Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé

by James Leo Cahill

An archive-based, in-depth analysis of the surreal nature and science movies of the pioneering French filmmaker Jean Painlevé Before Jacques-Yves Cousteau, there was Jean Painlevé, a pioneering French scientific and nature filmmaker with a Surrealist’s eye. Creator of more than two hundred films, his studies of strange animal worlds doubled as critical reimaginations of humanity. With an unerring eye for the uncanny and unexpected, Painlevé and his assistant Geneviève Hamon captured oneiric octopuses, metamorphic crustaceans, erotic seahorses, mythic vampire bats, and insatiable predatory insects.

Zoological Surrealism draws from Painlevé’s early oeuvre to rethink the entangled histories of cinema, Surrealism, and scientific research in interwar France. Delving deeply into Painlevé’s archive, James Leo Cahill develops an account of “cinema’s Copernican vocation”—how it was used to forge new scientific discoveries while also displacing and critiquing anthropocentric viewpoints.

From Painlevé’s engagements with Sergei Eisenstein, Georges Franju, and competing Surrealists to the historiographical dimensions of Jean Vigo’s concept of social cinema, Zoological Surrealism taps never-before-examined sources to offer a completely original perspective on a cutting-edge filmmaker. The first extensive English-language study of Painlevé’s early films and their contexts, it adds important new insight to our understanding of film while also contributing to contemporary investigations of the increasingly surreal landscapes of climate change and ecological emergency.

Genres: Nonfiction, Film, France

384 pages, Paperback

Published February 19, 2019

Reviews

[Curran Collier]

My entire metaphysics is changing at a frightening rate -- thanks, in part, to this book

[Jonathan Eburne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the pleasure of blurbing this book for the publisher. Here is my brief but heartfelt review: A remarkable study of Jean Painlevé’s cinematic attention to the marvels of animal life, James Leo Cahill’s study elegantly resolves the contradictions between intellectual biography and non-anthropocentric modes of inquiry. At once a focused critical biography and a wide-ranging study of organic systems thinking, Zoological Surrealism is alive with the intellectual ferment of the French 1930s. It is an essential text for any reader invested in the development of systems thinking, as well as in the history of experimental film, art, science, and thought.

[nick]

Inspired (sometimes fairly speculative) archival work and potent readings of the films in question, really opening up early-career Painlevé. Not quite as convinced by the attempts to theorize the relation of the cinema to the nonhuman through Painlevé, which is not to say that the "Copernican" model put forward isn't useful—just that it's more of an opening than a fully articulated theory.