A landmark eight-part series, Jean Painlevé au fil de ses films traces the boundary-blurring life of filmmaker, biologist, and surrealist-adjacent thinker Jean Painlevé. Through candid interviews and carefully selected film excerpts, Painlevé reflects on six decades of work that brought science to the screen — not as dry fact, but as living poetry.
Combining artistry and inquiry, Painlevé's cinema gives voice to the hidden lives of marine animals and scientific curiosities, elevating the microscopic to the mythical. Each episode explores a different chapter of his extraordinary career.
Episode Guide:
Episode 1: The Young Man and the Microscopic From bourgeois Parisian childhood to the radical 1920s: Painlevé's early days, fascination with cinema, and encounters with surrealism.
Episode 2: The Birth of Scientific Cinema The 1930s and the formation of the Institut du Cinéma Scientifique. Early experiments with slow motion and underwater cinematography.
Episode 3: The Seahorse Breakthrough In 1934, L’Hippocampe becomes a cultural shockwave — a film that transforms marine biology into cinema of sensation.
Episode 4: Cinema Under Occupation Painlevé’s activities during World War II — his resistance to fascism and the role of film as political and moral expression.
Episode 5: The Laboratory of the Sea Postwar relocation to the Biological Station of Roscoff. A new chapter of filming with scientists and divers on the Breton coast.
Episode 6: Science is Cinema A meditation on form and function: Painlevé’s view of the camera as an extension of the microscope, and cinema as a tool for seeing.
Episode 7: The Ethics of Observation Reflections on the filmmaker's responsibility when capturing the lives of nonhuman subjects. Painlevé questions objectivity.
Episode 8: Legacy and Light Nearing the end of his life, Painlevé considers what it means to have built a body of work where science, cinema, and poetry co-evolve.
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