
(1929): 12-23.
127
Anecdotal evidence suggests that alongside mutual admiration, a level of suspicion and professional
jealousy may have existed between Painlevé and Benoit-Lévy. Their film aesthetics—with the exception of
their work in surgical films—diverge dramatically. One primarily informed by a French republican
bourgeois moral sensibility (though cruelly kept at a distance by a baseline anti-semitism) and the other
born of a certain bourgeois anarchism and anti-institutional sensibility.
In a letter to Painlevé from Joris Ivens, dated 4 May 1939, Ivens cryptically writes (through the
hand of a friend, since Ivens’ French was limited): “I think Benoit-Lévy is the Rockefeller Foundation’s
favorite, which is a shame since it is in our interest that the foundation has a more appropriate contact with
French educational and documentary film. If you hear anything from the Foundation, it is necessary to
remain in contact with them. Another time I will imply why.” [Je pense M. Benoit-Levy est le favorit du
Rochefeller Foundation [sic], c’est mauvais parce que c’est notre interet que ce foundation a un contact
plus propre avec le film d’éducation et documentaire du France. Si tu entendras quelque chose du
Foundation, il faut pas du garderas le contact avec eux. Une autre fois je s’impliquerai [sic?] pourquoi.] See
Jean Painlevé, Correspondences Personnel dossier, FJP.
281
Painlevé, always suspicious of official sponsorship despite his family name, concentrated
on establishing a network of autonomous institutions to advocate for the production and
propagation of scientific films. Roxane Hamery notes that by the end of the 1930s, just a
decade into his career, Jean Painlevé had become a central figure of scientific filmmaking
on an international scale, as both a producer and vigorous promoter of the film in
research and teaching.
128
He accomplished this thanks to the reputation of his films, but
perhaps more so through the institutional interventions he launched from the narrow
cellar offices at 12 rue Armand-Moisan in the 15
th
arrondissement.
In addition to the Institut de Cinématographie Scientifique (ICS), founded in
1930, which handled the production and distribution of scientific films, in 1933 Painlevé,
Claoué, and Servanne co-founded the Association pour la documentation photographique
et cinématographique dans les sciences (ADPCS) to promote scientific and pedagogical
applications of cinema. The ADPCS held annual conferences each October between 1933
and the outbreak of the Second World War, bringing together filmmakers, research
scientists, film manufacturers, and educators. After liberation, the organization resumed
activities, reorganizing itself in 1946 as the Association internationale du cinéma
scientifique (AICS) [International Association of Scientific Cinema], which continued
holding annual conferences until 1992. These conferences, which were held at the Musée
Pédagogique and in 1937 divided between the Musée Pédagogique and the newly created
Palais de la Découverte, sparked diverse and lively debates regarding technique and

128
Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 95.
282
pedagogical uses of film, and had a direct impact upon Painlevé’s ideas about filmmaking
and teaching.
In Article 4 of the founding document filed by Painlevé, Claoué, and Servanne in
order to grant the ADPCS official status, the co-founders described the primary goals of
the organization as follows:
(1) The study of different photographic and cinematographic procedures and
techniques having a practical application for scientific research
(2) The unification of activities using photographic processes in the sciences
(3) The organization of periodic or annual meetings intended to provoke research
in these domains;
(4) Giving various forms of incentives for rewarding scientific works
(5) The constitution of diverse sections corresponding to each branch of the
sciences
(6) To implement in a general manner all the means likely to produce the aims
enumerated above.
129
Claoué, in a radio emission delivered on 20 September 1933, two weeks prior to the first
congress, remarked upon the surprising absence of an organization such as the ADPCS.
He justified the organization as filling an important lack in international scientific and
educational communities, noting that the congresses were founded in order to help keep
scientific filmmakers informed about the work of their predecessors and colleagues, to
make connections between researchers and specially trained filmmakers, and to allow
researchers and filmmakers to discuss learn about each other’s experiments in film.
130
The ADPCS placed great emphasis upon the necessity for international cooperation, the

129
Claoué, Painlevé, and Servanne, “Statute: Association pour la documentation photographique et
cinématographique dans les Sciences” (1933), ADPCS dossier, FJP. See also, Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 91-
95, and Berg, “Contradictory Forces,” 17.
130
Charles Claoué, “Le Cinéma Médical: Conférence radiodiffusée par le Radio-Club Étranger, sous les
auspices du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, le mercredi 20 Septembre à 3 heures du matin pour les
auditeurs américains,” 1933, 1, held in ADPCS dossier, FJP.
283
free and open diffusion of knowledge and information, and independence from both
government and commercial constraints. In an address to the members of the third
congress of the ADPCS in 1935, Painlevé explained,
I want to emphasize that our Association for the Photographic and
Cinematographic Documentation in the Sciences is not linked to any official
organization and that we are self-sufficient, for better and worse, with regards to
our needs: on the other hand we constitute neither a chapel nor a society of mutual
admiration: anyone who works in an independent manner is eagerly welcomed by
us.”
131
In practice, ADPCS did not make a policy of refusing participation from either
commercial or governmental film efforts, so long as they brought something of scientific
and educational value to the discussion. At the conclusion of the first congress, held 5-7
October 1933, the members defined the “character of documents” to be featured in
subsequent congresses in such a manner as to emphasize their experimental nature.
Featured films must (1) clearly indicate how technical means by which they were
produced, (2) must be completely free of all advertising save for the name of the director
or production studio, and (3) must demonstrate either a new technique, documentary
form, or previously unrecorded facts. Films that fall outside of these parameters, but still

131
Jean Painlevé, “Interventions personnelles au Congrès,” unpublished typescript, 1935, 1, held in the
ADPCS dossier, FJP.
In a draft of a 1935 letter addressed to filmmakers in the Soviet Union regarding the conference
and his hopes that delegates will participate, Painlevé explains that both the ICS and ADPCS are
autonomous institutions with no direct ties to the interests of the state and capital:
I used the pompous name Institute—which does not obviously match with the two cellars and two
offices that we occupy!—for the organization, whose statutes are adjoined, to indicate that we
wouldn’t be doing any business there: it was a precaution without effect since there are
“Institutes” which are strictly commercial… No aid of any kind has penetrated here.
See the letter “Chers Camarades,” 1935, 1, held in the ADPCS dossier, FJP. Additional quotations from
Painlevé’s writing are included in the illuminating discussion of Painlevé’s fiercely guarded independence
in Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 94.
284
hold particular scientific or cinematic interest might be featured in several screening
sessions held parallel to the conference, a decision that enabled the organizers a certainly
flexibility.
132
At the conclusion of the third congress in 1935, the goals of the organization
had expanded its ambitions to include (1) the creation of a continually updated
international repertoire of scientific and documentary films with sufficient explanations
so as to prevent other filmmakers from needlessly duplicating already existent research (a
commitment that spawned the Cinémathèque scientifique in 1945, which Painlevé co-
founded with Georges Franju, Charles Cloué, and Dominique Johansen
133
), (2) calls for
an international accord relieving films shown for non-theatrical, non-commercial
purposes from customs and exhibition taxes, and (3) the organization of well-equipped
and expertly staffed film laboratories in all research centers.
134
The programming of the conferences, as André Bazin marveled upon their
resumption after the war, had a sort of focused eclecticism that in many ways recalls the
programming of the Vieux Colombier (which ended its run as a specialty cinema in
1934).
135
The inaugural conference presented 10 hours worth of films over the course of 8

132
Anon., Association pour la documentation photographique et cinématographique dans les sciences:
Compte rendu du premier congrès de la section médicale et biologique, les 5, 6, et 7 octobre 1933 au
Musée Pédagogique de l’État (Bordeaux: J. Bière, 1933), 22. From here on referred to as Compte rendu.
133
See the statute of 6 June 1945, “Archives de la Photographie et du Cinéma Scientifiques,” held in
CNAM dossier, FJP. An earlier version of this statute was filed 23 January 1941.
134
Jean Painlevé, “L’Association pour la documentation photographique et cinématographique dans les
sciences,” unpublished typescript, 1935, 2, held in the ADPCS dossier, FJP. A handwritten note on the top
of the page reads, “donné à Mlle Simone Dubreuil à Paris Soir le 15 octobre 1935” [given to Mademoiselle
Simone Dubreuil of Paris Soir on 15 October 1935]. Hamery, 93, cites the same three points with verbatim
wording, as published in Anon, “Le 3
e
congrès de documentation cinématographique dans les sciences,”
Interciné, no. 11, novembre 1935, 63.
135
André Bazin, “Beauté du hasard,” L’Écran français, no. 121, 21 octobre, 1947, translated by Jeanine
Herman as “Science Film: Accidental Beauty,” in Science is Fiction, 145-147.
285
sessions, focused primarily on biological and medical films (particularly surgical films),
including work by Comandon, Claoué, Benoit-Lévy, Carrel,
136
Painlevé, etc., but also
included several sound documentaries from the German studio U.F.A. on invisible clouds
and microscope detectives. Painlevé also included a film adding historical perspective to
his own current research through the selection of a stencil-colored film on marine
zoology by a certain Bayard, dating 1912, described in the published report for the
congress as a “charming exposé of a luminosity and precision capable of being envied by
modern documentaries, calling to mind the best animated films of today.”
137
This last
selection became indicative of a concern not only for aesthetic aspects of science films,
but an interest in exploring its history and pioneers, such as screenings of Comandon’s
pre-World War I films, and a presentation by a Dr. Weyl of Eugène-Louis Doyen’s
oeuvre at the third congress in 1935, which Painlevé took as proof that “true
independents know how to render homage to the workers who have preceded them.”
138
In
addition to scientists from throughout France (Bordeaux, Cambrai, Paris, Strasbourg,
Toulouse, and Tours), participants came from Brussels, Germany, the United States,

136
Dr. Alexis Carrel was a French Noble-prize winning surgeon and biologist who worked for the
Rockefeller Foundation in New York. His surgical method and biological breakthroughs, particularly in
battlefield surgery and antisepsis, organ transplants, the development of the “perfusion pump” to keep
organs alive outside of the body, and tissue cultivation or senescence (research in life extension), earned
him considerable fame. He published two well known books: one on eugenics in 1936 called L’Homme, cet
inconnu, and a book on organ transplants with the famed pilot Charles Lindbergh, The Culture of Organs
(New York: Paul B. Hober, 1938). Despite his great admiration for aspects of Carrel’s research and the
films he made of it, Painlevé published a scathing review of the fascist politics of Carrel’s L’Homme, cet
inconnu in Vendredi, 29 novembre 1935.
137
Anon., Compte rendu, 3.
138
Jean Painlevé, “Interventions personnelles au Congrès,” 1. In the original text, “un juste” (a just, a
precise), as in the phrase “un juste hommage,” and “à ceux” (to those) are crossed out and “aux
travailleurs” (to the workers) is inserted in pencil.
286
Japan, and Argentina. Later conferences would expand to include representatives from
Switzerland, Holland, the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, Italy, Portugal, Austria, and
Czechoslovakia, and included such filmmakers as Achille-Pierre Dufour (whose films for
the Palais de Découverte were produced and voiced by Painlevé), Jean Brérault, Marc
Cantagrel, J. C. Mol (the Dutch amateur science filmmaker), Oskar Fischinger (who
presented his 1933 Gasparcolor experiment Kreise [Circles]), Adrien Klein (another
Gasparcolor pioneer), and Svend Noland (the animator, effects expert, and
documentarian who later worked on Nazi propaganda films).
139
The first congress also hosted workshops and debates about film technique (such
as shooting surgical procedures), the comparative analysis of various formats (8, 9.5, 16,
17.5, and 35 mm celluloid and ozaphane), and technologies (microcinematography,
different methods for filming with x-rays). Subsequent conferences included multi-year
examinations of scuba and underwater filming (accompanied by a presentation of footage
shot by Yves Le Prier, P. Sicard, and Painlevé at the Club des Sous l’Eau meetings),
high-speed and slow-motion cinematography, color cinematography (which despite his
enthusiasm, Painlevé insisted in 1934 and 1935 was not commercially viable), and 3-D
filmmaking, all of which would figure strongly in Painlevé’s technical research at the ICS
during the 1930s, and become primary topics of his work and teaching at CNAM. In
addition to discussions of technology and technique, the congress members also debated
questions of aesthetics, authorship, and film theory. For example, during the discussion of

