Science is fiction [videorecording (DVD)] : 23 films by Jean Painlevé

Long before Jacques Cousteau and Richard Attenborough, a Frenchman named Jean Painlevé made documentaries that captured the natural world in a unique manner. "Science Is Fiction" collects 23 of these short films. Painlevé (1902-89) spent his life straddling the arts and the sciences, studying biology at the Sorbonne, but also hanging out with Man Ray and Luis Buñuel. Long fascinated by marine life, Painlevé helped develop the underwater camera, one of the first handheld cameras, and high-magnification lenses that allowed him to observe creatures like sea urchins, jellyfish, and mollusks in their natural habitats. Though relatively obscure in the United States, Jean Painlevé's films embrace genre, combining documentary, educational film, and avant-garde experimentalism to create an aesthetic that captures the fantastic by means of the purely factual.