Synopsis
The seahorse is the only fish that moves vertically. It is also one of the few animals in which the male nourishes the eggs deposited by the female in his brood pouch and actually gives birth to the young. To film at the bottom of the Garonne estuary, the first mobile underwater camera was improvised. This film, accompanied by music from Darius Milhaud, shows with precision and humor the life of this strange underwater animal.
A word from Tënk
Honestly, I didn’t know Jean Painlevé, even though this film felt strangely familiar to me. After all, it’s hard to forget a male giving birth!
After doing a bit of research, I discovered that Painlevé, a trained biologist, began making films as early as the 1920s. Very early on, he saw cinema as a remarkable tool for sharing and transmitting knowledge—particularly in marine biology—capable of making visible what usually escapes our perception.
This black-and-white film is permeated by a sense of mystery. First, there are the astonishing reproductive mechanisms of the seahorse itself: the female transfers her eggs to the male, who carries them before giving birth. Wow! Painlevé captures this process, accompanying the images with description and narration tinged with scientific or ethnographic flavors—a deep male voice that instantly recalls films of that era.
Moreover, we understand that everything takes place in a laboratory. The shadows of the vertical fish cast on the walls constantly remind us of the ex situ nature of the observation. From this emerges a singular strangeness, one that almost evokes the Italian surrealism of the 1930s. A kind of marine surrealism, where an emerging form of scientific cinema is invented, foreshadowing the poetic popularizations to come, à la Charles Tisseyre.
Sylvie Lapointe
Filmmaker
