Jean Painlevé (1902-1989)

Patricia Laligant Photographs is representing exclusively the estate of Jean Painlevé in the United States since 2000.

Jean Painlevé, son of French mathematician and statesman Paul Painlevé, started his film career while a natural history student at the Sorbonne. In 1928, his first movie recorded the evolution and fertilization of the stickleback's egg. Both scientist and filmmaker, Jean Painlevé openly asserted the bonds connecting him to the work of Etienne Jules Marey, pioneering physiologist and inventor of the chronophotographe, the early camera that had inspired the Lumière brothers to conceive their cinématographe.

One of the first to plunge underwater with a camera to bring the sub-aquatic world to the screen, maverick scientific documentary filmmaker Jean Painlevé captured the throes of a male seahorse giving birth, the geometric choreography of crystal formation, and the mating habits of hermaphrodite mollusks. Painlevé made over 200 films including The Seahorse, Freshwater Assassins, The Vampire, and The Love Life of the Octopus, to name a few. His lyrical and instructive animal behavior films set to avant-garde scores were much admired by Surrealist contemporaries such as Antonin Artaud, Luis Bunuel, and Jean Vigo.

In 1924, Painlevé along with the German playwright and poet Ivan Goll, Guillaume Apollinaire, René Crevel, Pierre Reverdy and others, published the first and only issue of the review Surréalisme. Man Ray borrowed footage of starfish from Painlevé to use in his own film L'Etoile de Mer and George Bataille published Painlevé's stills of crustaceans in his review Documents. Painlevé's still and photographs were published in numerous magazines of the time including Jazz, Vu, Voila, and Art et Médecine.

His photographs are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Most of the photographs offered here are vintage stills from his films. The photographs surprise by their level of abstraction and reveal the strange beauty of the sea world.

A selection of Jean Painlevé’s movies was celebrated at the 2000 Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival in New York as well as at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Thanks to Marina McDougall, a San Francisco-based curator, who initiated the first United States retrospective of Jean Painlevé’s films in 1991. She is also the co-editor of the new publication Science is Fiction: The films of Jean Painlevé.