Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé

404 Pages·2019·5.91 MB·English

by  James Leo Cahill

ZOOLOGICAL SURREALISM
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ZOOLOGICAL
SURREALISM
THE NONHUMAN CINEMA
OF JEAN PAINLEVÉ
James Leo Cahill
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
Minneapolis ∙ London
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the generous
assistance provided for the publication of this book by the Hamilton P. Traub
University Press Fund.
Every effort was made to obtain permission to reproduce material in this book. If
any proper acknowledgment has not been included here, we encourage copyright
holders to notify the publisher.
A portion of chapter 2 was previously published in different form as
“Anthropomorphism and Its Vicissitudes: Reflections on Homme- sick Cinema,”
in Screening Nature: Cinema beyond the Human, ed. Anat Pick and Guinevere
Narraway, 73– 90 (New York: Berghahn, 2013). A portion of chapter 3 was
previously published in different form as “Forgetting Lessons: Jean Painlevé’s
Cinematic Gay Science,” Journal of Visual Culture 11 (2012): 258– 87.
Copyright 2019 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
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Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cahill, James Leo, author.
Title: Zoological surrealism: the nonhuman cinema of Jean Painlevé / James Leo Cahill.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2019] | Includes 
bibliographical references and index. | 
Identifiers: LCCN 2018025291 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0215-5 (hc) |
ISBN 978-1-5179-0216-2 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Painlevé, Jean—Criticism and interpretation. | Science films—History
and criticism.
Classification: LCC PN1998.3.P34525 C34 2019 (print) | DDC 791.4302/33092—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025291
UMP BmB 2019
Contents
Introduction: Cinema’s Copernican Vocation 1
1. Neozoological Dramas: Comparative Anatomy
by Other Means 31
2. Metamorphoses: Crustaceans, the Coming of
Sound, and Plasmatic Anthropomorphism 93
3. Amour Flou: The Seahorse and the Blur of Sex 159
4. Substitutes, Vectors, and the Circulatory Systems
of Modernity: Dr. Normet’s Serum: Experimental
Treatment of a Hemorrhage in a Dog
and The Vampire 215
5. Carnivorous Cinema: Freshwater Assassins
and Blood of the Beasts 261
Conclusion: Unfinished Revolutions,
Untimely Nature 311
Acknowledgments 317
Notes 321
Index 375
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Introduction
CINEMA’S COPERNICAN VOCATION
The further our knowledge extends, the more man perceives
his parochial location [seinen Winkel].
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Studien aus der
Umwerthungszeit, 1882– 1888
The cinema is a marvellous apparatus for taking us outside
of ourselves and outside of the world in which we believe
ourselves to live.
— JeaN epsteiN, Alcool et cinéma, 1946– 1949
“Je suis un horsin.”1 I am an horsin. The French filmmaker Jean Painlevé
described himself as such in an interview he gave in 1935. In Norman dia-
lect, horsin (also spelled horsain) refers to somebody not from the region
of Normandy. An horsin is an outsider, an unknown, or a stranger—a label
that applied to Painlevé, who grew up in Paris, but made many visits to the
northern coasts as a child and then as a researcher and filmmaker. Horsin
is a homonym with the spiny aquatic creature the sea urchin (oursin) as
well as the phrase hors sein, which may translate as “outside,” “off- center,”
“eccentric,” or “decentered.” Painlevé’s slight pun echoes a brief sequence
from his 1928 documentary Les Oursins (The Sea Urchins). The footage
depicts Painlevé “doing the tides,” searching the seashore and tidal pools
for specimens while also observing the inhabitants of an ecosystem in
situ. Painlevé briefly resembles Narcissus, appearing as if transfixed by
his own reflection and reaching out to caress the beautiful visage in front
of him. Breaking the water’s surface, he reaches beyond his reflected
face (now gently palpitating and deformed by the ripples of the water)
and retrieves a sea urchin, which he inspects with the same fascination
1
Figure i.1. Revising Narcissus: Jean Painlevé in The Sea Urchins (1928). Copyright
Les Documents Cinématographiques, Paris.
INTRODUCTION 3
(spectators know this to be a rock urchin not only because the film’s title
cards tell us so but thanks also to an explanatory cut- in to a full shot of
a specimen in an aquarium). The shift in attention—f rom self- regard
to nonhuman other, and the ripples or impact that such a perceptual
pivot may have on one’s self- image— presents in condensed form the
main argument of this book: that the films of Jean Painlevé developed a
mode of looking and a practice of cinematic encounter that, in turning
its attention to animal life and nonhuman worlds, also critically altered
conceptions of human life.
Painlevé’s oeuvre has remained a minor concern for film history and
theory, despite a filmography of close to two hundred films and filmed
documents spanning six decades and featuring a bestiary of strange aquatic
and terrestrial creatures, including octopuses, sea urchins, crustaceans,
seahorses, insects, vampire bats, and the people who observe them.
The subjects explored in the films he made alone and with his partner
Geneviève Hamon— the marvels and terrors of animal life and nonhuman
worlds, the radical possibilities and limitations of cinematic perception, the
ethics of documentation, as well as reflections on violence, vulnerability,
and precarity—o ffer a path for thinking another, untimely natural history
of cinema. This book offers such an account through two complementary
paths. First, it presents a history of the first twenty- five years of Painlevé’s
career, spanning from 1924 to 1949. Second, through close readings of this
oeuvre in its multiple contexts of production and reception, it develops a
transhistorical theoretical account of cinema’s Copernican vocation, or
the twinned capacities for potentially revolutionary scientific discovery
and anthropocentric displacement.
Given the breadth of Painlevé’s filmography, why focus on the years
1924– 49? Four primary reasons justify this periodization. First, this period
coincides with the twilight years of French comparative anatomy—t he
study of the morphology, physiology, development, and metamorphosis
of different organisms—b efore it was institutionally absorbed into biology
and genetics after the Second World War. Painlevé trained in this disci-
pline and began his first forays into aesthetics and filmmaking through
his research in comparative anatomy. Comparative anatomy provided
a ready-m ade framework for explorations of the relationships between