Jean Painlevé was a film director, critic, theorist, and animator, yet his interests and studies also extended to mathematics, medicine, and zoology. Amazingly, all these disparate strands came together in a groundbreaking, decades-spanning artistic career. Operating under the credo: Science is fiction, Painlevé forged his own unique cinematic path, creating countless short films for both the viewing public and the scientific community. Moreover, he was also one of the first filmmakers to take his camera underwater. Surreal, otherworldly documents of marine life, these films transformed sea horses, octopi, and mollusks into delicate dancers in their own floating ballets. This anthology features twenty-three of Painlevé's shorts in their original form, as well as Yo La Tengo's ninety-minute original score The Sounds of Science, written in 2001 to accompany eight of the director's films.


THREE-DISC SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
New, restored digital transfers
The Sounds of Science, an original score by Yo La Tengo to Jean Painlevé's films, plus an interview with the band
More than two hours of interviews with the filmmaker, drawn from the eight-part television series Jean Painlevé au fils de ses films, directed by Denis Derrien and Hélène Hazera
New and improved English subtitle translations
PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by film scholar Scott MacDonald and notes on all the films by Painlevé