Origins of the surrealist nature documentary in Jean Painlevé’s scientific films

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5209/dcin.83759
Keywords: Nature Documentaries, Surrealism, Jean Painlevé, Scientific cinema, Cinema History

Abstract

The informative work on biology by Jean Painlevé (1902-1989), a filmmaker and scientist related to surrealism, includes dozens of films and writings. The historiography of cinema has approached this corpus from the uniqueness and avant-garde of its proposals. This article proposes a conceptual definition of Painlevé's style, within the concept of nature documentary, calling it "surrealist nature documentary", a trend that did not occur as an isolated event, but as a movement of scientific filmmakers, produced between 1915 and 1940. Defining the surrealist nature documentary is a way of giving a name to a trend that, at the time of the avant-garde, found beauty in biology and adopted rigorous cinematographic techniques to combine abstraction with popular science, as shown by an approximation analysis to the most didactic work of Painlevé.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Isleny Cruz Carvajal, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos

Phd from the Complutense University of Madrid and a professor at the University for the Elderly UCM since 2017 and at the Felipe II Campus in Aranjuez from 2006 to 2015. Professor since 2015 at the Rey Juan Carlos University in journalistic and audiovisual specialties. She has been a jury in various international film festivals, writer for magazines specialized in audiovisual arts and co-author of Tierra en Trance: Latin American Cinema in 100 Films (Alianza), The Documentary in Latin America (Cátedra), Uninhibited Looks, the New Ibero-American Documentary (Secc), Theory and History of the Image (UNIR / Synthesis) and Itineraries and forms of the audiovisual essay (Gedisa), among other publications.

View citations

Article download

Crossmark

Metrics

Published
2023-01-25
How to Cite
Cruz Carvajal I. y Martínez Armas I. . (2023). Origins of the surrealist nature documentary in Jean Painlevé’s scientific films. Documentación de las Ciencias de la Información, 46(1), 5-11. https://doi.org/10.5209/dcin.83759
Issue
Vol. 46 No. 1 (2023): Imágenes para la ciencia: la divulgación científica a través del audiovisual. Historia, perspectiva y futuro
Section
Monography

License

In order to support the global exchange of knowledge, the journal Documentación de las Ciencias de la Información is allowing unrestricted access to its content as from its publication in this electronic edition, and as such it is an open-access journal. The originals published in this journal are the property of the Complutense University of Madrid and any reproduction thereof in full or in part must cite the source. All content is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 use and distribution licence (CC BY 4.0). This circumstance must be expressly stated in these terms where necessary. You can view the summary and the complete legal text of the licence.