Program 1: Pioneering Work Co-sponsored by the San Francisco Exploratorium. Following the tradition begun by Etienne-Jules Marey, and later by Lucien Bull, Pierre Nogues, and Doctor Commandon, French documentary filmmaker Jean Painlevé used cinema as a means of scientific exploration and observation. His poetic "cinema of the invisible" was appreciated by the Surrealists, and was shown in avant-garde cinemas together with films by Man Ray and Buñuel. "For the general audience, the images of these films, regardless of their abstraction or roughness, are always supported by this fact: they 'represent' some fragments, animal or mineral, of our universe. This tension between the intangible and reality is not mediated by any particular story yet leads to the wildest fantasies. And Jean Painlevé always knew how to exploit the emotional power of these images: a slight displacement, Duke Ellington's blues over images of repellant contortions of vampire bats (a scandalous juxtaposition in his day), the octopus slinking between branches of a tree or over a face; the camera records the most fantastic of fictions, that which becomes real. What is more horrible than Nosferatu? A real vampire. These 'vamps' or 'stars' from another world are the anonymous heroes of the obscure dramas taking place every instant in microscopic worlds, worlds seen in slow or accelerated motion. The sumptuous landscape of liquid crystals unfolds itself pointlessly in the silence of the invisible. The ferocious societies in The Fresh Water Assassins, an entire miniature world of transparent ectoplasms, devour each other indifferently according to a complicated hierarchy of size and resilience. . . And these worlds are clearly part of the most intense cinematic revelations of the visible world. As Jean Painlevé said, 'science is fiction.'"-- Dominque Willoughby (translated from the French by Bertrand Augst and Nancy Goldman)