Le Vampire by Jean Painleve (1945)
um-wow-this old nature documentary is something else-I'm a little bit uncomfortable with the vampire bat feeding from the guinea pig(although the pig doesn't die, it makes me super cringe)
but wowsa-they knew how to make a documentary back in the
day.
here is a clip of an essay about Jean Painlev
"If Cousteau would shortly discover a fascination for hydrophone recordings of aquatic audio, Painlevé was auditioning his subjects with an ear to popular appeal from the very advent of sound cinema. Like his friend, the vanguard composer Edgard Varese, Painlevé was a fellow traveller to the Paris Surrealists who struggled to reconcile his avidity for music with André Breton's doctrinaire deafness. The increasing rigidity of Bretonian edict must have rankled Painlevé's habitual refusenik, but ultimately it was Breton's refusal to invest a greater significance in music which catalysed Painlevé's departure from the Surrealist ranks.
Specialist audiences were scandalised by the soundtracks to Painlevé's films – presumably, to Painlevé's own considerable delight. The Vampire – Painleve's exploration of the vampire as a biological archetype and his cheerfully morbid allegory for nazism – is enlivened by Duke Ellington's 'Black and Tan Fantasy' and 'Echoes of the Jungle'. Painlevé's fascination for octopi was as great as his partisan tastes for experimental music, and both are brought into compelling relief for his Love life of the octopus. The score for this film was commissioned from the French pioneer of musique concrete, Pierre Henry; and Henry's sonorities are delicately matched to the action transpiring on the screen. If only a small part of Love life of the octopus is devoted to the inconceivable erotica of amorous octopi, through the fluid grace of an eight-arm embrace and the silken glance of an inscrutably bulbous eye those sequences are rendered genuinely erotic. Henry's music would've been incongruous in most other cinematic contexts, but in this film his early electronica is perfectly matched to the stunning grotesquerie of the image..." entire essay
here
heres a link to a place selling dvds of Jean Painleve's movie collections
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