139
This data comes from the programs for the congresses in 1933, 1935, 1936, 1938 held in the ADPCS
dossier, FJP. Further archival research is necessary to track down the programs and further information for
the second and fifth congresses, held in 1934 and 1937.
287
the varied film formats available for recording surgical procedures, Jean Benoit-Lévy, in
a rare discourse on aesthetics, is reported as asserting that,
it is not only a question of formats, but of a preliminary work which can only be
done by adequately skilled specialists possessing a personal technique that they
must know how to rapidly adjust to the needs of the surgeon…in order to create a
cinematographic œuvre and not just a document that anybody can now record
with success, thanks to sophisticated modern apparatuses.
140
Benoit-Lévy—whose surgical films were referred to by the Compte rendu of the first
congress as “the model for the genre”—makes a number of interesting distinctions in this
brief intervention that disrupt notions of surgical film as expressions of a completely
disinterested, transparent, and expressive of a universal aesthetic.
141
Benoit-Lévy asserts the importance of a personal technique—or style—but one
that must also be open to improvisation and collaboration in order to be responsive to the
needs of its actors and subject. It is this quality, rather than any technological apparatus,
that is responsible for the creation of a work, an oeuvre that exceeds the merely functional
value of a document (in a traditional rather than Bataillian sense), and perhaps even the
documentary. Jean Benoit-Lévy evokes something of a different order: that of the filmic.
At the same time, this evocation of technique—which to my knowledge does not appear
elsewhere in Benoit-Lévy’s discourses on filmmaking, and is perhaps the result of the
unsentimental stare of the surgical film (many shot in a single take)—suggests an
interesting fissure even in his own work in its difference from his more sentimental and
instrumental notions of the instructional and propaganda films. It is also rather distinct

140
Anon., Compte rendu, 10.
141
Ibid., 4.
288
from Grierson’s contemporaneous notion of the “creative treatment of actuality”—as the
“value” is not created in the imposition of narrative or intervention of montage, but rather
emerges from protocols informing the choreography of filmmaker and profilmic scene, as
well as long-take filming.
During a subsequent debate, Painlevé also emphasized the importance of a critical
approach to both the production and viewing of science films and the epistemological
status of the image. Dr. Garripuy of Toulouse, author of the films Accouchement normal
and Opération de Poro, after a screening of his work, felt compelled to explain that even
though the subjects in his film look dead, they are indeed alive. In response, Painlevé
gave an early formulation of a core tenant of his critical thinking on film and in particular
on the use of film for teaching. According to the transcript in the Compte rendu, Painlevé,
recalled, as he had done in describing the elaborate precautions with his films on
the stickleback’s egg and Normet’s serum, that the cinema must constantly
awaken the critical spirit, as any means of investigation must do, which, by
contributing a new means of evidence, always brings with it possibilities of
trickery [truquages] and false interpretation.
142
Painlevé introduces here one of the tenets adopted at the end of the congress, that all
films featured should indicate the means of their technological production (a practice
established by the recording protocols of such scientists such as Étienne-Jules Marey,
Lucien Bull, Jean Comandon, indicated by the omnipresent clocks, metronomes, grids,
and other measuring and calibration devices in the mise-en-scène). For Painlevé this
meant an obligation on the part of the filmmaker to indicate the speed of filming, scale of
magnification, and any other variables introduced when recording or editing. Painlevé

142
Ibid., 14. For a fuller elaboration of this point, see Painlevé, “Du Faux dans le documentaire,” Instruire
et Plaire, vol. 1, no 2 (December 1938): 24-25, 41.
289
also raises here a certain epistemological vigilance he believed necessary for the
production of documents and documentaries, a concern that receives extended attention
in his subsequent teaching.
The ADPCS served the cause of film education in at least two manners. First it
aimed to educate and inform practitioners—research scientists and filmmakers—on the
most recent innovations in their fields and give them a forum for talking shop, so to
speak, about their research and their recording, presentation, and representation of that
research in film. These discussions, as sketched above, were often the occasion for
technical as well as aesthetic, critical, and theoretical discussions. Second, the congresses
provided an opportunity for educational filmmakers to screen their films, and put them
into circulation amongst a network of educators. It is certainly significant that Charles
Lebrun, director of the Musée Pédagogique, hosted the conferences during the
1930s—which saw the size of the congress quickly increase from 8 sessions the first year
to 15 by the third and fourth years, with the incorporation of additional “hors-series”
(special) screenings to feature interesting films that do not exactly fit the parameters of
the conference but nevertheless have a scientific or cinematographic interest. The
independent, international character of the ADPCS, with its mixture of rigor and
eclecticism, suggests one model of education that Painlevé threw himself into
wholeheartedly. Furthermore, the films and debates introduced over the course of the
ADPCS’s interwar conferences furnished much of the material for his own research
pursuits at the ICS, and as Roxane Hamery has noted, overlapped with and nourished the
290
focus of his teaching and research activities at CNAM.
143
In this respect, his heightened
sensitivity to the epistemological challenges of film had a particularly significant impact
upon his lectures on cinematic technique, inaugurated at CNAM in November 1937.
4.7 Lectures on Cinematographic Technique: Lessons from Painlevé
On 8 July 1937 the members of CNAM’s administrative council voted in favor of hiring
Jean Painlevé as the new director of the Center for the Production of Scientific Cinema, a
post that had recently been left vacant by the departure of its first director Marc
Cantagrel.
144
As part of his new position, Painlevé inaugurated his series “Lectures on
Cinematographic Technique” on 3 November 1937 in the grand amphitheater (number 2)
at CNAM (see Figure 66). Based upon the early success of the lectures, the
administrative council instituted Painlevé’s course as an annual event. Furthermore, by
unanimous approval of a vote held 23 December 1937, the council also put at Painlevé’s
disposal the funding and resources to incorporate laboratory practicals [travaux
practiques] into the classes and, significantly, to support research on cinematographic
technology and techniques with regards to its application in the sciences, with the
intention of using this research as the opportunity to produce scientific films for
teaching.
145
Painlevé’s general course in film technique reemphasized a commitment to

143
Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 95.
144
Letter from Anatole de Monzie to Jean Painlevé, 10 July 1937, and attached “Extrait du Proces-Verbal
Reorganisation du Centre de Production de Films Scientifiques,” CNAM dossier, FJP.
145
Letter from Anatole de Monzie to Jean Painlevé, 27 January 1938, 1, and attached “Extrait du Proces-
Verbal du Conseil d’Administration: Séance du Jeudi 23 décembre 1937,” 1-3; and Jean Painlevé, “Projet
d’Organisation des Travaux Practiques,” 24 Février 1938, 1-2, in CNAM dossier, FJP. The extract of the
administrative proceedings also notes the interest in founding a cinémathèque at CNAM.
291
Fig. 66. Poster advertising Painlevé’s “Lectures on Cinematographic Technique” at the Conservatoire
National des Arts et Métiers, Autumn 1937, courtesy of Les Documents Cinématographiques, Paris. For
English translation see Appendices.

292
the popular dimension to the founding aims of the Center for the Production of Scientific
Cinema as outlined in the ambitious 1934 proposal to include the creation of a forum for
training cinematographers in the specific art of scientific filmmaking, training educators
in the basics of filmmaking, handling equipment and films for classroom usage, and in
bringing together researchers and filmmakers.
146
The CNAM lectures in many ways belong to the long tradition of scientific and
technical popularization championed by Auguste Comte (and others) and articulated to a
critique of the current education system. Educational reform efforts received new energy
in the 1930s with the young Popular Front Minister of Education Jean Zay’s (1904-1940)
attempts to democratize the residual elitism and biases of secondary education (“Does not
social justice demand that whatever the starting point, each student should be allowed to
go in his chosen direction as far and as high as his talents allow?”).
147
The Popular Front
also advocated for adult and continuing education, instituting the reduced 40-hour
workweek and increasing incentives for pursuing more education, in order to produce a
more educated and modern work force. The role of institutions such as CNAM, with its
long tradition of adult and professional education—CNAM was founded from the
revolution (1794) and began offering public courses in applied sciences and technology
in 1819—received a considerable boost now that workers actually had the time and
energy to pursue such matters.
148
These commitments made CNAM an obvious home for

146
See Anon., “Création au CNAM d’un Centre,” 1-4; and Jean Painlevé, “Avant-Projet Relatif au Centre
Cinématographique des Arts et Métiers,” sans date (ca. 1937), 1-2, CNAM dossier, FJP.
147
Moody, French Education Since Napoleon, 134.
148
Beguet, “La vulgarisation scientifique,” 8.
293
technical film education, particularly given its active role in the propagation of the
educational use of film through its many conferences on the subject and their hosting of
the Musée du cinéma. The Center for the Production of Scientific Teaching Films made
reference to these traditions in its rationale, staking claim to the perpetuation of CNAM’s
long commitment to visual education and their rather realist teaching philosophy: “to
show rather than speak.”
149
CNAM also had an intimate relationship with Paul Painlevé,
who served as president of the administrative council at the time of his death in 1933, and
for whom the conservatory named an amphitheater.
150
Although Jean Painlevé established
himself as one of the central figures in the world of scientific film and leading voice in
educational uses of film through his own efforts, making him a logical candidate for the
job, the weight of his family name should not be ignored, even at a moment when the
Popular Front began faltering.
Painlevé used his new post as an opportunity to work through, in a rather public
fashion, some of his ideas about the relationship of film to research and education. The
twenty lectures, as indicated by the poster advertising them (Figure 66 and Appendices),
gave an overview of the history of cinema from a scientific perspective, the ABC’s of the
recording and projection apparatuses, various film stocks and gauges, and its uses for
specific avenues of research in zoology, biology, physiology, medicine, mechanics,

149
Anon., “Création au CNAM d’un Centre,” 3.
150
Hamery, Jean Painlevé, 95.
294
physics, chemistry, astronomy, and meteorology.
151
The content of the lectures is highly
technical, most often providing a detailed overview of the practical functions and
applications of equipment and the possibilities of its uses. Yet the lectures continually
return to epistemological considerations similar to those raised during the debates at the
congresses of the ADPCS and in his critical writings of the moment. Here begins the
articulation of what I develop in the balance of this chapter as a Painlevé’s cinematic gay
science.
His inaugural lecture, introduced by Charles Spinasse (former Economic Minister
and professor at CNAM who, in the words of de Monzie, “worshipped” Paul Painlevé
152
),
begins by elaborating the difficulties involved in commencing a study of the
cinematograph (the apparatus) and its technics (the French word technique refers to
technology and technique). Cinema, he notes, is a highly contested term without a single,

