Jean Painlevé, scientist and surrealist, by Christina Heflin

This presentation will begin with a biographical overview of Painlevé and his work, which will then be followed by a discussion of the focus of my recently completed doctoral thesis on the connection between the Surrealist use of marine animals in artwork and post-World War I trauma.

Son of mathematician and politician Paul Painlevé, marine biologist and documentary filmmaker Jean Painlevé lived between different worlds: sea and land, Surrealist gatherings and research laboratories. Painlevé’s connection to the ocean reaches as far back as his childhood, and though his films were intended for research and educational purposes, his unique approach to filmmaking and its resulting effects resonated strongly with his Surrealist friends whom he had met during his studies. Though never an official member or close to the Pope of Surrealism himself, André Breton, the first part of this talk will address Painlevé’s significant contribution to the film-based aspects of Surrealism and provide additional insight into an underexamined element of the movement, its connections to science.

The representation of and violence against the eye is often seen in Surrealist art, with works like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s film Un Chien andalou and Georges Bataille’s erotic novella Story of the Eye being the most renowned for these depictions. Over the years scholars have questioned these artists’ intentions and have even gone so far as to position them as being anti-ocular, connecting it to the trauma of World War I, known to have been an assault on the senses.

In the second part of this talk, Christina Heflin will explore how artists like Jean Painlevé symbolically questioned the hierarchy of the senses by presenting creatures who did not rely on modes of perception in the same way as humans, and that the idea that the compromising of the physical integrity of the eye is not necessarily an outright rejection of vision. Instead, it symbolically questions the hierarchy of the senses, displaying animals as they navigated their worlds without the primacy of vision. In addition to this, they were also challenging gender roles as well as the hierarchical place of the human among other animals, also known as anthropocentrism. They were doing this in a way that displayed their engagement in the real, tangible world, which has been overlooked in favor of Surrealism’s focus on metaphysical dreamworlds.
 

Heflin argues that they were using these creatures to question the status quo. Surrealism’s depictions of marine life reflect an interest in exploring alternative sensory regimes, calling into question the position of the human-animal relation by blurring these boundaries and by challenging the traditional places of men and women at this time. These representations express a desire to adapt to a society that had been turned upside down by war to merge with the capacities of these creatures, expanding perception and exploring the faculties of sensing typically denied to the human.