Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painleve (review)

Science Is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé. Andy Masaki Bellows and Marina McDougall with Brigitte Berg, eds. Translated by Jeanine Herman. Cambridge, Mass. and San Francisco: MIT Press and Brico Press, 2000. Pp. 213. $39.95.

The scholarly anatomization of the avant-garde has identified many of the literary, artistic, and popular-cultural influences that affected various movements; the role of scientific representations, however, has received comparatively little attention. Science Is Fiction represents a significant step not only in the recovery of a neglected innovator but also in the investigation of science's importance to the avant-garde. It provides the most comprehensive source of information on Jean Painlevé in English to date and offers a fascinating collection of representative artifacts from his career.

The subtitle is somewhat misleading since the book touches on much more than Painlevé's films: it contains a biographical essay, essays by and an interview with him, contemporary journalistic pieces published about him, and full-page reproductions of twelve of his photographs. It also includes a curious section entitled "Photograms," which consist of frame enlargements from various films juxtaposed with transcriptions of selected intertitles or voice-over narration. Since the films remain woefully underdistributed, this provides a welcome opportunity to get some sense of them, but it only barely suggests their richness while underscoring the shortcomings of frame enlargements as a method for illustrating moving pictures.¹

The most substantial contribution is Brigitte Berg's biographical essay, "Contradictory Forces: Jean Painlevé, 1902-1989." Berg collaborated with Painlevé during the final years of his life and is currently the director of Les Documents Cinématographique, an organization to collect and distribute popular scientific films founded by Painlevé in the 1930s that now houses much of his own work. Her essay draws extensively on unpublished archival documents. It makes one think that a more extensive collection of his work, both films and writings, would be well worthwhile (a compliment one could pay this book is that it leaves one hoping for more).

The book documents a web of avant-garde connections in which Painlevé was enmeshed. He was an acquaintance of Luis Buñuel's, to whom he showed a film of an actual eye surgery (Buñuel's response: "Do you really believe that just because I cut open an eye in a film that I like that sort of thing? . . . [O]perations horrify me. I can't stand the sight of blood" [xvi]). He had a working relationship with Georges Bataille, who published his and Eli Lotar's photographs in Documents. He enjoyed a brief friendship with Sergei Eisenstein, whom he helped to smuggle into Switzerland in a basket of dirty laundry to see the silent-era film diva Valeska Gert (reproductions of postcards from Eisenstein's trip to the Americas in 1930 form the book's coda). He was friends with Man Ray (whose L'Étoile du mer owes its starfish footage to Painlevé), Pierre Prévert, and Jacques Boiffard. Another crucial, though unknown, figure is his longtime collaborator and partner, Genèvieve Hamon, daughter of the libertarian anarchists Augustin and Henriette Hamon; unfortunately, however, this book does not go beyond alluding to Hamon's importance.

With this circle of friends and acquaintances, it is not surprising that Painlevé is most commonly associated with the Surrealists, a connection that the book supplies ample evidence to support. In 1924, for instance, he contributed two short pieces, "An Example of Surrealism: The Cinema" and "Neo-Zoological Drama" (translated in this volume), to the first and only issue of Surréalisme, a journal edited by Ivan Goll that included contributions by Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay, among others. (This journal should not be confused--as it sometimes is--with Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, André Breton's more influential and longer-lived journal.) He also filmed vignettes that were projected in Goll's play Methuselah (1927); the "Photograms" section begins with stills from...