151
While researching Painlevé’s relationship with CNAM, I came across a number of Painlevé’s lectures
from 1937, folded up inside a poster advertising the series. These documents consist of onion paper carbon
copies of approximately 108 typewritten pages, so faded as to only be legible when photocopied at the
darkest setting. To the best of my ability, I have tried to organize the lectures based upon the poster
advertising the program at CNAM (Figure 66) and have used an asterisk after the listings in the appendices
to indicate the lectures I have been able to partially or fully reconstruct and that can be consulted in the
CNAM dossier, FJP. In many cases, these assignations have been based upon content of the lectures, as
very few contain titles, precise dates, or consistent numeration. In absence of further archival discoveries, it
has not been possible in all cases to assess whether the lectures consulted are the final versions read by
Painlevé or if material dated (where dates are inscribed upon the pages) corresponds to when it was
delivered. Furthermore, the possibility exists (however slim) that these pages are comprised of a mixture of
various years worth of materials—though in many cases specific details, such as thanking a visiting guest
whose arrangements had been confirmed in personal correspondences, have enabled me to date a number
of the lectures with confidence, and cite accordingly. At a minimum, I contest that these materials remain a
useful resource for a fuller understanding Painlevé’s thinking about pedagogy. Given the possibility of
error, when citing the lectures I have tried to provide as much information as possible in order to aid
subsequent scholars in locating them in the archives.
152
Letter from Anatole de Monzie to Jean Painlevé, 28 October 1937, 1, CNAM dossier, FJP. Charles
Spinasse served as the Economic Minister and Minister of the Budget during the Popular Front, and was a
professor at CNAM responsible for, among other things, the film Les Dentelles (Laces), made with A.
Métral. Spinasse later supported the Vichy government and was imprisoned as a collaborator upon
liberation.
295
easily delineated history or definition, and he expresses regret that in order to give an
overview, one must sacrifice mentioning the many researchers and ideas that have
contributed to the development of the cinematograph without bearing fruit in the form of
a completed apparatus.
153
Despite these difficulties, he describes the cinematograph as
producing a definitive “break” [coupure] between the centuries—“before the cinema,
after the cinema”—based upon its capacity for a “real survival of the past”; its inscription
and encryption as a sort of cinematic afterlife.
154
Painlevé quickly tempers his invocation of the epoch-defining possibility of a
historical record constituted by the living on of the past by emphasizing that a critical
epistemology—in the strictest sense of the word in French—is necessary.
155
The cinema, as a new means of evidence that also carries in it the means for
falsification [truquage], requires, like the others [e.g. all other forms of
evidentiary media], the permanent presence of a critical spirit, all the more so
since its impressions are more direct, more vigorous, and more immediate—for
the majority of mankind—than any other means of expression. It is thus necessary
to summon the greatest precautions even when it’s a matter of the definition of its
conception.
156

153
Painlevé, “Prise de vues et projection animées. Historique,” CNAM Lecture 1, 3 November 1937, 1-2,
CNAM dossier, FJP.
154
Ibid., 1. Clearly Painlevé was not above employing a hyperbolic discourse with respect to the seemingly
supernatural powers of photographic media.
155
The Petite Larousse defines épistémologie as “Discipline qui prend la connaissance scientifique pour
objet” (discipline that takes scientific knowledge as its object) and Le Trésor de la Langue Française
defines it as “Étude de la connaissance scientifique en général” (Study of scientific knowledge in general).
Mary McAllester Jones, in the introduction to her translation of Gaston Bachelard’s The Formation of the
Scientific Mind (1938, repr.; Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2002), 3., emphasizes the importance of the
French understanding of epistemology as first and foremost referring to the study of scientific knowledge.
156
Painlevé, “Prise de vues et projection animées. Historique,” CNAM Lecture 1, 3 November 1937, 2,
CNAM dossier, FJP. His epistemological concern shows up elsewhere; such as in an undated document
titled “Liste de conférences,” which matches verbatim the 20 lectures listed on the 1937 CNAM poster,
Painlevé notes:
One can, moreover, continue the program by:
1) Conception of a film;
296
This skepticism must be unceasing, without rest, and in fact, must be brought to bear not
only upon the products of the cinematograph, but the various components of the
apparatus itself which may never be assumed to function as promised. A typed note
amongst the lectures (it is difficult to ascertain its precise date) indicates the topic for a
forthcoming lecture as “Filming. The accidents relative to the ensemble of operations
needed for the production and projection of a film.”
157
This in fact becomes a recurrent
motif that structures his introduction of the various components of the recording and
projecting apparatus. In section II of his lectures dated 14 November, Painlevé states “We
will start with the difficulties [ennuis] concerning the outcome of a film, that’s to say, the
utilization of the positive print in its projection” and continues to list the various
problems with registration, lamps, motors, electricity, the multiple ways projectors tear
and mutilate films, and especially problems with the projected image itself, such as
slipping, blurring, and flickering images.
158
Painlevé takes the same approach to lenses, opening his lecture with the words
“Different defects that a lens can present” and later addresses “the difficulties resulting
from filming” (as previously promised), including blurred images, missed focal points,

2) Entirety of production;
3, 4, 5, 6, etc.) Application of film to teaching in the sciences from mathematics to
psychology, etc.;
n) Critique of cinematographic evidence.
See Painlevé, “Liste de conférences,” 2, CNAM dossier, FJP.
157
Painlevé, “Pour vendredi…,” CNAM dossier, FJP. It may be in reference to lecture 4 “Le film.
Emulsions et support. Incidents remédiables et irrémédiables.”
158
Painlevé, “Unspecified CNAM lecture,” dated 14 November, II-IV, CNAM dossier, fonds Jean
Painlevé, Les Documents Cinématographiques, Paris.
297
footage that is too dark or too bright, aesthetically dull images (“lack of plasticity”),
framing problems, and so on.
159
At minimum, these remarks, constituting a page or more
or their respective lectures, evidence an ongoing concern for an epistemological
vigilance. A vigilance, however, that should not be mistaken for expression of a closed or
conservative epistemological philosophy.
While the long lists of potential failures might suggest his skepticism verges on
pessimism, Painlevé seems to have given such moments a privileged status with regards
to his pedagogical practice and its connections to research as forms of continuous
experimentation. In the proposal submitted by Painlevé and A. Métral, Chair of
Mechanics at CNAM, to the administrative council, and approved at a meeting on 23
December 1937, the two authors argued for the necessity of both laboratory practicals
integrated within the film classes, and a program of research on film and with film for
application in the sciences and the teaching of sciences. CNAM, in their words, “must not
content itself to record established science or to film a general documentation. It must
participate in research as much for its scientific consequences as for future teaching.”
160
With regards to teaching, Painlevé and Métral justified the call for resources to
incorporate film experiments into the curriculum because, “Only errors made on the
material itself can allow for the maximum benefit from the apprenticeship, and be

159
Painlevé, “Unspecified CNAM lecture,” dated 15 November, 1 and unnumbered page-3, CNAM dossier,
fonds Jean Painlevé, Les Documents Cinématographiques, Paris.
160
Painlevé and A. Métral cited in “Extrait du Proces-Verbal du Conseil d’Administration: Séance du Jeudi
23 Décembre 1937,” 2, CNAM dossier, fonds Jean Painlevé, Les Documents Cinématographiques, Paris.
Based upon a verbatim match with the citations in the “Extrait du Proces-Verbal,” from 23 December 1937,
it can be verified that a carbon copy of Painlevé and Métral’s complete recommendation is among the
unmarked lecture materials in the CNAM dossier.
298
successfully applied to the resolution of particular [speciaux] problems.”
161
Shortly
afterwards, Painlevé reformulated this experimental ethos in a short text for La Revue du
Cinéma Éducateur titled “Le Cinéma peut apporter de la Jeunesse de la Fantasie et de
l’Espoir” (The Cinema can contribute to the Youth Fantasy and Hope). This text
concludes by once again invoking the importance of risking and engaging with mistakes
through the use of the cinematograph in research and teaching. “To multiply results is
also to multiply the chances for mistakes. A man named Laplace said it before me, but it
is also to multiply the chances of success, of discovery.”
162
In pursuing a rigorously
experimental approach to film for both research and teaching, Painlevé’s practice
resonates with the enthusiasm expressed in Jean Epstein’s writing on cinematic
magnification: “We demand to see because of our experimental mentality, because of our
desire for a more exact poetry, because of our analytic propensity, because we need to
make new mistakes.”
163
But equally striking, it suggests a close allegiance with the
experimental ethos developed by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science:
Truthfulness.—I favor any skepsis to which I may reply: ‘Let us try it!’ But I no
longer wish to hear anything of all those things and questions that do not permit
any experiment. This is the limit of my ‘truthfulness’; for there courage has lost
its right.
164

161
Painlevé and A. Métral cited in “Extrait du Proces-Verbal du Conseil d’Administration: Séance du Jeudi
23 Décembre 1937,” 2, CNAM dossier, fonds Jean Painlevé, Les Documents Cinématographiques, Paris.
162
Painlevé, “Le Cinéma peut apporter à la Jeunesse de la Fantasie et de l’Espoir,” La Revue du Cinéma
Educateur, no 7 (déc. 1938 – jan. 1939): 9. Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1749-1827, was a French mathematician
and astronomer who authored the famous Essai philosophique sur les probabilitiés [A Philosophical Essay
on Probabilities] (1814).
163
Jean Epstein, “Magnification,” trans. Stuart Liebman, in French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907-1939,
vol. 1, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 239; and Epstein, Bonjour
Cinéma (1921), in Écrits sur le cinéma, 1921-1951, t. 1, 1921-1947 (Paris: Seghers, 1974), 97.
164
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. and
commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), sect. 51, 115; and Nietzsche, Le Gai Savoir
299
In returning to a consideration of the rapport of Painlevé’s pedagogical and cinematic
activities and their critical interventions into realist education as a condition of possibility
for filmmaking practices, this Nietzschean spirit—what I elaborate as a documentary or
cinematic gay science—reveals the extent to which Painlevé’s oeuvre exerts its particular
pressure upon the aesthetics of positivism, not just as a mode of representation, but as a
pedagogical philosophy.
4.8 Unlearning through the Cinema
Between co-founding the ADPCS and the beginning of his teaching career at CNAM,
Painlevé remained active as a filmmaker. From 1931-1934 he worked primarily on the
production of L’Hippocampe (1935), but also filmed nearly a dozen research films
through the ICS, including Étude du sang (1932), Digitaline Nativelle (1934) for the
Nativelle laboratory, Culture de tissues et macrocytes (1935) and Culture du coeur d’un
embryon de poulet for Dr. J. André Thomas, Essais couleur (1935) for the engineer Louis
Lesigne (who helped fashion apparatuses for L’Hippocampe, and collaborated with

(La Gaya Scienza), trans. Henri Albert (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1901), sect. 51, 95. The
Albert translation reads:
Véracité.—Je loue toute espèce de scepticisme auquel il m'est permis de répondre: « Essayons
toujours! » Mais je ne veux plus entendre parler de toutes les choses et de toutes les questions qui
ne permettent pas l'expérience. Ce sont là les bornes de ma « véracité »: car ici la bravoure a
perdu son droit. (Truthfulness: I praise all species of skepticism to which I can respond: ‘Always
experiment!’ But I no longer want to hear of any things and questions that do not permit
experimentation. These are the limits of my ‘truthfulness’: because here courage has lost its right.)
Here and elsewhere, I cite the French translation available—if then increasingly unpopular—in the 1930s in
order to emphasize the possible French reading of this text at the moment Painlevé expressed his ideas
about pedagogy. Albert’s vocabulary is very much sensitive to and sensitized by the aesthetic, pedagogical,
and philosophical debates glossed in this chapter.
300
Painlevé’s research to devise a 3-D system), Microscopie à bord du Théodore Tissier
(1935), Eolis (1937), Corèthre (1937), Strioscopie des tourbillons: en bout d’hélice et en
bout d’ailerons d’otarie (1938) for the engineer Tricot, and the Gasparcolor film La
Formation de la chaîne des Alpes (1938) for Professor Léon Moret.
165
He served as the
producer and commentator—again through the ICS—for a series of films directed by the
special effects expert Achille-Pierre Dufour, including Voyage dans le ciel (1935), La
Quatrième Dimension (1937), De la similitude des longueurs et des vitesses (1937), and
Images mathématiques de la lutte pour la vie (1937). From 1934-1937 he also worked as
the producer on the remarkable plasticine/claymation opera-buffa of Charles Perrault’s
Barbe Bleue (1938), filmed in Gasparcolor by sculptor René Bertrand and his family.
166
It is in the midst of all of these activities that Painlevé sent his reply to the
president of the alumni association of Lycée Louis-Le-Grand, condensing his reformist
manifesto into a single sentence: “I have the intention of contributing, with my modest
means, to the total abolition of secondary education, which has always profoundly
disgusted me.” Painlevé’s violent response, however, was not confined to a single
expression of hostility contained in a single letter and aimed at a single institution, but
rather served as a recurrent theme in his reflections on education and the educational use
of film. He maintained such a position throughout his life, as expressed in an interview

