The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 22-28
The Sea Horse (1933)
Directed by Jean Painlevé
Before Jacques Cousteau made his famed foray into underwater research and long before Planet Earth and David Attenborough perhaps convinced you British-accented English is nature’s true tongue, French filmmaker, innovator, and scientist Jean Painlevé was thrusting his cameras into the sea, the ocean depths, and elsewhere, bringing back images of a fantastic, often rarely seen world. (Buñuel and Vigo were among the fans of his Surrealist-friendly accounts of the natural world.) The Sea Horse makes for an excellent primer: hypnotic, lyrical, statedly educational with a playful score. One of the over 200 films Painlevé would make, the short is a rich record of textures, behaviors, and details—a seahorse’s diaphanous, marvelous dorsal fins, their prehensile tails, the child-bearing role of the males. Striving for large audiences, which, in the case of The Sea Horse, he found, Painlevé pioneered and popularized a cinematic vision of the strange, wonderful wild. Jeremy Polacek (March 26, 4:30pm at the Museum of the Moving Image, as part of a science-film program also featuring Isabella Rossellini in person with her “Green Porno” shorts)