Criterion Sunday 468: “Science Is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé”

The Criterion Collection may generally be known for championing the great auteurs, but they also do some rather left-field choices, whether that’s Michael Bay (albeit early on in their existence; I’m not sure they’d give his films much time now), weird low-budget 50s sci-fi and now this set of short films about animals, which somewhat defy any straightforward description. The first disc presents his “popular films”, which is to say those made for the public (and not academics).

There’s a certain wonder to the first, Hyas and Stenorhynchus (1927), about little weird algae-like creatures with their spindly spines. The photography is obviously not as advanced as now, or even Painlevé’s later films, but there’s something luminous about the grainy, ethereal monochrome of these aquatic close-ups that has a magic to it. Sea Urchins (1954) has a lot of the same tentacles and marine weirdness but is somehow slightly unsettling, perhaps from the pulsating 1950s electronic score or just the better closer photography available. It’s co-directed with Painlevé’s partner, Geneviève Hamon, like a lot of his later films and sadly she seems not to get mentioned much in writing about him and his work. Clearly, though, both had a fascination with jellyfish, or with the category of weird gelatinous and tentacle-y things, because it feels like a number of his films deal with them. How Some Jellyfish Are Born (1960) also shows an interest in some unusual methods of conception and birth, with perhaps some hints towards other orders of gender and sexuality in these creatures which could probably have been developed more.

One of his better works, and certainly the creature with which he’s most linked (given the set’s box art), The Sea Horse (1933) makes clear just how extremely weird these creatures are. Just watching them is like gazing upon some Ray Harryhausen stop motion animated monster, but in a cute sort of way, though maybe there’s a bit of Lovecraft to them. Certainly Painlevé gets much more into the reproduction here, with the males gestating the babies, and seeing the tiny little ones come out is so fascinating (though I could have used without the shock cut to them cutting a pregnant seahorse open, even if I recognise this is ultimately a scientific film). Anyway, this is the kind of thing that Painlevé excels at, the intersection of science and the oneiric, which is also where The Love Life of the Octopus (1967) seems to sit. Truly octopuses are the most terrifying of creatures. Slithering yet smart, and, like so many of Painlevé and Hamon’s scientific studies, they have many tentacles. This particular short sets up our subject before getting into reproduction, and that too is strange and creepy, with thousands of little octopuses swimming away from these loose threads of gestating eggs. I remain properly terrified by this animal.

Further short films continue their fascination. With Shrimp Stories (1964), the directors acknowledge how ridiculous shrimp look with an overtly comic introduction, before we get into these (once again) elaborately tentacled sea creatures. Well in the case of shrimp, less tentacles than waving antennae and frantically moving little feet. If Acera, or The Witches’ Dance (1972) were merely an excuse to orchestrate the delightful aquatic ‘dance’ of these tiny snail-like organisms, then that would be enough (they swirl about, all but hopping up and down), but we also discover their hermaphroditic reproductive rituals and the gestation of tiny new acera. The photography is luminous and, as ever, these animals are strangely compelling. Sadly Freshwater Assassins (1947), despite its title, just seems a little bit duller, more like the orthodox nature shows you might get on TV, with less of the ugly weirdness of his other animals, mostly being just bugs living and fighting under the water in a pond. In Sea Ballerinas (1956), though, there’s a sense of humour, with it ending on a brittle fish seemingly conducting an orchestra, but otherwise there’s a lot of tumbling, shuffling and crawling around.

Stepping away from the sea creatures to watch something far more abstract is Liquid Crystals (1978). This is in fact closer to a late Stan Brakhage film than the kind of natural science pieces Painlevé did earlier on. It’s beautiful, though, as is an earlier film about the blood-sucking vampire bat, The Vampire (1945), which contextualises it in a short history of entertainment before letting it loose on an unfortunate guinea pig. There’s the customary blend here of limpid beauty and a sense of mystery in the photography, an informative voiceover and the dull academic subject matter, but the first enlivens the latter. Back to the abstraction in Diatoms (1968), but partly because the creatures under the (literal) microscope here are single-celled algae-like things, of various shapes, floating around on their own or in colonies. I’m still not exactly clear what a diatom is or does but I certainly got an almost trippy vision of their lives.

