Jean Painlevé Movies

A close-up look at sand urchins and rock urchins. At the seashore, a man digs up a sand urchin. We look closely. He sets it back in the sand, and it...

An early example of ultra-realism, this movie contrasts the quiet, bucolic life in the outskirts of Paris with the harsh, gory conditions inside the...

Underwater photography, magnified close-ups, and film through microscope present the sea urchin, a complex creature. We see their mouth and five...

This documentary about the life and work of filmmaker Jean Painlevé was originally presented in eight parts on French television. It was...

The one-celled long and slender diatom, up close: discovered in 1703 with the invention of the microscope. We observe them magnified 10,000 times:...

Examines the sea horse, the only fish that swims upright. We watch it use its prehensile tail to wrap around plants and other sea horses. A frontal...

Title cards introduce images we watch without narration; they are displays of shape and color. François de Roubaix's electronic music...

Two kinds of starfish, the brittle and the feather. The brittle star moves its arms alone, without the aid of suckers. Underneath is a single...

Jean Painlevé short film examining proportion and its effects on organisms.

In mud flats along the coast of Brittany we watch acera, small ball-shaped mollusks that are about two inches in diameter. They rest in mud; then, in...

At a marine biology station, a clump of algae reveals polyps, stomachs with limbs, limbs with buds, buds with poison cells. This animal reproduces by...

In close-ups and extreme close-ups, we watch two small species of marine crustaceans, the slender long-legged stenorhynchus and the clumsy,...

We begin on planet Earth, with a demonstration of measuring distances using triangulation. Then, an imaginary voyage begins from earth to the moon,...

Perrault's fairy tale presented in claymation with choral voices. Bluebeard goes courting, all six of his wives having died. He arrives at the house...

After a look at some strange creatures, the narrator and camera take us to the Chaco forest, on the borders of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil, where...

An octopus slithers into a narrow crack near the shore; we see its eye up close. It feeds on a crab. In spring it's time to mate. A male grabs a...

The mesmerizing, utterly unclassifiable science films of Jean Painlevé (1902-89) have to be seen to be believed: delightful,...