Via Invisible Cinema comes this announcement of a special curated by Valeria Mogilevich entitled Nouvelle Vague: Submerged Scientific Films & Firefly Cinema: Somewhere not Here? screened at the Anthology Film Archives. One of the films shown is the one pictured below, which I’ve had the pleasure of seeing in a double bill with Georges Franju’s 1949 The Blood of the Beasts at the Antwerp film museum. The 1934 The Sea Horse is scored by French impressionist composer Darius Milhaud, as are some of his others.

The Sea Horse (1934) – Jean Painlevé

Jean Painlevé (1902-1989) was the director of more than two hundred science and nature films and an early champion of the genre. Advocating the credo “science is fiction,” Painlevé scandalized the scientific world with a cinema designed to entertain as well as edify. He portrayed sea horses, vampire bats, and fanworms as endowed with human traits – the erotic, the comical, and the savage – and in the process won over the circle of Surrealists and avant-gardists he befriended, among them the filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Vigo, and Luis Buñuel.