Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

Joris Ivens, Jerzy Toeplitz, John Maddison
and Jean Painlevé (location and year
unidentified)
The review Documents published Painlevé’s stills of crustaceans, as did
Les Cahiers Jaunes, illustrating “La vieillesse précoce du cinéma,” an
article by Antonin Artaud...
For his 1929 film The Hermit Crab, Painlevé for the first time added a
musical accompaniment. Through Robert Lyon, the owner of the
prestigious concert venue Salle Pleyel, Painlevé met the composer
Maurice Jaubert who provided a musical score for the film. Jaubert
chose a composition by Vincenzo Bellini. Painlevé would later admit
that he would have preferred a score
written specifically for the film.
When Jean Vigo arrived in Paris in 1932 to
shoot Zéro de conduite—which would later
be banned by the French Board of
Censorship, presumably for its harsh
portrayal of French bourgeois
institutions—Painlevé introduced Vigo to
Jaubert, who then composed the score for
Vigo’s film. For one of the scenes, Jaubert
recorded the music normally, then played it
backward, achieving a dreamlike effect.
Entranced with the result and pleased by
his show of inventiveness, Painlevé asked
Jaubert to compose an original score
around which he would produce a film.
Thus, Blue Beard was conceived. From Jaubert’s thirteen-minute comic
opera, based on the tale of Blue Beard and his murdered wives,
sculptor René Bertrand, aided by his wife and three young children,
created hundreds of figurines out of clay that were then animated and
filmed. With the use of a special camera—adapted by André Raymond
from an old Pathé—each frame was shot three times using three
different color filters and then developed according to the Gasparcolor
method. Blue Beard would take three painstaking years to finish.
In 1938, at the first public screening of Blue Beard, Painlevé began his
presentation by paying homage to Emile Cohl and Georges Méliès,
inventors of animated film, who had both died that same year, largely
forgotten.
Painlevé would often champion the work of others, paying particular
attention to films that faced government censorship. One such film
was Sergei Eisenstein’s Battlehip Potemkin, which chronicled the
unsuccessful 1905 revolution against the Russian tsar. Viewed as
Communist propaganda, the film was deemed “subversive” by
European officials and censored. Thus, when Painlevé and his friend, the
documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens, screened it in Amsterdam, they
posted sentries at the theater door to watch for police. When the police
did arrive, Painlevé and Ivens quickly stopped the projection, grabbed
the film reels, and, with the audience in tow, scurried to another theater.
There, too, the screening was interrupted by police. So the group
moved again. In the course of one evening, the group moved six times,
but in the end Battleship Potemkin was shown in its entirety.
When Eisenstein himself came to Paris in 1930, Painlevé asked his
18 Journal of Film Preservation / 69 / 2005