Le Vampire (Jean Painlevé, 1939)
Thaumetopoea: Pityocampa (Robert Enrico, 1960)
La Croisière jaune (Andre Sauvage, Leon Poirier, 1933)

In the films of Jean Painlevé, the Surrealists saw a form of total cinema based on “the beauty of chance” (Bazin). Le Vampire (9 mins, B&W) is a magnificent horror film made from a documentary on the Brazilian bat, with a short extract from Nosferatu and music by Duke Ellington. When the bat, having supped on blood, spreads his wings in a salute, the metaphorical reference to Nazism is inescapable. Thaumetopoea: Pityocampa (25 mins, Color) is everything you wanted to know about processionary caterpillars and then some. When commissioned to make a scientific film, Robert Enrico produced a work of black humor, the music track giving seemingly neutral elements a quality of science fiction. André Sauvage's The Yellow Cruise (90 mins, B&W) was a document of the Third Citroën Automotive Expedition from Beirut to Peking: “A dreamlike and obsessive story of futile adventure. At its heart, this is an expedition of the absurd. Could it be that the purpose is to drive a car from Beirut to Peking? Perhaps, but these weird half-track vehicles never even make it over the Himalayas. Could it be ethnographic? Maybe, but their concerns are never scholarly and almost always bizarre....A bygone era of impassioned exploration and derring-do.” (Telluride Film Festival '89)