165
These listings draw upon the filmographies in Hamery, Jean Painlevé, le cinéma au coeur de la vie, 278,
and Brigitte Berg, Science is Fiction, 185.
166
René Bertrand was the uncle of Painlevé’s friend Gilles Margaritis (1912-1965), best known as the
juggling salesman in Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934) and star of the early television show La Piste aux étoiles,
which he produced from 1950 until his death. For more on this fascinating film, see François Porcile,
“Barbe-Bleue, René Bertrand, Jean Painlevé, 1938” in Du Praxinoscope au cellulo: un demi-siècle de
cinéma d’animation en France (1892-1948) (Paris: Centre National de la Cinématographie, 2007), 95-99.
301
conducted in 1982, where reflections about his friendship with Vigo quickly turned to an
invective against the educational system: “Generation after generation, we suffer the
same imbecilic dictatorship of education…”
167
Painlevé developed this critique in an essay published in the December 1934 issue
of Vu under the title “La Problème du documentaire scientifique” (The Problem of
Scientific Documentary), which he subsequently republished in the March 1936 issue of
Le Point as “Comment on désapprendre par le cinéma” (How we unlearn [or forget]
through the cinema). In this text, or texts, which bookend his letter to Lycée Louis-Le-
Grand, Painlevé derides the positive attention given to documentary films. He evokes a
scene in a bourgeois dining room, where he imagines respectable types discussing cinema
over dessert, blandly praising documentaries for their presumed educational value. “The
guiding idea for these unfortunate admirers is: ‘at least with the documentary you learn
something.’ ‘To learn [apprendre]…’ This much-touted word has already corrupted the
mentality of 90 percent of humanity. Fortunately this affirmation does not come true; but
all the same there is so much waste.”
168
Painlevé’s tone separates him from the cautious optimism for film’s educational
potential presented in the 1920 report by an extra-parliamentary commission established
to study means for generalizing the application of cinema in the different branches of

167
Jean Painlevé interviewed by Philippe Ensault, “La Vie de Jean Painlevé,” unpublished transcript
(1982), 8, Radio and Television dossier, fonds Jean Painlevé, Les Documents Cinématographiques, Paris.
168
Jean Painlevé, “Le Problème du documentaire scientifique,” Vu: no. spécial sur cinéma, 15 December
1934, no pagination. Held in the dossier Coupures originales: Articles de Jean Painlevé, FJP. Retitled and
lightly revised as “Comment on désapprend par le cinéma,” Le Point, mars 1936, 29-33. Although I have
used my own translations, readers may wish to consult Wendy Anderson’s excellent and readily available
English translation of “How we unlearn through cinema” at http://lesdocs.com/archives/écrits.html
302
teaching, known as the Bessou Report, commissioned in 1915 by Paul Painlevé. This
attitude also characterized numerous articles in the teacher’s journal Les Documents
Scolaire et Post-Scolaire and early histories of film such as Léon Moussinac’s Naissance
du cinéma (1925) and Georges-Michel Coissac’s Histoire du Cinématographe des
origines à nos jours (1925) and Le Cinématographe et L’Enseignement: Nouveau guide
pratique (1926).
These sources emphasize film’s educational potential not only through its ability
to capture student’s interest while maximizing their pleasure but also film’s capacity to
produce lasting mnemonic impressions. This capacity is premised upon the
thesis—offered in advance of Walter Benjamin—that film delivers a perceptual shock.
For example, Moussinac, making reference to the educator and future director of the
Cinémathèque de la Ville de Paris Adrien Bruneau’s experiments with memory retention
in his drawing students, ages 6-8, writes of the pedagogical utility of film’s mnemonic
impression. Film, Moussinac writes, is, “a wonderful stimulant for memory… The brain
remains under the influence of an acquired stimulant [sous le coup d’une excitation
acquise] which, despite itself, forces the combination of forms and movements; an effect
in no way obtained through traditional teaching by plaster or even ‘living’ models.”
169
In
a similar vein, Louis Colin, director of the regional Office of Educational Cinema in
Nancy, writes of the value of cinema’s capacity to intensify the senses and imprint
information upon the mind, but only if distributed to students in precisely regulated
doses. “Our experience with teaching cinema allows us to note … that cinematographic

169
Léon Moussinac, Naissance du Cinéma, 163-164.
303
projections must be sufficiently distributed in order for the child to receive the visual and
emotional shock which will make the images remain engraved in his mind, without
confusion or the muddling harmful to a lasting memory.”
170
According to this logic, film’s shock, when used judiciously, stays engraved in
the memory like a thumbprint in clay (though who knows if it, like other forms of shock,
is recoverable at will, let alone instrumentalizable). Painlevé notes that the present uses of
films in the classroom, including his own films, often have little positive impact upon
student’s learning and are often rendered impotent by the misinformation of undertrained
teachers. As an example, he gives an account of the use of his 1929 film Les Oursins in
classroom lessons (Figure 67).
We learn [apprend] at school that sea urchins have spines with which they move.
When, during fifty meters of film, we demonstrate that the spines play no
part in this, the students’ compositions emphasize, as a result, the importance of
spines for the locomotion of the sea urchin. I have even seen a bad mark on a
paper where the student said that the spines are not used for locomotion. What’s
more, on the rare occasions when a child describes the relevant mechanism, he
has only relied upon his memory and understood nothing [n’avait rien compris].
Memory naturally falters at the capital moment of the exposé, resulting in an
extraordinary muddle with the conclusion being that the sea urchin leaps like a
goat. And since this was seen through photographic images, it is nevertheless a
memory as absolutely irrefutable as is, for the youngest children, the word of their
schoolmaster, parents, or priest.
171
To be fair to the young spectators and teachers in this scene, Les Oursins presents both
the sand urchin, which uses its flexible, mobile spines [piquants mobiles] to dig itself into
the sand, and the rock urchin, which uses its tubular, suction cup feet for locomotion and

170
Louis Colin, “A quelle dose doit-on faire du Cinéma Scolaire?” Les Documents Scolaires et Post-
Scolaires, 3
e
année, no. 13 (December 1937): 1 (my emphasis).
171
Jean Painlevé, “Le Problème du documentaire scientifique,” np.
304
whose spines are primarily a mode of passive defense. Nevertheless, Painlevé’s point
here is that even the best of films cannot undo the worst educational practices, and thus
their capacity to serve as lessons within such a context is extremely limited. Under such
conditions, in Painlevé’s estimation, the most one can ask of a documentary is “a curious
moment” or “some pretty pictures.”
172
In order to improve this situation, new pedagogical
philosophies and practices are necessary.
Fig. 67. Frame capture of rock urchin locomotion from Les Oursins (Painlevé, 1929).
These concerns seem not to have abated when, in May of 1935, Pathé-Consortium
released Painlevé’s ninth theatrical documentary, L’Hippocampe (The Seahorse), as both
a 35mm sonarized commercial print and a 16mm silent print, in order to best exploit the
theatrical and the scholastic and educational markets for film.
173
In promotion of the film,

172
Ibid.
173
In a letter to Jean Painlevé dated 2 November 1938 (his 36 birthday), O. Jacquemin, Chief of
Commercial Services at Pathé, informs him that “concerning small formats, we bring it to your attention
that these belong entirely to us and that the yield of sales in this format must be returned to us in its
entirety.” See L’Hippocampe dossier, FJP. It seems surprising that Painlevé, who took such an active
interest in reduced formats through the ICS and ADPCS, would willingly concede to such an agreement. In
305
Painlevé gave a series of interviews that turned rather heated every time the question of
the educational value of his work arose. In the April 1935 issue of the left-wing magazine
Regards, Léo Sauvage reports that when the topic came up, Painlevé spoke with
“sustained rage” about the “ass-kissers, yes, his word, of bureaucracy, of routine, of dust,
and of the result of all of this: education”
174
When Madeleine Epron of La
Cinématographe Française broached the subject in an interview titled “M. Jean Painlevé
nous expose ses idées sur les Films d’Enseignement” (Jean Painlevé explains/airs for us
his ideas about Educational Films), Painlevé insisted “I have never made ‘educational’
films… None of my productions are suitable for current education; if one serves this end,
it can only be as a lesser evil.”
175
Making the same etymological distinction in both interviews, Painlevé further
explains his reticence to have anything to do with official education. He tells Sauvage,
The day when headmasters are replaced by psychiatrists, there will be progress.
Until then, you could say, I will do nothing to collaborate with a teaching that I
consider in its spirit, methods, and often, in its men, to be corrupt. As long as
there are sanctions instead of mutual aid, and as long as ‘learning’ (or
‘apprehending’) [apprendre] is more important than ‘understanding’ (or
‘comprehending’) [comprendre], I feel it would be a compromise to aid in the
maintenance of this teaching.
176

fact, this seems to have been a breaking point for Painlevé, who carefully guarded his independence. The
relationship between Painlevé and Pathé, which went broke in 1935 and had a rather scandalous bankruptcy
proceeding in 1938, quickly soured and resulted in a rather lengthy lawsuit in order to terminate Painlevé’s
contract, finally settled in 1942.
For more on attempts to exploit schools and educational institutions as a new market at a moment
when the French film industry was suffering considerable losses, see the Bessou Report, as well as Oliver
Gaycken, “Devices of Curiosity,” 102.
174
Léo Sauvage, “Jean Painlevé ou, subversion dans la science,” Regards (April 1935): 9.
175
Madeleine Epron, “M. Jean Painlevé nous expose ses idées sur les Films d’Enseignement,” La
Cinématographie Française, no 26 (May 1935): 7.
176
Sauvage, “Jean Painlevé ou, subversion dans la science,” 9.
306
With Epron he describes such collaboration as a “prostitution” adding,
Ten years ago, one could count on his fingers those who would accept a
cinematographic projection in the classroom. Late-comers have attempted to grab
hold of a weapon whose importance they have, until now, misunderstood, in order
to turn it to their benefit or to the benefit of their ideas. These ideas—what a
coincidence—are directed against life and attempt to smother the revealing flame
that can burst forth from the cinema. Is this not the mode of expression proper to
new men (moderns), who, by essence, justify the concept comprehend as opposed
to the concept apprehend?
177
When asked how he imagines teaching of the future, Painlevé dispenses with any rhetoric
of films’ capacity for education or moral uplift. Instead he responds aloofly that “rather
than adapting film to education, it is education which must move towards film.”
178
In his
estimation, such a destruction and rebuilding of education will take at least fifty years and
three generations to achieve, as it requires the breaking of old habits and the initiation
into new ones, which must continually be redefined.
179
As for his own efforts, he
cryptically tells Sauvage “my task consists of working at the margins, maintaining the
link with similar thinkers, and methodically training myself in what will be the teaching
of the future. My action will parallel that of the revolutionary struggle of the workers.”
180
His aim with film, as he explains at the conclusion of a text published in Ciné-Liberté
surveying the 4
th
congress of the ADPCS, is to “kill once and for all ‘learning without
understanding’ [apprendre sans comprendre].”
181

177
Epron, “M. Jean Painlevé nous expose ses idées sur les Films d’Enseignement,” 7.
178
Ibid.
179
Ibid., 8.
180
Sauvage, “Jean Painlevé ou, subversion dans la science,” 9.
181
Painlevé, “Le Cinéma Scientifique et d’Enseignement,” Ciné-Liberté no. 5 (1 November 1936): 3.
307
Pathé’s marketing plan for the different prints of L’Hippocampe as a theatrical
documentary and potentially lucrative educational film, and Painlevé’s own presence on
the educational film circuit—he was the most represented filmmaker among new
acquisitions by the Musée Pédagogique in 1936 (10 films by Painlevé compared to
Brérault’s 7)—suggest at the very least a rather deep ambivalence regarding the
educational value of his work.
182
To be certain, L’Hippocampe, like Painlevé’s other
theatrical documentaries, resembles a wildlife documentary and even an educational film.
A viewer can learn about the behavior, reproductive cycles, and anatomy of the creatures
from Painlevé’s scripted commentary, recorded in this instance by Ben Danou, a radio
personality and commentator for Pathé actualities. The film also teaches viewers a lesson
about film itself, and more particularly the aesthetic of positivism it both deploys and
critiques. The film draws and makes its spectacle from the plastic and hallucinatory
aspects of scientific imagery. It is suffused with moments of a strange poetry and an
erotic energy that cannot be anthropocentrically contained or focused (for long) on a
single object or aim, though they are not a priori opposed to more sober ambitions.
Rather, the film lets the tension between such diverse impulses scintillate upon the
screen. L’Hippocampe experiments with a politics of framing and focus (discussed in the
previous chapter as “amour flou”) that emphasizes what strains and evades its own visual
and epistemological limits. The enigmatic, question mark shaped creatures continually