The final film on the first disc, and the latest film collected in the set, is Pigeons in the Square (1982). Pigeons get all kinds of bad press, and though this (relatively long) short film has a comical edge to it, Painlevé comes from a science background so he’s not interested in adding to the negative propaganda about pigeons. They are by turns majestic, beautifully patterned, comically silly, strutting, hopping, fluttering and pecking. Sure some of the urban varieties are a bit bedraggled and their seduction attempts wouldn’t pass muster by human standards, but this film just enjoys watching pigeons, and I enjoyed watching this film.

The second disc starts with “early popular silent films”, some of his earliest works. There’s The Octopus (1927), which has sort of a structure, but is mostly just the octopus slinking around (because if there’s anything we learn from the first disc it’s that Jean Painlevé loves a tentacled sea creature). The fragile beauty to these silent films is exemplified by Sea Urchins (1928), a creature he returned to in the 1950s (on the first disc), with luminous oneiric cinematography and no sound to distract (even if I did put some music on). The urchins wave around but also move and burrow. One thing I could do without is watching one get cut open but I guess there is at least some scientific method here. I am, though, prompted to wonder if my response to these short films is related to how much I like the creatures rather than a dispassionate critique of the filmmaking. I mean we may all know and love a seahorse, and even have opinions on octopuses, but what’s a Daphnia (1928)? Still for all its tiny bug like size — and there’s some serious magnification happening here — there’s even a bit of drama when the hydra comes along. A lovely little film.

Under the heading “silent research films”, there are a couple of Painlevé’s scientific shorts included and you can see immediately the difference from his “popular films”. The Stickleback’s Egg (1925) deals with a less than thrilling subject (microscopic organisms) and is pretty dry. There’s some great close-up photography that must have been very advanced for the time, and being silent I was able to put on a jaunty score, but this is mainly interesting as a comparison. Meanwhile Experimental Treatment of a Hemorrhage in a Dog (1930) is only four minutes, and exemplifies his specifically scientific focus in the silent era, but I really did not need to see this. The dog was fine after the procedure the film is clear to point out and that’s good, but it’s pretty graphic.

Unlike his more famous short films about animals (often underwater tentacled ones), Jean Painlevé also made a series of films dealing with various abstract concepts, here collected as “Films for La Palais de la Découverte”. The Fourth Dimension (1936) covers that idea, suggesting ways in which it could be understood, possibly as something beyond our own conception, something almost magical. It’s hard to really get to grips with it but Painlevé is serious and educational and it’s a lot to take in. More abstract scientific ideas are on show in The Struggle for Survival (1937) although this film is heavy on the text, which almost overwhelms the film with detail. He’s talking about population growth and certainly covers some ideas about it. Turning his cinematic attention to the Earth’s place in the universe is the subject of Voyage to the Sky (1937), which seems to conclude that in the grand vastness of space, we humans are almost ridiculously insignificant. It’s a rather bleak conclusion but nicely illustrated. Finally, Similarities Between Length and Speed (1937) is a rather abstruse short film on a topic I don’t really understand (which is to say, anything to do with mathematics). However, Jean Painlevé is an engaging filmmaker and tries to grapple seriously with his subject, which is about how bigger things aren’t exactly proportional.

Finally comes the single film under the heading “animation”, Bluebeard (1938), and it certainly a departure from Painlevé’s other films, being for a start not a scientific study of animals but instead a gloriously colourful claymation animated film about the bloodthirsty titular pirate, chopping off heads hither and yon. It’s all rather jolly and odd, and dark too and a fine way to round out the set.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection

My custom on this blog has not been to give ratings to short films, so the list below is just of the films included in the order they are presented. However my favourite was probably The Sea Horse, with the two academic research works and the mathematics film as my least favourite.

Hyas et stenorinques (Hyas and Stenorhynchus, 1929) [silent film] | Director Jean Painlevé | Cinematographer André Raymond | Length 10 minutes.
Oursins (Sea Urchins, 1954) | Directors Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon | Cinematographer Claude Beausoleil | Length 11 minutes.
Comment naissent des méduses (How Some Jellyfish Are Born, 1960) | Directors Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon | Length 14 minutes.
Cristaux liquides (Liquid Crystals, 1978) | Directors Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon | Length 6 minutes.
L’Hippocampe ou ‘Cheval marin’ (The Seahorse, 1933) | Director Jean Painlevé | Cinematographer André Raymond | Length 14 minutes.
Les Amours de la pieuvre (The Love Life of the Octopus, 1967) | Directors Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon | Length 14 minutes.
Histoires de crevettes (Shrimp Stories, 1964) | Directors/Cinematographers Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon | Length 10 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 26 September 2021.

