Long before the high-definition panoramas of "Planet Earth," before even the landmark wildlife documentaries of Richard Attenborough and Jacques Cousteau, a Frenchman named Jean Painlevé was making films that captured the natural world as it had never been seen before.The son of a mathematician turned politician (who twice served as French prime minister), Painlevé (1902-89) spent his life straddling the arts and the sciences.
He studied biology at the Sorbonne but was also a habitué of the Dada-mad Paris salons of the 1920s, where he befriended the likes of Man Ray and Luis Buñuel. Accordingly, his films, which mostly focused on underwater life, fused a scientist's eye for observation with a surrealist's taste for the uncanny.
A new three-disc release from the Criterion Collection titled "Science Is Fiction" due out this week brings together 23 of his short films and an eight-part made-for-TV documentary, featuring an interview with the octogenarian Painlevé, not long before his death...[LATimes]
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