182
Anon., “L’Effort du Musée Pédagogique,” Les Documents Scolaires et Post-Scolaires, 2e année, no. 7
(May 1936): 11-12.
308
pivot out of focus and out of frame, doing so in a manner verging at times on the ecstatic
in the etymological sense of going besides or beyond itself.
If we take Painlevé’s anti-educational, abolitionist discourse seriously, and read it
alongside if not in his films, what sort of lessons might these films purport to teach, even
if through the form of a negation, the dés of désapprendre? On its surface
l’Hippocampe’s ode to strange-love does not precisely appear to wield the abolishing
force Painlevé promised to modestly unfurl. But it does begin to manifest the first bright
sparks of what I refer to as a cinematic gay science, which distinguishes not only
Painlevé’s own immanent theorization of a wild realism, but emphasizes his own critical
turn regarding the historical trajectory and limits of a realist pedagogy.
4.9 Forgetting Lessons
The critical attention given to the forgotten lessons from Painlevé’s lectures at CNAM,
and their relationship to his critical discourse on the educational system, provide a richer
context for considering the lessons of Painlevé’s films themselves. The notion of
Painlevé’s oeuvre as the inauguration of a cinematic gay science as a pedagogical
reformation (or re-formation: re-education in French) comes more clearly into view by
asserting a bit more pressure upon an idea introduced—but not explicitly developed—in
Painlevé’s re-titling of his essay “The Problems of Scientific Documentary” as “How we
unlearn (or forget) [désapprendre] through cinema” when it was republished in 1936.
This is particularly the case regarding Painlevé’s repeated emphasis in his discourse on
309
the importance of the distinction between the words apprendre, comprendre, and
désapprendre, which all share the root prendre: to take, to capture, to have.
Apprendre, to receive or give a lesson, to apprehend, in Painlevé’s idiom, stands
for learning as sort of rote memorization. It describes the unidirectional, and often
passive notion of learning from being taught, with an emphasis on the tenuous nature of
such an apprehending: Painlevé seems to imply that what one grasps can easily slip away.
Comprendre, as comprehension or understanding, is valorized by Painlevé as more
thorough and lasting learning. Painlevé’s definition suggests a certain openness and
patience, demonstrated by his practice of filming wildlife. The definitions for
comprendre in the Trésor de la langue Français emphasize its relational properties and
even a sense of reciprocity, whether between content and form or subject and object: “I.
To include in its own nature or in a system such and such things or people… II. The
dominant idea is that of a qualitative relationship of intellection between a mental
function and the objects upon which it is exerted.”
183
Pivotal to Painlevé’s distinction, as
he informs Madeleine Epron, are the differences held in the Latin prefixes “ad” (to) [in
French this is rendered by ad, ap, or a] and “com” (with). “No instruction will be
valuable that guards the first place of the word apprehend [apprendre].”
184
Ad/ap/a
primarily refers to a motion or accumulating force (in the sense of adding to). But a also
indicates a negation (without or -less, as in anonyme: nameless). Apprendre, a-prendre,
understood in this manner defines a taking-less or capture-less learning: a teaching

183
See the Trésor de la langue Français.
184
Epron, “M. Jean Painlevé nous expose ses idées sur les Films d’Enseignement,” 7.
310
premised upon sisyphusian tasks modeled upon military-style drilling and rote
memorization that dulls rather than arouses the mind. To push the idea a little further in
anticipation of the theorization of experimentation, it is worth noting that a is also an
algebreic symbol for a known quantity, that which is submitted to interrogation by
transvaluative thinking.
The shift between the multiple valences of apprendre and comprendre that
Painlevé calls for in these texts and interviews, relies upon his use of
désapprendre—unlearning, forgetting—and the coup de dés it tosses into apprendre’s
learning.
185
In “How We Unlearn through the Cinema” the problem of the scientific
documentary has been diagnosed: it is its presumptions about teaching and learning. The
presence of film in the traditional classroom setting, Painlevé contends, is a source of
almost universal failure when it comes to learning, it spurs, rather, a forgetting or
unlearning, primarily due to the fact that neither teachers nor students have been properly
trained to critically engage film. “We can and must” Painlevé insists, “only teach through
the cinema under very special conditions and in an environment that is never realized,
even in places reserved for instruction. Teachers suitable to this new pedagogy,
moreover, do not exist to take advantage of it.”
186
Painlevé observes, “film can be

185
Un coup de dés translates as a throw of the dice. The throw, blow, or cut of the negating force of the dés
(as a prefix), in this context, draws upon the unforeseen, the incalculable, the gamble, chance: a roll of the
dice echoed by Painlevé’s insistence, discussed later in this text, that education must respect the imprevu,
the unforeseen. To complete the allusion, “Toute Pensée émet un Coup de Dés.” Stéphane Mallarmé,
Collected Poems and Other Verse with parallel French text, trans. E. H. and A. M. Blackmore (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 159.
186
Painlevé, “Comment on désapprend par le cinéma,” Le Point, mars 1936, 30.
311
horribly harmful, or simply useless, depending upon whether the professor uses it
inopportunely or annihilates the impact.”
187
A second reading of Painlevé’s désapprendre can be put in operation here,
extending his critique to consider the forgetting or unlearning unleashed by films as
having a productive or creative aspect as well. This second understanding of unlearning
or forgetting can be plotted through a larger intellectual context to which Painlevé’s work
adds a cinematic dimension. I will present it here through a rapid literary montage built
from three sources: (1) an old French proverb recounted by M. G. Duplessis; (2)
Friedrich Nietzsche’s fantasy dialogue between a man and a ruminating animal,
presumably bovine, and (3) a line from Gaston Bachelard’s “Le Surrationalisme”:
Beasts [les bêtes] teach us to live.
“Why do you just look at me like that instead of telling me about your
happiness?” The animal would like to answer, and say: “The reason is I always
forget what I was going to say”—but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed
silent: so that the human being was left wondering.
And yet, in order to think, one will first have so many things to forget.
188
To give an exegesis: Beasts—or the bête—can teach us to live.
189
We humans can learn
something about living by regarding beasts. One of these lessons is about gaiety, a

187
Epron, “M. Jean Painlevé nous expose ses idées sur les Films d’Enseignement,” 7.
188
M. G. Duplessis, La Fleur des Proverbes Français (Paris: Passard, 1851), 70; Nietzsche, “On the uses
and disadvantages of history for life,” trans. R. J. Hollingdale in Untimely Mediations, introduction by J. P.
Stern (1874; repr., New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 60; and Nietzsche, “De l’Utilité et de
l’Inconvenient des études historiques pour la vie,” in Considerations Inactuelles, trans. Henri Albert (Paris:
Société du Mercure, 1907), 123; and Gaston Bachelard, “Le Surrationalisme,” Du Surréalisme au Front
Populaire: Inquisitions: Fac-similé de la revue de documents inédits, ed. Herni Béhar (1936; repr., Paris:
Éditions du CNRS, 1990), 1. These fragments deserve a much fuller exegesis than possible here.
189
One may translate the noun bête as “beast” or “animal,” but also, according to the many definitions
listed in the Trésor de la langue Français as a machine (such as a train or motorcycle) or an “unknown or
312
happiness rooted in forgetting. Forgetting, Bachelard asserts, is a vital condition of
possibility for thinking (just as he will claim in the same essay, channeling Mallarmé, “If
one does not gamble with reason during an experiment, the experiment is not worth the
trouble of being attempted”).
190
Beasts teach us to forget to think. Beasts teach us to
forget, to think. All in the service of learning to live.
191
This montage outlines the foundation of a fantasy curriculum—premised, to be
certain, upon its own set of anthropomorphic projections and repressions—for forgetting
lessons. This is both a forgetting of particular lessons of the French educational system
and general lessons in how to forget. Such a productive education in forgetting, spurs the
very sort of transvaluation of film’s educational value and of education itself that
Painlevé advocated, if not precisely in directions he could have foreseen. The movement
from apprendre to comprendre through désapprende dialecticalizes the “a” of apprendre
as both an addition and a subtraction, a known quantity and its negation, pushing the
notion of learning as grasping towards its reversal, the unlearning by ungrasping, by
letting go.
This letting go, however, is not total release or complete abandonment into
ecstasy but rather an experiment in forgetting, in letting go, which is to say, a project still
bounded, to a quest for knowledge. Part of what Painlevé’s films challenge his spectators

undetermined object” (an x). As an adjective, bête is a more slippery creature, meaning something like
stupid, foolish, unreasonable (déraisonnable), stunned, dazed (étourdi)…
190
Bachelard, “Le Surrationalisme,” 5 (original emphasis).
191
Or learn[ing] to live finally, as Derrida writes at the beginning of Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(New York, Routledge, 1994), xvii. Cf. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louis
Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); and Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric
Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
313
to forget, or at least suspend, is their anthropocentric perspectives. They also challenge
the habituated organization of the perceptual systems produced by educational realism’s
common sense. His films try to unstitch, dismember, or disremember common sense’s
exquisite corpse, aiming to render sense critically uncommon or even heterogeneous.
In a text written in late 1935 in honor of the 40
th
anniversary of the Lumière
Domitor, the art historian Henri Focillon, author of La Vie des formes (1934) and member
of administrative council of the L’Institut International du Cinéma Éducatif (International
Institute of Educational Cinema), identified precisely this anti-anthropocentric potential
as film’s greatest asset as an educational tool. Focillon believed film occasioned the
possibility for an untimely reignition of the late middle ages’ and Renaissance’s interest
in life beyond the standard of the human body, “which is not perhaps ‘the measure of
all/any things’.” Focillon sees film as potentially pushing the School of Beaux-Arts,
which has “made so little room for other orders of life,” away from its anthropocentrism
and towards a renewed curiosity regarding “plants, animals, and shells.”
192
This
introduction of different scales—epitomized by scientific cinema’s manipulations of
space and time through microcinematography and time-lapse and slow-motion
filming—often has the estranging effect of pushing the horizons of the real past
recognition (and in the use of these “special effects,” as Oliver Gaycken observes,
science documentaries maintain the sense of wonder solicited by the cinema of attractions
and aesthetics of astonishment).
193
This anti-anthropocentric pressure is coupled with

192
Henri Focillon, “Le Cinématographe et L’Enseignement des Arts,” in Jubilé Louis Lumière: 6 Novembre
1935, ed. anon. (Paris: Renaissance Françiase, 1936), no pagination.
193
Oliver Gaycken, “Devises of Curiosity.”
314
what we might call cinema’s own basic pleasure principle: to take a brief vacation—or
auto-evacuation, to forget oneself, which is in part, one of the promised pleasures of
popular wildlife and nature films.
Such a pedagogical approach ventures toward what Germaine Dulac theorizes
through scientific documentaries as the insaisissable: the “grasping the ungraspable.”
These displacements and incitements of dissatisfaction are vital steps in the abolition of
an education designed primarily to produce docile subjects. In Painlevé’s own words,
At the base of the most solid, most humane, most frank, most durable education is
the sense of the enigma, of curiosity for the unexpected [imprevu]. Moreover, if
one considers the culmination of studies, the scientific research film, one sees that
it builds itself like reading a good detective novel: certain hypotheses guide the
researcher like the reader, neither knows what to expect.
194
Forgetting lessons clear the way for a very different practice and understanding of the
pedagogical use of film. If this is rare, it is because forgetting, unlearning is not easy
work.
4.10 Forgetting Philosophy
Passages in Painlevé’s films appear capable of momentarily unraveling or disorganizing
the very common sense and the realist epistemological practices from which they emerge.
This idea of denaturalizing the natural sciences and the method of thinking based upon
their observation, was not confined to Painlevé’s work but in fact held currency at the
time as the task of the modern theoretical sciences. Gaston Bachelard’s assertion in 1936
that thinking requires forgetting, as already suggested, shares a strong resemblance with

