RENDERING_7: Of Science and Fiction: Jean Painlevé’s L’Hippocampe (1932)
Stefan Helmreich opens Alien Ocean with his 2003 experience as a participant-observer onboard a small oceanographic boat called Point Lobos. An interesting moment finds Helmreich in screen-filled control room, charged with monitoring and capturing footage sent back from a 2.5 ton remotely operated vehicle (ROV). The vehicle can descend 1,500 meters below the surface, and is equipped with video cameras and, for this mission, plastic tubes for collecting ‘pushcores’ of “methane-infused ooze” from the ocean floor off the coast of California. (Helmreich, 36)
Describing different modes of sensing an underwater environment, Helmreich contrasts the control room’s rendering of the ROV’s video feed with the films of French director Jean Painlevé (1902-1989):
“… an aesthetic of realism is sternly enforced for the screens delivering images from the Ventana. We are meant to be watching a sort of real-time documentary about extraordinary things, not, say, a high-definition version of the bizarre works of Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon, twentieth century French filmmakers famous for their far-out movies of sea creatures, in which the viewer is constantly reminded of how much cinematic prodding it takes to make human eyes get their bearing in the refracting realm of the sea.” (Helmreich, 47)
This reference to Painlevé jumped out at me because just last fall the title of a newly-reissued (Criterion) collection of his underwater films, Science Is Fiction, caught my STS-eye while I was trolling the shelves of my local video rental store. I watched it and was really impressed by the early underwater cinematography, and the haunting—dare-I-say-alien quality?—of the filmic renderings of underwater life.
While Helmreich uses Painlevé as an arty foil for the empirically-figured ROV feed (on page 33 Helmreich even notes that the ROV’s name, Ventana, is Spanish for “window”—implying an unobstructed, realistic representation of the world) there is more to Painlevé’s story than his brush with surrealism.
In fact, Painlevé, who was the son of French prime minister Paul Painlevé, trained as a biologist at Laboratoire d’Anatomie et d’Histologie Comparée in Sorbonne. Here he met Geneviève Hamon his collaborator and life partner. Through her anarchist father, Painlevé was able to meet a number of influential surrealist artists (Alexander Calder, Eli Lotar)—who were active on both sides of the Atlantic starting in the early 1920s. Painlevé made his first film in 1927, and soon took great interest in underwater images.
While certainly influenced by his surrealist connections, Painlevé also had strong ties to the world of science that Helmreich evokes him in contrast with. Painlevé founded the Institut de Cinematographie Scientifique, and, as Marina McDougall notes in her survey of Painlevé, Science Is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé (2001), “Painlevé kept one foot planted in the biology laboratory, the other in murky waters teeming with aquatic life.” (McDougall, xii)
In 1930 Painlevé began work on what would become his most iconic (and only financially successful) film, L’Hippocampe—“The Seahorse”—(1932). In accordance with surrealism’s call to render the everyday bizarre and disturbing, Painlevé chose to conduct a filmic study of seahorses in order to highlight their “alien” sex roles; female seahorses produce eggs, while the male seahorse gives birth to the offspring.
To make the film, Painlevé had a special airtight box constructed that would house his Sept camera. A transparent glass window pane allowed the camera a view outside the box, which interestingly, anticipates MBARI’s Ventana. Painlevé shot parts of the film by submerging his box in the Bay of Arcachon, off the west coast of France. To catch the birth of a baby seahorse (integral to his themes of gender and reproduction) Painlevé’s also took footage in a Paris basement studio which housed massive seawater aquariums filled with seahorses.
To catch the special moment of birth (film was quite expensive and couldn’t be wasted) Painlevé constructed an apparatus to keep him awake as he monitored the action in the tank for hours on end. He designed a special hat, which, if its metal sensor made contact with a surrounding wire frame (i.e. if he started to nod off) would electrocute him back to wakefulness (I could totally use this invention, actually).
Still, Painlevé is able to transcend the realistic. His use of voiceover helps anthropomorphize the seahorses—to highlight the contrast with human reproduction roles he is hoping to defamiliarize—and the surreal qualities evoked imprint a personal mark on the images created. This was consistant with the French-surrealist notion that a documentary filmmaker should not subordinate themselves to their subject matter, but rather imbue their own sensibility and personal style into the rendering. As such, Painlevé’s approach contrasted with more familiar British and Canadian realistic trends in social documentary films (see John Grierson, for example), which laboured to present ‘realistic’ pictures of the world ‘as it is’.
