Jean Painlevé, the French photographer-filmmaker-scientist-inventor, made about 200 films over a period of 60 years on a wide range of topics, such as bats, pigeons or astronomy, but he was mainly specialized in underwater fauna. As founder of the first amateur diving club in Europe, he made film portraits of sea urchins, shrimps, jellyfish and crabs, among other things. A mysterious world, which until then was unknown to the general public, floated ‘to the surface’ and was projected for the first time in cinemas. Painlevé approached this world not as a biologist but as an astronaut, who reports to earth on this newly discovered, strange planet—where the beings sometimes show striking similarities with people on earth. With great fascination, he highlights the erotic, comical and wild side of underwater creatures.

L’Hippocampe, his film about seahorses, is still his most famous work. The film caused a great scandal in its time because of the openness with which Painlevé looks at the sexuality of the animals. Les Amours de la Pieuvre is also an erotic story: the octopus, the viewer, the camera, the lens, the filmmaker are all together in a confined space, where everyone keeps searching for the other.

Next, we’ll show Origin of the Species by the British film director Ben Rivers. The film offers an intimate portrait of S., a striking figure who lives in a secluded spot in a forest and has read Darwin’s famous work The Origin of the Species for twenty years. He’s a nutty professor who investigates and tries to define the world using Darwin’s theories. Rivers, in turn, subjects the film to an experimental process in which the sound is released from the image. The main character, S.; the filmmaker, Rivers; and you, the spectator: everyone is busy searching for and giving meaning to things, creating a world of their own.