194
Epron, “M. Jean Painlevé nous expose ses idées sur les Films d’Enseignement,” 8.
315
Painlevé’s discourse on this very forgetting or unlearning. As a recently minted professor
at Dijon—having started his academic career later in life, after working for the French
postal system—Bachelard launched a rather rigorous critique of realist pedagogy and the
French educational system with strong resonances, though significant difference from,
the notion of Painlevé’s forgetting lessons. The extent to which Painlevé was familiar
with Bachelard’s work and Bachelard with Painlevé’s filmmaking is unknown, yet the
argument here is less dependent upon a direct connection than the elaboration of an
emergent sensibility formed in response to a specific historical context.
195
Both men
participated in an overlapping set of intellectual debates, and shared a sensibility for
working in scientific and poetic realms in ways that breach any supposed categorical
distinctions between the two realms, making a brief exegesis of Bachelard’s ideas useful
for drawing out the stakes of Painlevé’s project. Bachelard’s early theoretical
work—particularly his short essays “Noumène et Microphysique,” (Noumenon and
Microphysics) published in the inaugural issue of Recherches Philosophiques (1932) and
“Le Surrationalisme” (Surrationalism), published in the only issue of Aragon, Caillois,
Monnerot, and Tzara’s journal Inquisitions (1936)
196
—take as their critical object realist

195
The one known collision of these two names Painlevé and Bachelard is in the pages of the inaugural
issue of the journal Clé (Janvier 1939), organ of the Féderation Internationale de L’Art Révolutionnaire
Indépendent (International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art). Both Bachelard and Painlevé
registered negative responses to the manifesto “Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendent” (For an
independent revolutionary art). See the letter soliciting his response, dated 6 November 1938 from FIARI
to Painlevé, in Correspondences-Personnel dossier, FJP; and Gérard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist
Movement, trans. Alison Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 352.
196
Bachelard, “Noumène et Microphysique,” Recherches Philosophiques, no. 1 (1931-1932): 55-65; and
Bachelard, “Le Surrationalisme.”
316
epistemologies and the French educational system’s construction of common sense (a
perspective he shares with Painlevé).
Bachelard saw realist epistemologies not as transparent or self-evident, but as
fundamentally shaped or stained by the observing subject. In his 1938 book The
Formation of the Scientific Mind (La formation d’esprit scientifique), Bachelard notes
that empirical observation “engages sentient human beings via all aspects of their
sensibility. When empirical knowledge is rationalized, we can never be sure that
primitive sense values are not coefficients attaching themselves to reasons.”
197
Bachelard
argues that the realism, particularly as proffered by the French educational system, is far
too limited an approach to the study of reality, and in fact produces an obstacle to
scientific thought. In The Formation of the Scientific Mind he exerts considerable energy
on a critique of the deceptions of vision-based epistemologies: “primary observation
brings with it a profusion of images: it is vivid, concrete, natural, and easy. You need
only describe it and marvel. And then you think you understand it.”
198
Images, as
coagulations of process, as condensations of arrested thinking, stand in the way of a
proper education to Bachelard’s way of thinking.

197
Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind, trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester,
UK: Clinamen Press, 2002), 26. For the French see La formation d’esprit scientifique (1938; repr., Paris:
Vrin, 2004), 17.
198
Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind, 29; and La formation de l’esprit scientifique, 23. Few
sensitive readers of Bachelard’s thinking across his many works would accuse him of being afraid of
contradiction: the same year he published The Formation of the Scientific Mind he began publishing his
inquiries into the psychoanalysis of the elements and a long term project on dreams, dreaming, and poetics,
for which images and the imaginary are central. The two strands of his thinking, under proper pressure,
reveal themselves to be co-implicated. For discussions that chip away at the rigid separation of Bachelard’s
scientific and poetic thinking, see Mary Ann Caws, “The ‘réalisme ouvert’ of Bachelard and Breton,” The
French Review, vol. 37, no. 3 (1964): 302-311; and Françoise Gaillard, “L’Imaginaire du concept: une
épistémologie de la purité,” MLN, vol. 101, no. 4, French Issue (1986): 895-911.
317
Balzac said that bachelors and old maids put habit in the place of emotion. In
exactly the same way, teachers put lessons in the place of discovery. Teaching
about the discoveries that have been made throughout the history of science is an
excellent way of combating the intellectual sloth that will slowly stifle our sense
of mental newness. If children are to learn to invent, it is desirable that they
should be given the feeling that they themselves could have made discoveries.
199
In earlier, less restrained elaborations of his opposition to an over reliance on
realist epistemologies developed in his essays, Bachelard takes up a skepticism similar to
that advocated by Nietzsche’s gay science (see section 4.7), attacking what he calls
“thing-ism” [chosisme] of official education.
200
For Bachelard, microphysics—from
microscopy to atomic research and its accompanying mathematics—occasions the need
for a rethinking of systems of knowledge and values similar to the effects that Nietzsche
saw in the proclamation “God is dead.”
201
Bachelard refers to empirical observation as
merely a “working phenomenology” (likened to a working hypothesis), emphasizing that
“We can not have any a priori confidence in the instruction that immediate data pretends
to provide us.”
202
The philosophical ramifications of microphysics, for Bachelard, are
nothing short of profound, and not only to question the limits of epistemology but
ontology itself, posing fundamental challenges to the categories of “unity” and “totality”
as well as the “identity and repetition of being”—the very sorts of realization produced
by Painlevé’s microcinematography.
203

199
Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind, 245; and La formation, 295.
200
Bachelard, “Noumène et Microphysique,” 61.
201
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sect. 108, 167; and Le Gai Savoir, sect. 108, 161.
202
Bachelard, “Noumène et Microphysique,” 57.
203
Ibid., 64.
318
Bachelard declares that we must learn to unanchor human reason, to “abandon the
banks of the immediate real” and the epistemologically conservative “taste for port, for
certitude, for the system.”
204
In a word, to pursue the unexpected, the imprevu. Bachelard
devises “surrationalism” to suggest a dialecticized mode of rationalism analogous to
surrealism’s relationship to realism as it appears in Painlevé’s work. He does not
completely eschew rational thinking in the manner that the surrealists wished to do.
Instead he calls for a fuller engagement with rationalism, accounting for what rational
thinking represses as much as what it privileges, particularly its productive forces of
negativity. Drawing upon aesthetic and scientific experimentation for inspiration,
Bachelard advocates nothing short of a revolution in reason:
In brief, it is necessary to return to human reason its turbulent and aggressive
functions. In this way we will contribute to founding a surrationalism which will
multiply the occasions for thought.... The physical world will be experimented
upon in new ways. We will understand and feel differently. We will establish an
experimental reason susceptible to organizing the real surrationally, like the
experimental dream of Tristan Tzara organizes poetic freedom surreally.
205
Bachelard, seeking a more productive dialectician than Hegel, cites the non-
Euclidian geometry of the Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobatchewsky (1792-1856)
and its importance for mathematical theories of relativity as an example of the
transvaluative power of abstract thinking to challenge basic presumptions about reality,
or at least the parameters within one thinks it. He sees such work as fundamentally

204
Bachelard, “Le Surrationalisme,” 5.
205
Ibid., 1-2. For an elaboration of important differences between Bachelard’s understanding of creativity
and dream and that of the surrealists, see Cristina Chimisso, Gaston Bachelard, Critic of Science and the
Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2001), 195-196. For an attempt to think the overlaps between the two,
see Mary Ann Caws, “The ‘réalisme ouvert’ of Bachelard and Breton.”
319
challenging axiomatic thinking, allowing one to insert a destabilizing “it depends” into
rigid or mechanistic thinking. For example, Lobatchewsky’s challenge to Euclid’s fifth
postulate (stating that for a line L and a point P located outside of line L, there is only one
parallel line passing through point P that does not bisect line L), and from that the
possibility of the existence of triangles whose angles produce a sum smaller than 180º,
inspires in Bachelard a small bit of Brechtian theater. When asked by an axiomatic
thinker whether or not the sum of the angles of a triangle equals 180º, Bachelard muses,
You respond to him tranquilly, “That depends.” In fact, this depends upon the
choice of axioms. With a smile, you disconcert this wholly elementary reason
which accords the absolute right of propriety to its elements. You soften this
dogmatic reason while making it play axiomatics. You teach it to forget
[désapprendre] in order to better understand [comprendre]. What a variety in this
disorganization of sclerosed rationalism. And reciprocally, what variations on
surrational themes; what sudden mutations for intellects suddenly dialecticized.
206
This dialecticization of rational thought suggests an understanding of dialectics that, in an
almost literalization of Lobatchewsky, does not quite add up as one expected. It remains
productively incomplete and not fully synthesized; it is without teleological guarantees,
an open (as opposed to closed) rationalism. A rationalism that in Bachelard’s vocabulary
is far more cheerful:
Happily incomplete reason can no longer deaden itself within a tradition; it can no
longer count upon memory to recite its tautologies. It is necessary to constantly
prove it and test it. It struggles against others, but first of all, with itself. This
time, it has guarantees of being incisive and young.
207
Seeking to upset or dissolve the stagnation of scientific thought, his method
endorses a practice of continuous experimentation. Such an experimental practice,

206
Ibid., 3-4.
207
Ibid., 6.
320
however, is not limited to empirical observation but aims at abstract and theoretical
thinking as creative acts indispensable to research. Bachelard imagines using such an
experimental pedagogy to disrupt the teaching of reason as a mere accumulated tradition.
“The time of this monotonous enrichment appears over. We now have less need for
discovering things than for discovering ideas.”
208
(In a slightly different register, he
writes in “Noumène et Microphysique” that physics is “no longer a science of facts; it is a
technique of effects [Zeeman effect, etc.].”
209
) Such an experimental form of education
emphasizes the transvaluative power of scientific thinking to disrupt the foundations of
reality as presently perceived, in order to expand the realm of the possible. With
surrationalism, one’s sense of scale and orientation as secured by a realist
phenomenology is potentially inverted in a manner suggestive of the revelatory
dépaysement of Painlevé’s films. “Simplicity changes camps. It is massive, the formless
[informe] that is simple. It is the element that is complex. Elementary form reveals itself
polymorphous and shimmering at the very moment when the massive form tends towards
the amorphous. Suddenly, unity scintillates.”
210
This scintillating, flickering, trembling
unity—this unity that shimmers, that shimmies even—reasserts the presence of difference
within concept of unity, providing a suggestive figure of the ontological interventions of
surrationalism’s epistemological openness.