Below I’ve included a 10 minute edit of L’Hippocampe (the original is 14 minutes), which my filmmaker-roommate certainly did NOT rip from the DVD.
I’m interested in how Painlevé’s camera-in-a-glass-box way of sensing the sea compares to and anticipates the ROV’s. How does Painlevé’s double stance as scientist and artist (which Helmreich doesn’t fully convey) affect his rendering of seahorse life? Above I’ve tried to sketch both sides: Painlevé as both a (over-regulated/techno-regulated) self-regulating subject (sitting awake for hours making observations under pain of electrocution), and as an artist with a specific political point to make. Does this dichotomy come across in this film? Is Helmreich oversimplifying or glossing Painlevé here?
dis_order 
Thanks for the post Jordan.
I too, was struck by Helmreich’s description of being surrounded by screens that pumped out information in all directions, however; what captured me was how this experience registered in his body.
He states that being inside this information feed lead to a, “sensory scramble, a layering of ocular, auditory, and corporeal disorientation” (2009:42). Aside of the obvious alliteration, I am interested in how this description of disorientation might be read alongside or disrupt Shukin’s concept of “distortion” and Cooper’s notion of “delirium”.
Are all three notions descriptions of capital flows? And if so what level and register does each author suggests that these flows are experienced at?
this is great, jordan.
one thing that struck me was the photo of painleve (what a fabulous name) in his underwater gear. with all this talk of how ‘alien’ sea life may be, humans are also rendered alien in attempts to enter their world. it leads me to daydream of ‘becoming-alien’ and what that might entail, not in the surrealist sense of ‘making strange,’ but in a deleuzean sense (at least my superficial understanding of it). id have to be more deeply familiar with that aspect of deleuze before going any further, but maybe there is something to this sort of extremophile humanity and extreme prosthesis that links the cyborg, the undersea explorer, the astronaut, the fashionista, the body-art enthusiast….
It’s wild that this kind of cyborg interaction with the sea goes so far back – I’m so glad that you drew our attention to this. Moments like these I feel like there’s nothing new under the sun, but in the best possible way. Certainly, this suggests that we should be wary of attributing any kind of absolute novelty to the kinds of human-machine interactions grouped under the heading of ‘cyborg,’ although the technical accoutrements have clearly changed.
In relation to your comment, Emily, I think that while capital is no doubt involved in as capital-intensive project as microbial oceanography, Helmreich’s discussion of the submarine cyborg isn’t strictly a description of capital flow – as he says, responding to Cooper, he’s spent too much time with the people in question to boil down all of their actions to ‘delirious emanations of capital.’
Which, in a roundabout way, links up to the question of becoming – on which I’ll just say that for D&G, it’s all ultimately about becoming-molecular. Which suggests why they are ‘monists,’ even ‘reductionists’ after a fashion: they don’t hesitate to name becoming-molecular ‘the’ becoming which groups together all the others (becoming-woman, becoming-animal, and presumably becoming-alien). Insofar as becoming always involves one or several multiplicities for them, to become the multiplicity is closest to nature of ‘becoming’ itself. (Becoming-imperceptible seems to suggest for them a kind of end state, a movement past the limits of life.) One certainly doesn’t need to agree with this kind of monism, but it’s good to keep in mind when thinking of D&G and the cheerleaders of multiplicity. (Which they absolutely are, but there’s also this emphasis on unity, particularly with reference to the ‘plane of immanence.’)
Wow, I had no idea such a thing existed! I think you’re quite right about how Painlevé’s contraption anticipates the innovation of ROVs–it’s a great example of the geneology of media, and echoes Bolter and Grusin’s theory of intermediality.
To echo Ali’s point, it makes me feel like there really is nothing new! The project kinda reminded me of March of the Penguins with all the anthropromorphizing and making meaning of animal behaviour using human interpretive models (“the seahorse is anxious, you can tell by the way he moves his eyes around so quickly”). I think Painlevé gives away his double stance when he shows the vivisected sea horse; he makes his goal clear–to apprehend the sea horse and use it as an object of scientific knowledge.