TPO 3 Lecture 2 Film history
Narrator
Listen to part of a lecture in a film history class.
Professor
Okay, we’ve been discussing films in the 1920s and 30s, and how back then film categories, as we
know them today, had not yet been established. We said that by today’s standards, many of the
films of the 20s and 30s would be considered hybrids, that is, a mixture of styles that wouldn’t
exactly fit into any of today’s categories, and in that context.
Today we are going to talk about a film-maker who began ** very unique films in the late
1920s. He was French, and his name was Jean Painlevé.
Jean Painlevé was born in 1902. He made his first film in 1928. Now in a way, Painlevé’s films
conform to norms of the 20s and 30s, that is, they don’t fit very neatly into the categories we use
to classify films today. That said, even by the standards of the 20s and 30s, Painlevé’s films were
unique, a hybrid of styles. He had a special way of fusing, or some people might say confusing,
science and fiction.
His films begin with facts, but then they become more and more fictional. They gradually add
more and more fictional elements. In fact, Painlevé was known for saying that science is fiction.
Painlevé was a pioneer in underwater film-**, and a lot of his short films focused on the
aquatic animal world. He liked to show small underwater creatures, displaying what seemed like
familiar human characteristics – what we think of as unique to humans.
He might take a clip of a mollusk going up and down in the water and set it to music. You know,
to make it look like the mollusk were dancing to the music like a human being – that sort of thing.
But then he suddenly changed the image or narration to remind us how different the animals are,
how unlike humans. He confused his audience in the way he portrayed the animals he filmed,
mixing up on notions of the categories of humans and animals.
The films make us a little uncomfortable at times because we are uncertain about what we are
seeing. It gives him films an uncanny feature: the familiar made unfamiliar, the normal made
suspicious. He liked twists, he liked the unusual. In fact, one of his favorite sea animals was the
seahorse because with seahorses, it’s the male that carries the eggs, and he thought that was
great. His first and most celebrated underwater film is about the seahorse.
Susan, you have a question?
Student 1
But underwater film-** wasn’t that unusual, was it? I mean, weren’t there other people
** movies underwater?
Professor
Well, actually, it was pretty rare at that time. I mean, we are talking about the early 1920s
Student 1
But what about Jacques Cousteau? Was he like an innovator, you know, with underwater
photography too?
Professor
Ah, Jacques Cousteau. Well, Painlevé and Cousteau did both film underwater, and they were
both innovators, so you are right in that sense. But that’s pretty much where the similarities end.
First of all, Painlevé was about 20 years ahead of Cousteau. And Cousteau’s adventures were
high-tech, with lots of fancy equipment, whereas Painlevé kind of patched the equipment
together as he needed it.
Cousteau usually filmed large animals, usually in the open sea, whereas Painlevé generally filmed
smaller animals, and he liked to film in shallow water. Uh, what else, oh well, the main difference
was that Cousteau simply investigated and presented the facts – he didn’t mix in fiction. He was
a strict documentarist. He set the standard really for the nature documentary. Painlevé, on the
other hand, as we said before, mixed in elements of fiction. And his films are much more artistic,
incorporating music as an important element.
John, you have a question?
Student 2
Well, maybe I shouldn’t be asking this, but if Painlevé’s films are so special, so good, why haven’t
we ever heard of them? I mean, everyone’s heard of Jacques Cousteau.
Professor
Well, that’s a fair question. Uh, the short answer is that Painlevé’s style just never caught on with
the public. I mean, it probably goes back at least in part to where we mentioned earlier, that
people didn’t know what to make of his films – they were confused by them, whereas Cousteau’s
documentaries were very straightforward, met people’s expectations more than Painlevé’s films
did. But you are true: film history is about what we know about them. And Painlevé is still highly
respected in many circles.
TPO 3 Lecture 3 Art History
Narrator
Listen to part of a lecture in an Art History class. The professor has been discussing the origins of
art.
Professor
Some of the world’s oldest preserved art is the cave art of Europe, most of it in
Spain and France. And the earliest cave paintings found to date are those of the Chauvet Cave in
France discovered in 1994.
And you know, I remember when I heard about the results of the dating of the Chauvet paintings,
I said to my wife, “Can you believe these paintings are over 30,000 years old?” And my 3-year-old
daughter piped up and said, “Is that older than my great-grandmother?” That was the oldest age
she knew.
And you know, come to think of it. It’s pretty hard for me to really understand how long 30,000
years is too. I mean, we tend to think that people who lived at that time must have been pretty
primitive. But I’m gonna show you some slides in a few minutes and I think you will agree with
me that this art is anything but primitive. They are masterpieces. And they look so real, so alive
that it’s very hard to imagine that they are so very old.
Now, not everyone agrees on exactly how old. A number of the Chauvet paintings have been
dated by a lab to 30,000 or more years ago. That would make them not just older than any other
cave art, but about twice as old as the art in the caves at Altamira or Lascaux, which you may
have heard of.
Some people find it hard to believe Chauvet is so much older than Altamira and Lascaux, and
they noted that only one lab did the dating for Chauvet, without independent confirmation from
any other lab. But be that as it may, whatever the exact date, whether it’s 15,000, 20,000 or
30,000 years ago, the Chauvet paintings are from the dawn of art. So they are a good place to
start our discussion of cave painting.
Now, one thing you’ve got to remember is the context of these paintings. Paleolithic humans -
that’s the period we are talking about here, the Paleolithic, the early stone age, not too long
after humans first arrived in Europe - the climate was significantly colder then and so rock
shelters, shallow caves were valued as homes protected from the wind and rain. And in some
cases at least, artists drew on the walls of their homes. But many of the truly great cave art sites
like Chauvet were never inhabited. These paintings were made deep inside a dark cave, where
no natural light can penetrate. There’s no evidence of people ever living here. Cave bears, yes,
but not humans. You would have had to make a special trip into the cave to make the paintings,
and a special trip to go see it. And each time you’d have to bring along torches to light your way.
And people did go see the art. There are charcoal marks from their torches on the cave walls
clearly dating from thousands of years after the paintings were made. So we can tell people went
there. They came but they didn’t stay. Deep inside a cave like that is not really a place you’d
want to stay, so, why? What inspired the Paleolithic artists to make such beautiful art in such
inaccessible places? We’ll never really know of course, though it’s interesting to speculate.
But, um, getting to the paintings themselves, virtually all Paleolithic cave art represents animals,
and Chauvet is no exception. The artists were highly skilled at using, or even enhancing, the
natural shape of the cave walls to give depth and perspectives to their drawings, the sense of
motion and vitality in these animals. Well, wait till I show you the slides. Anyway, most
Paleolithic cave art depicts large herbivores. Horses are most common overall with deer and
bison pretty common too, probably animals they hunted. But earlier at Chauvet, there is a
significant interest in large dangerous animals, lots of rhinoceros, lions, mammoth, bears.
Remember that the ranges of many animal species were different back then so all these animals
actually lived in the region at that time. But the Chauvet artists didn’t paint people. There is a
half-man-half-bison creature and there is outline of human hands but no depiction of a full
human.
So, why these precise animals? Why not birds, fish, snakes? Was it for their religion, magic or
sheer beauty? We don’t know. But whatever it was, it was worth it to them to spend hours deep
inside a cave with just a torch between them and utter darkness. So, on that note, let’s dim the
lights, so we can see these slides and actually look at the techniques they used.