Acera ou Le Bal des sorcières (Acera, or The Witches’ Dance, 1972) | Directors/Cinematographers Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon | Length 13 minutes.
Le Vampire (The Vampire, 1945) | Director Jean Painlevé | Length 9 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Monday 27 September 2021.

Les Assassins d’eau douce (Freshwater Assassins, 1947) | Director Jean Painlevé | Length 24 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Tuesday 28 September 2021.

Les Danseuses de la mer (Sea Ballerinas, 1956) | Directors/Cinematographers Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon | Length 13 minutes.
Diatomées (Diatoms, 1968) | Director Jean Painlevé | Cinematographer Catherine Thiriot | Length 17 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Friday 1 October 2021.

Les Pigeons du square (Pigeons in the Square, 1982) | Director Jean Painlevé | Cinematographer Vincent Berczi | Length 27 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Saturday 2 October 2021.

La Pieuvre (The Octopus, 1927) [silent film] | Director Jean Painlevé | Length 13 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 3 October 2021.

Les Oursins (Sea Urchins, 1928) [silent film] | Director Jean Painlevé | Length 10 minutes.
La Daphnie (Daphnia, 1928) [silent film] | Director Jean Painlevé | Length 9 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Thursday 7 October 2021.

L’Oeuf d’épinoche (The Stickleback’s Egg, 1925) [silent film] | Director Jean Painlevé | Length 26 minutes.
Traitement éxperimental d’une hémorragie chez le chien (Experimental Treatment of a Hemmorhage in a Dog, 1930) [silent film] | Director Jean Painlevé | Length 4 minutes.
La Quatrième dimension (The Fourth Dimension, 1936) | Director Jean Painlevé | Length 10 minutes.
Images mathématiques de la lutte pour la vie (The Struggle for Survival, 1937) | Director Jean Painlevé | Length 14 minutes.
Voyage dans le ciel (Voyage to the Sky, 1937) | Director Jean Painlevé | Length 11 minutes.
Similitudes des longueurs et des vitesses (Similarities Between Length and Speed, 1937) | Director Jean Painlevé | Length 10 minutes.
Barbe-Bleu (Bluebeard, 1938) [colour film] | Directors Jean Painlevé and René Bertrand | Length 13 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 10 October 2021.

LFF 2016 Day Twelve: A Woman of the World (1925) and Women Who Kill (2016)

Sunday 16 October was the last day of London Film Festival, sadly, and I only had two films to see, at a fairly leisurely pace, so I even got to sit down for lunch.

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A Woman of the World (1925, USA, dir. Malcolm St. Clair, wr. Pierre Collings, DOP Bert Glennon)
It’s not perfect, and moves all too easily into broad melodrama, but there’s a lot of genuine charm to this Pola Negri vehicle. Small town hypocrisy has always (always) been an easy target, but Negri with her — shock! — continental smoking ways and skull-shaped tattoo is a delight. She’s clearly a great actor for sly sideways glances and eye rolls at the ridiculousness of everyone else, but there’s a bumbling old chap with an enormous moustache and a great tattoo reveal of his own to match her in the later stages. Definitely good fun.

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Women Who Kill (2016, USA, dir./wr. Ingrid Jungermann, DOP Rob Leitzell)
A sort-of-indie-comedy sort-of-thriller, this film attempts a difficult balance of competing tonal registers. I don’t think it always succeeds, but it has a dry humour, not to mention the presence of Sheila Vand, who proved she could do a darker character in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, hence she’s well cast here. In truth I was expecting something more along the lines of Jungermann’s web series The Slope (set in the gentrified Park Slope area of Brooklyn) and its co-creator Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior. That it didn’t quite do the same thing is hardly a criticism — there’s only so many brittle takes on Brooklyn lesbian hipsterism one needs (though I adored Appropriate Behavior) — and it does revisit some familiar terrain in the Co-Op, but overall the horror-tinged mystery aspect is I suppose a fertile metaphorical terrain for dealing with post-break-up anxieties. Plus the leads nail their NPR/Serial-style podcasting voices for their premise.

Go West (1925)

This screening was presented with live piano accompaniment from John Sweeney, whose work was excellent and deft as ever. I always worry I should try to have something more precise to say, but if he had been unduly drawing attention to his playing, it would hardly have been so successful; instead I was fully engrossed in the Keaton comedy.