208
Ibid., 4 (my emphasis).
209
Bachelard, “Noumène et Microphysique,” 59.
210
Bachelard, “Le Surrationalisme,” 4.
321
Bachelard’s surrationalism proposes a definition of the experiment that cuts
across science in both a laboratory and a Nietzschean sense—raising the stakes of all
experimental work. “If one does not gamble with reason during an experiment, then the
experiment is not worth the trouble of attempting.”
211
He continues,
The risk to reason must moreover be total. It is its specific character to be total.
All or nothing. If the experiment succeeds, I know that it will completely change
my mind… What could I do, in fact, with an experiment the more it comes to
confirm what I know and, by consequence, what I am? Every real discovery
determines a new method, it must ruin a preliminary method. Said another way, in
the kingdom of thought, imprudence is a method. Only imprudence can have
success.
212
Bachelard’s definition of the experiment, to surrealist delight, elaborates practices of
science and a scientific thinking that purposively eschews the comfort and assurances of
realist epistemologies, aiming instead to test or “endanger” reason itself. It is only in
pushing toward the unknown, the x, that anything new can be learned, that true
discoveries can be made, and in the pursuit of such knowledge, the subject can be
unmade and remade, refashioned, reinvented, reformed.
It is in this manner that Bachelard presents experimental science as a realm of
imagination and performative, creative acts. Bachelard’s celebration of scientific thinking
as creative already appeared in the concluding lines of “Noumène et Microphysique”:
“Contemporary atomic science is more than a description of phenomena, it is a
production of phenomena. Mathematical physics is more than abstract thinking, it is a

211
Ibid., 5.
212
Ibid., 5.
322
thinking rooted in nature [pensée naturée].”
213
The irony should not be lost on the fact
that Bachelard venerates the very forms of creative activity that in the coming years will
be focused almost exclusively on an intoxication for pure annihilation in the forms of
atomic weaponry and unrestrained biopolitics. He is revealed at these moments at his
most utopian, if perhaps politically absent minded with regards to the relation of science
to the state, and his failure to be—as Nietzsche would want—adequately stateless.
Bachelard’s larger project—elaborated in The Formation of the Scientific Mind—of a
psychoanalysis of scientific thinking can be criticized here for lacking an adequate
theorization of the death drive despite his call to reinstate a (self) agressivity to
rationalism. His notion of science, for all of its creative powers, still understands the
practice of scientific thinking to somehow happen in an atmosphereless, disencarnated
sphere. With its Cartesian hangover, even under the sway of psychoanalysis, these early
texts on the philosophy of science manifest a startling iconophobia that marks out in this
context an irreconcilable difference between the methods and thinking of Painlevé and
Bachelard on the questions of science—though one could resume the conversation
through Bachelard’s subsequent and incredibly rich texts on poetics and the imagination,
particularly his 1942 study L’Eau et Les Rêves: essai sur l’imagination de la matière.
Bachelard helps push the consequences of Painlevé’s pedagogical interventions into the
realm of philosophy, and in fact offers a useful resistance to its enthusiasms. Yet Painlevé
also productively disturbs Bachelard’s philosophy of science, demonstrating the extent to
which it draws upon a rather impoverished notion of moving—or still—images, even

213
Ibid., 65.
323
with the representational practices of positivism. They are neither self-evident nor simple,
and as the surrealists would claim, they maintain their own potential for an experimental
risk to reason, their own contribution to a creative and productive forgetting.
4.11 A Cinematic Gay Science
Few terms seem more descriptively apropos of Painlevé’s oeuvre and its aesthetic and
philosophical implications than “gay science”—a science that is cheerful, spritely, and
witty, though also possessed with an ambivalent, erotic energy. My appropriation of this
term, however, draws primarily on its formulation by Nietzsche in his text of the same
name. As with the encounter with Bachelard, the aim here is not to claim a Nietzschean
heritage for Painlevé, or establish that Painlevé’s thinking about pedagogy took its cues
from Nietzsche, though hints of such a possibility are sprinkled throughout Painlevé’s
oeuvre.
214
Rather, it is to further draw out the critical possibilities immanent in Painlevé’s
project with regards to a longer history of critical engagements with the aesthetic of
positivism and realist epistemologies and pedagogy: Friedrich Nietzsche’s Gay Science
(translated into French as Le Gai Savoir in 1901). As with Bachelard, Nietzsche offers a
valuable—and less iconophobic—antidote to the calcification of the realist educational
system and suggests how Painlevé’s project attempts its surrealization of pedagogy.

214
In absence of a detailed intellectual diary or access to Painlevé’s personal library (which has regretfully
disappeared), such a case would best be made through the study of the aphoristic texts, nonsensical verse,
and plays he wrote or co-wrote under his various pseudonyms and alter-egos. See, for example, P. J. Alpin
[J. P.] and Philippe Halsman, “Tétard devient monsieur Teste ou les rayons de la mort, le jeu du
surhomme,” undated (ca. 1936-1945); Yann O’Bara [J. P.], “le théâtre de la dérision,” undated (ca. 1980s);
and O’Bara [J. P.], “La traversée du mouroir,” undated (ca. 1980s), as well as the miscellaneous aphorisms
from throughout his life, collected by Brigitte Berg in Jean Painlevé (Paris: Les Documents
Cinématographiques, 1991).
324
Nietzsche’s text, which takes its title from the Provençal troubadours’ art of
poetry (gai saber), develops an anti-dogmatic, joyously experimental approach to
thinking through aphorisms, rhyme, and song, previously alluded to through his “Let us
try it,” “Always experiment.”
215
In characteristic style, the science (Wissenschaft, savoir),
of Nietzsche’s text resonates with common understandings of the term as both a body of
knowledge and the empirical method of the positive sciences. But it simultaneously
pushes such terms toward a critical transvaluation or poetic redefinition of science in
favor of practices and thinking that affirm “health, future, growth, power, life.”
216
Read in
the French context of the Third Republic’s foi laïc (secular faith or religion of science

215
Nietzsche’s and Painlevé’s understandings of experimentation might be understood as a radicalizing
reinvention of Claude Bernard’s definition of the experiment into the realm of aesthetics and theory. In
Principes de médicine expérimentale (1878; repr. Paris, PUF, 1947), Bernard provides the following
definition:
Scientific experiments are made following a preconceived idea that is acted upon to verify or to
control in order to understand a phenomenon and to grasp in all the circumstances that accompany
the production of the phenomenon which truly constitutes its determination and which must be
called its proximate cause. (4)
In his most famous text, the 1865 Introduction à l’étude de la médicine expériementale (1865; repr., Paris:
Delagrave, 1898), 17, he introduces the concept of “experiments by destruction” wherein the understanding
of a normal functioning cell is gained by producing abnormalities and tracking the malfunctions they cause.
Lisa Cartwright provides a thorough critique of the sadistic, destructive impulses at the heart of such an
enterprise in Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1995), 17-46.
Painlevé’s lecture tours in 1931 make reference to Georges Cuvier’s famously violent definition of
the active/passive distinction in natural and experimental sciences in his Règne animal (1816): “In a
manner of speaking, calculation orders nature. It determines the phenomena more exactly than observation
can make them known; experiment forces nature to unveil herself; observation spies her when she is
rebellious and seeks to surprise her” (cited in Edward A. Eigen, “Overcoming First Impressions: Georges
Cuvier’s Types,” Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 30, no. 2 (1997): 191). And yet, like Nietzsche,
whose discourse on veils is developed throughout The Gay Science seems almost directly pointed at such a
definition, Painlevé develops a practice that moves further and further away from the will to unveil, which
is not the same as a willingness to remain mystified.
216
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sect. 3, 35; and Le Gai Savoir, 10.
325
and citizenship),
217
Nietzsche’s science both engages and radicalizes the positivist method.
Nietzsche challenges faith in science as a surrender of a necessary skepticism, a
mechanization of thinking premised upon the fantasy that with the proper method one can
reconstruct an objective architectonics of knowledge founded in a priori datum
established through the methods of the natural sciences, and thereby return thought to a
stable foundation and comfortable existence (the seeds of this undoing are already
immanent to Taine’s true hallucination).
218
In opposition to this, he performs a science
without piety, an impious science that turns critical attention to its very methods and
assumptions, its convictions, including what positivist science knowingly or not aims to
repress—namely the insaisissable, the incalculable.
219

217
Cf. Buisson, La Foi laïque: Extraits de discours et d'écrits, 1879-1911 (Paris: Hachette, 1912).
218
On the mechanization of thinking see Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sect. 373, 335; and Le Gai Savoir,
sect. 373, 370. On his mockery of this faith in the “Jesuit” Auguste Comte’s work, see Twilight of the
Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1968), sect. 4, 69; and Le Crépuscule
des Idoles, trans. Henri Albert (Paris: Société du Mercure, 1908), sect. 4, 175.
Nietzsche was a great admirer of Hippolyte Taine, and hoped through him to gain both a translator
and a French readership. On 4 July 1887, Nietzsche sent Taine copies of Daybreak and the second edition
of The Gay Science. In an accompanying note, he wrote that “I would be very happy if my readers were to
include the Frenchmen whom I hold in the highest esteem.” In a 10 November 1887 letter to his friend
Peter Gast, he expressed how much he would have liked to be a part of the Goncourt salons in Paris,
sharing dinners with the “most skeptical troupe of Parisian minds” who Nietzsche seems to see as almost
resembling a collection of modern practitioners of the gay science: Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, Théophile
Gautier, Taine, Renan, Schérer, Gavarni, and of course the Goncourts. He even imagines a role for himself
in the group, suggested in final sentence of this extract:
Exasperated pessimism, cynicism, nihilism, alternating with a lot of joviality and good humor; I
would have been quite at home there myself—I know these gentlemen by heart so well that I have
actually had enough of them. One should be more radical; at root they all lack the principle
thing—“la force.”
Printed in Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1969), 267-268, 275.
219
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sect. 344, 280-281; and Le Gai Savoir, sec. 344, 301. The critique of
convictions takes an ironic twist in its French translation. “De quelle manière, nous aussi, nous sommes
encore pieux” (In what manner we too are still pious) addresses the manner in which most science requires
a leap of faith, in the form of its convictions in realist, empirical observation, to which scientists, and even
326
As a pedagogical intervention, Nietzsche’s theorization of an empirical method
antagonistic to the comforts of positivist and realist epistemologies places considerable
stress on the cultivation of a scientific method guided by “the delight in an x.”
220
By x
Nietzsche indicates the unknown—the mathematical variable or factor that is as of yet to
be determined, and which occasions, continually, the activation of the experimental ethos
and an epistemological approach that stresses a fundamental openness to contingency and
difference, the unforseen.
As cited in the previous chapter, Nietzsche calls out the piety of realists in order
to underscore the irreducible presence of a quantity of fantasy, fiction, and intoxication
within supposedly sober or objective endeavors, and in fact their intoxicating powers.
Nietzsche’s teasing critique of realism’s haughty sobriety as itself a form of intoxication,
in addition to calling out the affective dimension of this mode of representation, aims less
at dissolving reality into a groundless relativism than at underscoring the impossibility of
separating essences from the contexts of their perception and the perceiving subject, or
the drinker from the drink, the drunk (completely reinventing what it means, as discussed
in chapter three, to say “I am drunk”). For readers of such French positivists, particularly
Littré and Taine, this is not a radically new or even disturbing concept.

gay scientists, remain too often dutifully pious. Pieux (pious) has a homophonic relationship to the verb to
stink (puer), the very terms upon which a year later Nietzsche leveled his critique of Zola’s naturalism in
Twilight of the Idols: “Zola: or ‘delight in stinking’”; “Zola: ou «la joie de puer».” See Nietzsche, Twilight
of the Idols, sect. 1, 68; and Nietzsche, Le Crépuscule des Idoles, trans. Henri Albert (Paris: Société du
Mercure, 1908), sect. 1, 172.
Might even the gay scientist remain too stuck in the muck of realism and naturalism? Or is this
simply an expression of Nietzsche’s impalpable nose?
220
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sect. 3, 37; and Le Gai Savoir, sect. 3, 12-13.
327
Yet Nietzsche’s methodological intervention as a philologist apply new pressure
to realism’s or scientific realism’s epistemological basis.
221
He calls into question the
reading methods of realism and the prejudices of science and the exnomination of its own
acts of interpretation, which he wishes to disrupt with what he later calls in The Anti-
Christ an ephexis, a skillful and learned undecisiveness, a suspension or withholding of
the interpretive decision or cut into the matters or questions under investigation. Reading
scientifically, thus, becomes an act of refusing reduction, of never seeking to “divest
existence of its rich ambiguity,” but rather joyously engage its differences if one wishes
to discover meaning.
222
Nietzsche returns us, again, to the forgetting lessons that Painlevé’s films
potentially set in motion. It can be summarized as a respectful regard for the strange,
what Nietzsche refers to as “learning to love,” the acquisition of a patient and open
attitude towards the strange: “In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our
patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually it sheds its veil
and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our
hospitality.”
223
Painlevé’s flirtation with anthropomorphization and anti-
anthropocentrism, his cinematic gay science, pushes towards a respect and responsibility

