Moving on, The Love Life of the Octopus (13 minutes, 1965) is another narrated tale with an octopus being followed from the shore back into the sea as it goes about its life as a predator. We follow the beast as it mates by locking one of its arms in another octopuses windpipe and when it breaks free it releases the sperm to impregnate its mate. We then see the mother's maternity. The images are accompanied by musical cues comparing the octopuses to chain gangs as they tie themselves to one another, and sound effects to illustrate its rapacious nature. How Some Jellyfish are Born (14 minutes, 1960) is a black and white short which starts with the collection of polyps samples at the beach which are then viewed through a microscope at scales of between 400 and 1000 times their normal size. The polyps develop by "budding" from their parent and splitting off, and we watch as they grow the ability to create the venom which will later paralyse the unfortunates it hunts. These microscopic organisms, between 1-2 millimetres large, will eventually become types of jellyfish. Viewed in this way, both magnified and speeded up, they are magnificent and deadly beasts. In Liquid Crystals (7 Minutes, 1978), crystals of acetic acid, caffeine and urea are seen under a polarising microscope with no narration but accompanied by the music of Francois de Roubaix. The colours form fantastic weaves and patterns as the crystals change under heat, the effect is beautiful and absorbing and here Painleve's method is to choose images to best complement the pre-existing music.


Seahorses (15 minutes, 1934) is an amazing, very early, black and white film shot with improvised equipment at a time when cameras where largely immobile and impractical - Painleve had to invent his own solutions to capture aquatic life on film. Starting with footage of a seahorse colony as they use their tales to grip onto rocks and one another, we get to see the natural anomaly of the male seahorses being fertilised and bearing their young. We see a section of a pregnant seahorse and then watch the young embryos as, slowly, they are born. The narration enjoys the infants as they play with each other like school kids, and the piece ends with the mixing of footage of racehorses with their underwater counterpart. Shrimping Stories (13 minutes, 1964) watches, in colour, shrimps as they hunt other sea creatures and devour them. Every month, the shrimp sheds its whole skin and the scenes of this metamorphosis are eerie, as this translucent creature leaves a copy of its whole outline behind it in seconds. The film illustrates both the strength of these beasties as they pick apart crustaceans as well as their surprising intricacy with careful and delicate self-hygiene. Using the music of Chopin, Hyas and Stenorhynchus (10 minutes, 1929) shows us three very different examples of camouflaging sea beasts. First, a spider like creature which camouflages itself in sea vegetation in order to feast on smaller unsuspecting organisms. Then a more crab like crustacean which can use algae or even other beasts to conceal it in its voracious efforts to feed. Finally, we watch the wormlike spirograph which has a fan like funnel of tentacles that it uses to encompass those creatures which get too close, a little like a wiry underwater venus fly trap.

Sea Urchins (11 minutes, 1954) considers the life of an anenome - how it uses its spines to both protect itself and filter food from the rocks it is attached to. It has vicious looking teeth in its centre and it moves by way of suckers on its its spines that it attaches to rocks to drag itself along. The final Painleve naturalist piece moves on to dry land and considers the vampire bats of South America in The Vampire (9 minutes, 1945). Intercut with scenes from Murnau's Nosferatu, pitched as a sly allegory to Nazism, and scored by music from Duke Ellington, we witness an encounter between one of these bloodthirsty bats and a guinea pig. True to best Christopher Lee form, the bat neutralises the larger rodent easily before sucking its blood at leisure. We learn it could ingest the rodent's full supply in one sitting and that it thins the blood as it consumes it.

The two remaining Painleve films are the throwaway Methusaleh (7 minutes, 1927) and the excellent animation Blue Beard (13 minutes, 1938). Methusaleh is a short entertainment piece, originally intended to be show in between acts of a stage play. There are five scenes in which we see characters from Hamlet, a funeral, a skit on war and a marriage. Painleve appears as an actor in a number of them. There is some satire in the pieces but they seem more like friends messing around rather than serious art. In the animation piece, Painleve uses the story of the famous serial killing lothario. Painleve creates a stunning and colourful fable as Blue Beard takes his seventh wife. The wife is soon left alone in his castle when war takes her husband off to battle, and she makes the fatal mistake of walking into the forbidden room, a mistake each of her predecessors have also made as the presence of their corpses prove. When her husband discovers she has defied him, her end is guaranteed unless her rescuers can stop him.