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There’s plenty of ink that’s been spilled over the years (although that’s not entirely an apt metaphor for this modern era) discussing the differences between the various silent film comedians, along with people’s personal preferences. I’ve not seen enough by any of them (although I did, rather briefly, review a screening of Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! last year) to contribute much that’s worthwhile to that discussion — which I can only hope will be a blessed relief to readers, who should be free to make their own judgement on this matter. I will say that of the famous ones, I’ve seen the most films by Buster Keaton, a disparity that’s hardly going to be rectified by the BFI’s current Keaton retrospective season. Amongst his fine body of work, Go West is it seems a little underappreciated, but over a series of vignettes set in the Wild West, Keaton mines plenty of humour, and even a bit of pathos.

Plot isn’t really what this kind of comedy is about, so much as the set-up. In this case, Keaton plays a friendless loner (called “Friendless” in the credits, indeed) who is evicted from his home and, exhausted by city life, hops on a train headed to Santa Fe, where he falls in to working at a cattle ranch run by a gruff but kindly Howard Truesdale. This of course motivates a series of comedic set pieces that test the untrained city-slicker neophyte against this new world, leading to slapstick pratfalls (primarily from donning chaps and spurs), incompetence (trying to lasso a calf, or milk a cow), imperilment (at the horns of some rampaging bulls) and fights (squaring up to a poker cheat). But Keaton’s Friendless also discovers a determination and tenacity prompted by his newly-kindled love.

Of course, being a comedy, the love interest angle is hardly straightforward. When Friendless shows kindness towards a cow named Brown Eyes, the cow devotedly follows him, which initially seems played for laughs — especially given the ranch owner has a daughter who is seen making eyes at Friendless. However, it soon leads to something akin to genuine pathos, as a mutual affection develops between the two that leads Friendless to want to save his love from imminent death. But this is hardly a proto-animal-welfare message movie: the last third of the film has him show loyalty to the ranch owner by trying to ensure his cattle are delivered to the slaughterhouse stockyards, which motivates a manic slapstick stampede through the local town.

Keaton’s touch is everywhere evident, not just in the unconventional relationship dynamic and in his trademark pork-pie hat (which he continues to wear even as a cowboy), but elsewhere in a number of little throwaway moments, like him catching his hat as it’s blown off in a passing breeze, staying in his stony-faced character as his poker-playing antagonist holds a gun on him and demands he smile, or leaping back onboard a runaway train so that he can comfort Brown Eyes rather than try to stop the train. There’s also a lovely sequence later on showing a black street dancer plying his trade while Friendless watches captivated, all of them happily oblivious to the growing number of stampeding cattle approaching from the back of the shot.

The film is really a framework within which to accommodate all these (and many other) virtuoso moments. There’s no point where things stop to deliver a message about character growth or the importance of friends; Keaton keeps things far subtler than all that. Instead, clichés of romantic love are skewered within the familiar fish-out-of-water scenario, and even the ‘riding off into the sunset’ shot gets a laughable twist. This film shouldn’t, therefore, be just for fans of Keaton or silent comedy: there’s plenty for everyone to love. Even farmyard animals.

CREDITS
Director Buster Keaton; Writers Raymond Cannon and Keaton; Cinematographers Elgin Lessley and Bert Haines; Starring Buster Keaton, Howard Truesdale; Length 80 minutes.
Seen at BFI Southbank (NFT2), London, Tuesday 21 January 2014.

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

This screening was preceded by an early silent short film, which I’ve reviewed separately at the end.

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I imagine a lot of people have at least a smattering of knowledge about this story based on its long-running stage musical incarnation or its soundtrack. And though I can’t pretend (like the snob I am) that I’ve entirely avoided Andrew Lloyd Webber in the course of my life, I had at least missed out on this particular creaky stage musical of his, so I can’t make any comparison between it and this (much earlier) film adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s original. I can only assess it as it compares with other silent films I’ve seen of the era, and certainly the 1925 Phantom provides plenty of enjoyment on its own merits, including an iconic role for the all-too-brief silent film career of Lon Chaney (senior), as well as featuring some beautiful camerawork and use of colour and tinting.