221
Nietzsche, in 1888, defined philology as “the art of reading well—of being able to read off a fact without
falsifying it by interpretation, without losing caution, patience, subtlety in the desire for understanding.
Philology as ephexis [undecisiveness] in interpretation…” Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, sect. 52, 169. See
also, Barbara Stiegler, “On the Future of Our Incorporations: Nietzsche, Media, Events,” trans. Helen
Elam, Discourse, vol. 31, no. 1-2: Special Issue: On the Genealogy of Media, ed. Laurence Rickels (2009):
124-139, esp. 139n18.
222
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sect. 373, 335; and Le Gai Savoir, sect. 373, 370. Albert renders “seines
vieldeutigen Charakters” in section 373 as “son caractère multiple”: it’s multifaceted nature.
223
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sect. 334, 262; and Le Gai Savoir, sect. 334, 282.
328
for unsublimated difference. The preservation of this, of life’s rich ambiguity requires the
development of a taste, “the taste of reverence for everything that lies beyond your
horizon.”
224
Painlevé suggests a position that cuts across Bachelard’s surrationalism and a
French inflected reading of a Nietzschean gay science. Painlevé’s insistence on continual
experimentation, his skepticism regarding the content of images and the apparatus, his
critical engagement with the enterprise of epistemological realism, and perhaps most
importantly the practice of an epistemological openness form key components of his
critical pedagogy on the page, in the classroom, and on film. Of course, it bears repeating
that in stark opposition to Bachelard, Painlevé worked on a science through images, and
more specifically, through moving images, and while he mobilized the discourses of pure
science and pure film, he shouldn’t be mistaken for a Pasteurian. These film share with
Bachelard and Nietzsche a commitment to rigorous thinking as a cheerful endeavor.
Painlevé’s work presents compelling footage that calls into question the fantasy of the
self-evident or transparent image without abandoning the value of images for the pursuit
of gay science. His creations take full advantage of the filmic possibility of presenting the
concrete and the abstract simultaneously, and to use the medium to interrogate the limits
of both. Herein lies his originality, his contribution to a cinematic gay science.
Les Oursins—the only of Painlevé’s films that he explicitly described with the
adjective “surreal”—mobilizes the scientific cinema’s primary manipulations of space
and time, microcinematography and time-lapse and slow-motion filming, in order to

224
Ibid., sect. 373, 335; and Ibid., sect. 373, 370.
329
introduce spectators to different scales and forms of life.
225
The film deploys realism not
as a ground upon which to reaffirm what is known, but as a landscape that becomes
increasingly strange, pushing at the threshold of realist representation. The film, which
begins with images of Painlevé strolling on the beach in search of sea urchins, opens as if
it were a remake of the visit to the beach in the textbook Lectures et Leçons de Choses.
226
It quickly reveals itself, however, to be something else. The sequences dedicated to the
rock urchin feature a succession of images of the creature’s surface depicted with
increasing strengths of magnification. The camera reveals a previously invisible dense
and teeming multitude of strange life forms and architectural shapes that suggest a
diversity and increasing differentiation of what appeared at first to be a simple animal. It
becomes less accurate in the face of these images to speak of a singular creature so much
as an ecosystem, a scintillating, non-self-identical unity. (Figures 68-69)
If Painlevé does not completely unanchor his thinking from realist
epistemologies, he does, in a manner that echoes Bachelard’s radicalized rationalism,
push realism to take account of the surreal, deploying realism not as a ground upon which
to reaffirm what is now, but as a landscape that becomes increasing strange the more one
pushes the demands of realism. The images hold spectators in what Nietzsche describes
as philology’s critical ephexis: a studied undecisiveness, an intellectual long take that

225
Painlevé, “Les Films Biologiques,” Lumière & Radio, 10 September 1929, 17. Although beyond the
bounds of this essay, Painlevé’s understanding of the surreal is quite different from that of André Breton,
and in fact, is better conceived of as a para- or dissident surrealism.
226
Bert, Lectures et Leçons de Choses, 190-195.
330
Fig. 68. Frame capture of the “lost world” and strange eco-system of the rock urchin, to which he has
introduced a caprella. From Les Oursins (1929).
Fig. 69. Frame capture of increased magification of pedicels / pedicellariae—the worm-like organisms that
clean and defend the rock urchin. From Les Oursins (1929).
331
refuses to cut to easy resolutions, instead respecting ambiguity.
227
The closer and more
intensely one looks, the more one is potentially ungrounded or set adrift into a wholly
other realm of experience. The film’s images verge on the fantastic, the incredible, the
surreal. The film ends as it opens, with shots of the seashore at Port-Blanc on France’s
northern coast. But even these establishing shots are robbed of their power to establish a
ground or to enframe this documentary’s excursions into vertiginous scales, its invitation
to a voyage to strange “lost worlds.”
228
The effect emphasizes the manner in which the
function of the framing device is set up to be upset, to upset us, to set us up for something
else, some other bête...
The documentary’s anti-anthropocentric pressure imagines a trajectory for
nonfiction cinema, for cinema in general, that counters the Griersonian documentary
tradition. It is coupled with cinema’s own basic pleasure principle: to take a brief
vacation, to vacate, to escape, to get away, to forget oneself, to forget, oneself. A
surprising potential, it is tempting to say a minor politics, reveals itself in one of the banal
promises of the amusing instruction of popular wildlife and nature films, in its so-called
escapism, its call of the wild.
Painlevé’s playful engagement with the enterprise of epistemological realism, and
the manner in which the work strives for an epistemological openness, form key
components of his critical pedagogy in print, in the classroom, and on film. Painlevé’s

227
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1968),
sect. 52, 169; and Le Crépuscule des Idoles, Le Cas de Wagner, Nietzsche Contre Wagner, et L’AntéChrist,
trans. Henri Albert (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1899), sect. 52, 323.
228
Painlevé, “Les Films Biologiques,” Lumière & Radio, 10 September 1929, 17.
332
compelling footage often calls into question the fantasy of the self-evident or transparent
realist image, without abandoning the value of images for the pursuit of knowledge. His
creations take full advantage of the filmic possibility of presenting the concrete and the
abstract simultaneously, of using the medium to interrogate the limits of both. Even if
Painlevé could not make good on his impossible promise to the alumni association of the
Lycée Louis-Le-Grand “to totally abolish secondary education,” his work offers the
conditions of possibility for a transvaluation of both documentary film and film education
as a critical unlearning. The challenge, and the gift, that Painlevé’s oeuvre presents to
students and teachers is nothing less than to think and enact the transformation of film
and film education.
To invent disciplines where science will be gay, or it will not be.
333
CONCLUSION
CINEMATIC WILDLIFE, 1939-1946
5.1
“Blood is life!” —Knock, Nosferatu
In October of 1934 Painlevé wrote to Alfred Stoessel of the Institut für volkstümliche
Naturkunde, Berline (The Institute for Popular Natural History), “I am now going to
begin a very long study of the blood of animals and men. I do not know the outcome, but
for or against the classical theories, I am confident, after the first attempt made, that we
will have interesting results…”
1
As with most of Painlevé’s experiments, his peculiar
form of comparative anatomy, passionate zoology, gay science, there is less a distinct aim
than a pursuit of interesting results. Painlevé does not leave many further clues about the
precise dimension of his long study of the blood of animals and men, but it seems clear
that two films begun prior to the fall of the Third Republic would respond to the times
and become inflected by a politics of blood, and life.
16 December 1938 Émile Roubaud, a specialist in tropical medicine—colonial
medicine—at the Pasteur Institute, co-author of the text La Maladie du Sommeil au
Congo Français 1906-1908, sent a brief note inviting Painlevé to visit his office and see
Brazilian vampire bat, reported the first in France and said to be a rather docile specimen,
with the hopes of filming its sucking mechanism and method of attack using a guinea pig

1
Letter from Jean Painlevé to Alfred Stoessel of the Institut für volkstümliche Naturkunde, Berlin,
16 October 1934, held in Correspondences Q-Z dossier, FJP.
334
or a rabbit.
2
Painlevé and André Raymond filmed the bat, but the picture had to be
shelved as the German forces invaded France. The bat was gassed to prevent it from
escaping in the case of bombing, and spreading pestilence.
Painlevé who had been active in assorted anti-fascist campaigns, including
serving as part of the delegations that visited Austria and Poland to monitor the situation
of European Jews and other minorities in fascist countries, and he used his father’s name
to help Spanish revolutionaries and German and Italian Jews gain temporary asylum in
France. When France fell, he went underground and traveled around the unoccupied zone
for much of the war. Afterwards, he preferred not to play the veteran and speak of his
activities during the war. But his anti-fascist actions, including filming footage of the
liberation of Paris, earned him the office of Director of French cinema, a post he held for
only a matter of months, because Charles de Gaulle thought a functionary would
probably serve the post better (and did not care for Painlevé’s politics).
In 1945 he resumed work, participating in a trilogy of films about blood: Le
Vampire (1939-1945), L’Assassins d’eau douce (1933-1946), and writing the
commentary for his assistant Georges Franju’s directorial debut, Le Sang des bêtes
(1949), on the abattoir at Villette. These films all address, indirectly, the trauma of the
war, of the Shoah, the spread of fascism, the culpabilities of colonial occupation, the
widespread complicity with the suppression of life, of freedom, and the everyday
violence of deaths that sustains life, but their principle object is the questions of blood

2
Letter from Dr. Émile Roubaud, l’Institut Pasteur, to Jean Painlevé, 16 December 1938, held in
Vampire dossier, FJP; and É. Roubaud, G. Martin, and LeBoeuf La Maladie du Sommeil au Congo
Français 1906-1908 (Paris: Masson & Cie., 1909).
335
Fig. 70. Frame capture from Le Vampire (1939-1945).
Fig. 71. Frame capture from L’Assassins d’eau douce (1946).
336
and nourishment. They are deeply ambivalent films, refusing to provide clear or
untroubled allegories, but they flow, unabashedly, with blood. In this sense, they suggest
a genuine cinema of cruelty.
Antonin Artaud, in the face of almost universal misunderstanding, used the
adjective cruel to describe his theory of a living theater. Cruelty is not simply torture or
perverse violence, but a signifier of “this blind appetite for life, capable of overriding
everything…” later adding, “I have therefore said ‘cruelty’ as I might have said ‘life’ or
‘necessity’.”
3
Monique Sicard, suggests such a connection, noting that cruelty, from the
Latin crudelis, refers to “what makes blood flow.”
4
In what direction, is a matter of
politics.
5.2
…je reste un «hors-sein»…
5
I remain an outsider. I remain a sea urchin (oursin). Painlevé wrote these words to
Armand Moss, one of his few friends from Lycée Louis-Le-Grand—a Baudelaire expert,
living in New York as an exile, having left France to escape the fascists and the anti-

3
Antonin Artaud, “Second Letter: To J. P. Paris 14 November 1932,” and “Third Letter: To J. P.
Paris 9 November 1932,” in Theater and Its Double, 103, 116.
4
Monique Sicard, “Regards sous-marin, Jean Painlevé (1907-1989) [sic]” in La Fabrique du
regard: images de science et appareils de vision (XVe-XXe siècle) (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998), 196.
5
Letter from Jean Painlevé to Armand Moss, 25 November 1963, Correspondences L-P dossier,
FJP. Painlevé echoed this sentiment in an interview in 1986, responding to the question “Is there a film that
defines you?” with “L’Oursin.” Painlevé interviewed by Philippe Jerome, “Jean Painlevé: Cinquante ans de
cinéma scientifique: «La science est une fiction»,” 16.
337
Semites determined to strip so many of life. This unassuming self-portrait, written several
pages into a letter to an old friend, summarizes Painlevé and his œuvre. For what is it to
identify as an hor-sein, an oursin? To be enigmatic, somewhat prickly, difficult to handle,
hard to penetrate, coveted by gourmands? An outsider, an offsider, an insider aimed at
being a decentering or disruptive force…
The aim of this dissertation has been to engage the productive possibilities
Painlevé’s work as a series of provocations, and to trace out some of the rippling
consequences of the Painlevé effect. His short films, like the urchins he embraces, work
as irritants useful for disturbing received notions of science, surrealism, and the history
nonfiction film, of cinema itself. Painlevé’s œuvre points to the concrete manners in
which documents and documentaries circulate, agitate, and possibly present new ways of
perceiving and thinking about life, and for it.
Fig. 72. “Faim.” Frame capture from L’Assassins d’eau douce (1946).
338
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