Zoological Surrealism

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