The serialised novel by Leroux was originally published in 1909-10, but I’m guessing that even back then it was considered a bit clichéd. Whatever the strengths or limitations of the original, though, this adaptation has more than a whiff of the Victorian stage melodrama to its gothic horror stylings. Then again, of course, it’s set in a world of theatrical stylisation. In a sense, this is its coup du théâtre — there are few artistic forms so given to the grand gesture as opera, so it’s a brilliant match to the setting to have the acting be quite so flamboyantly over-the-top. Chaney as lost soul Erik (aka “the Phantom”) and the film’s female lead, the opera singer Christine (Mary Philbin), wring out every emotion, stretching their bodies and their gestures as if to convey their emotions to even those furthest up at the back of the gods. When Philbin (or one of the other female performers) is in peril, she holds herself in thrall to the lurking shadows, her hands flying up to protect herself from the danger, often unseen. When Chaney has been bested, he reaches out to grasp at the air above him with his fists, as if executing a particular flamboyant manoeuvre on the dancefloor of a goth club. None of it is in any way subtle, and that’s just fine.

At this point, I should probably at least sketch out the plot, not that it’s difficult to follow. The so-called “Phantom” (who is not so much a ghost, as a demented denizen lurking in the shadowy lower depths of the Paris opera house) is in love with opera singer Christine. He insists she perform in place of Carlotta, another singer, but when the latter disobeys his command, he takes terrible vengeance and abducts Christine away from her suitor, the Comte de Chagny (Norman Kerry, with a suitably rakish moustache). However, allowed by the Phantom to return to sing in a production of Faust (of course), she makes plans to escape with the Count, which spurs on the hectic denouement. Key to the plot is the idea that the opera house, the Palais Garnier, is built over many layers of historical torture chambers and underground rivers (it is not). Also — and I fully admit I may have misunderstood the specific references in the script — it seems that the “Phantom” has been in hiding since the revolution of 1848, although the Palais Garnier wasn’t completed until 1875. But these are pointless quibbles; historical accuracy is hardly at the forefront of the drama.

What’s probably more interesting is the production history, which was, in that classic understatement of Hollywood filmmaking, troubled. The film was released in 1925, after passing through a number of different cuts, adding and then removing comedy sideplots and changing the ending from a redemptive one to a more nakedly vigilante sequence that remains in all subsequent versions. Then, in 1929, it was recut again with some additional musical sequences (given sound in some cinemas, though silent elsewhere) which is what has been restored (albeit without the sound), first in 1996 with the Carl Davis score, and then again in 2013. With all these studio changes to the film in the 1920s, the credits are rather a mess, and there are all kinds of additional screenplay, directorial and cinematography credits (not to mention the extra actors for scenes which were subsequently removed). The original (and still the credited) director seems an interesting fellow, Rupert Julian (born Thomas Hayes), the first major New Zealand director to work in Hollywood, who made his name with an anti-German propaganda film in 1918, but who rather fell from grace following the debacle of this film’s production.

Given this production history, it’s pleasing to note that the film does not suffer greatly in terms of what’s seen on screen. The cinematography makes great use of shadows, and the set design for the basement is all suitably gothic and creepy. Best of all is a sequence towards the middle of the film which presents a Bal Masqué at the opera in an early form of Technicolor. The colours have in places faded towards pinks and greens, but it’s still a welcome surprise, and Chaney’s blood red costume as the Masque of the Red Death remains striking amongst the whirl and excitement of the dancing performers. Elsewhere there’s some good use of tinting (reminding one once again that early black-and-white silent films were in fact neither black-and-white nor silent, for the most part). Chaney’s creature effects are another visual highlight, and it’s for his pioneering make-up skills that Chaney is still largely remembered. Here he raises his nose, gets a nice sunken-eye make-up effect and wears some prosthetic teeth for a suitably monstrous appearance under the mask, revealed at length in one of those classic cinematic shock moments that still has much of its original power.

If one can move past the heavily stylised acting — which, as mentioned above, may be of a piece with stereotypes that exist regarding silent movie acting, but which is here matched nicely to the location and the genre — then this early film version of The Phantom of the Opera has a lot to commend it. It slowly builds tension through its shadowy sets and deployment of gothic horror archetypes, and nimbly uses intercutting to sustain it during the denouement. Best of all, there’s no Andrew Lloyd Webber on the soundtrack, but instead another wonderful piece of orchestral music from Carl Davis (known best for his Napoléon score). Still, to each their own: if you’re watching it at home, you can put whatever music you want on with it. Just don’t tell me.

CREDITS
Director Rupert Julian; Writers Elliott J. Clawson, Tom Reed and Raymond L. Schrock [all uncredited] (based on the novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra by Gaston Leroux); Cinematographer Charles Van Enger; Starring Lon Chaney, Mary Philbin, Norman Kerry; Length 93 minutes.
Seen at BFI Southbank (NFT2), London, Monday 20 January 2014.