If the afterlife exists, I’ve always imagined that I’d like mine to be underwater. I’d be reborn as something with fins, or tentacles, or maybe even with a single foot to drag along the ocean floor. Realistically speaking, this would not be so difficult to arrange. I’d have a sea burial. Fish would nibble at my earlobes. A shark might take a chunk out of my torso. My matter would pass through so many marine stomachs that pretty soon there’d be a molecule of me in every creature I’d dreamed of becoming: in the octopus egg, in the starfish embryo, in the seagrass. And it’s not just the dead who get to experience this kind of transmutation. The living do too. We shed matter all our lives. Part of you is probably already swimming around as an eel in the Sargasso Sea, thanks to all the hair you’ve washed down your drain. This process has a familiar name: digestion – something that, relative to its importance, does not get a lot of screen time. Because how do you film these things – eating, shitting, fucking, being born, dying, decomposing, germinating – without the magic getting lost in the slop of it all? The biologists and filmmakers (and lifelong romantic partners) Geneviève Hamon and Jean Painlevé somehow succeeded. So did the dancer and choreographer Loie Fuller, who appears in several of their films. At this moment in time, as human beings confront the consequences of our production of matter at a rate and scale that exceeds earth’s capacity to break it down, we have a lot to learn from returning to their work, where the digestive system takes centre stage.
Fuller’s life overlapped with those of Hamon and Painlevé for less than thirty years, and yet her affinity with the filmmakers runs much deeper than aesthetic comparison (a sea creature is like a dancer). Nonetheless, aesthetic comparison is where it starts, most obviously in Acera, or The Witches’ Dance (Painlevé and Hamon, 19721). Running to thirteen minutes, the film follows the lifecycle of a particular species of mollusc, acera bullata.2 A series of cuts bring us successively deeper into the mollusc’s world: first, boats bobbing on calm waters in a bay in Brittany, then the expansive mud-flats underneath these waters, revealed by a low tide, then a closer shot of the mud, in which we can just make out what the narrator describes as “a small group of little blobs”.3 Next, a slightly closer shot of the blobs, this time filmed underwater and in darkness, lit as if by a spotlight. Finally, moving closer still, we see them front on. The creatures now appear imposingly large – an impression that seems paradoxically supported by the narrator boasting that they can measure “up to five centimetres long”. This, the most intimate sphere of the molluscs, has an air of artificiality. We’ve found ourselves in a stage-set that looks almost like the surface of the moon. The molluscs begin to perform a slow and melancholy ballet.
In the shots that follow the bodies of the acera are difficult to navigate, oscillating between being discernible as individuals and entwined in a papery mass. The narrator orients us by pointing out a pair of tiny black eyes by which we are able to identify the head. They are lit beautifully against the darkness in shades of orange, red, blue-grey, an effect strongly reminiscent of the colour changing technologies patented by the dancer Loie Fuller. More anatomical description, this time drawing our attention to a cloak-like fold of skin by which the molluscs are able to move. Suddenly one, then another, lifts itself up from the ocean floor. At first their movements are clumsy, set to a soundtrack of “organised noise”, but then the music pulls itself into a harmony and the molluscs suddenly become overwhelmingly beautiful, throwing their luminous wings outward in time to the music. There is a brief flash of another shape, seamlessly edited in, a vaguely human form with wings outspread in darkness. This is Fuller herself, there for less than a second. When the molluscs stop dancing and fall again to the sea floor, the tone of the film changes altogether. The deliberate stage-lighting of earlier scenes gives way to an intrusive torch light: under it, the creatures appear fleshy and pink, like a string of testicles, as they attach themselves into chains of three or five and begin to mate. The narrator informs us that their sex changes depending on their position in the chain. “The animal at the head carries on with its business,” the narrator explains, “eating mud, for instance”, while “eggs are laid continuously, even during the intercourse”. We see these eggs magnified, and then we see inside the eggs, tiny larvae already alive with movement. They hatch and the newborns are set adrift. Some, we are told, will “become prey to other marine life”, while the remainder drop to the sea floor and straightaway begin catching microscopic food. The surviving acera “will be able to reproduce for a while before it dies”. FIN.
Fuller, embedded here as found footage within the full life cycle of a mollusc, may or may not have been recognisable to a contemporary audience. Born in the United States, she emigrated and rose to fame in Paris in the late 1890s with what she called The Serpentine Dance [see above]. This unique performance involved an elaborate costume of silk fabric into which was sewn bamboo rods. Holding on to these rods, she would twirl her arms to create patterns with the fabric – much like a ribbon routine, the difference being that the dancer would all but disappear into the billowing masses, which were illuminated with complex light displays. The footage incorporated into Acera is one of two allusions to Fuller’s choreography in the strange and wonderful marine documentaries Hamon and Painlevé produced across five decades between the late 1920s and late 1970s. In Hyas and Stenorhynchus (1927)4, she is present only as a narrated metaphor. A creature known as the European fan worm performs in her place, twirling its skirts. “Un ballet à la Loie Fuller”, the narrator muses dreamily. Perhaps one reason that Fuller’s ‘appearances’ in these films has been so overlooked is that it is easy to dismiss the allusions to her dancing as simply another of the playful comparisons characteristic of Painlevé and Hamon’s films: a crustacean is like an arm-wrestler, another is a fashion-conscious socialite, an octopus is a seductress and a seahorse is “medieval” looking. The pair were (and still are) regularly accused of anthropomorphism. Painlevé gave contradictory responses to these accusations over the course of his career. In his essay ‘Feet in the Water’ (1935), he complained: “There are so many myths to shatter! The most preposterous anthropomorphism reigns in this field: everything has been created by Man [sic] and in the image of Man and must be explained in terms of Man”5. Decades later, in an interview given in 1988, he declared: “We anthropomorphize, we have the right to anthropomorphize, if not we would find ourselves incapable of appreciating any element of our surroundings”6.
These are not necessarily contradictory positions: Painlevé seems to support anthropomorphism as a consciously-used creative device, while opposing it as a general attitude. As in the appearance of Fuller in Acera – so brief that it is barely distinguishable from the movement of the molluscs – Painlevé and Hamon’s anthropomorphisms do not make the animal more human, but rather trigger a confusion between human and animal. This involves collapsing the distinction between the grotesque (bodily functions) and the sentimental (art), which is where Fuller, with her peculiar dance, becomes particularly important. But before we begin to understand Fuller’s function in Acera, we first need to take a closer look at the world of the molluscs. By the end of Acera, we have come to understand that what we have seen is a mating dance, one which would have challenged every mainstream opinion held at the time in Europe about sex and the ‘natural’ way to do it. Perhaps even more surprising is the direct link established between digestion and reproduction, as if the food is more responsible for the creation of new life than any reproductive material issued from the parent molluscs. The necessity of eating is the driving force behind Hamon and Painlevé’s films, and is elaborated upon in a degree of detail that elevates it to a near art form. Taking us beneath the surface of a nondescript puddle in the film Freshwater Assassins (1947), Painlevé as narrator explains that we are about to see “several forms of alimentary destruction”, which he lists gleefully: “shelling, chewing, smashing, sucking, grinding, swallowing”. Even the “peace-loving and vegetarian” water scavenger beetle gives birth to a ravenous larva that immediately goes in search of prey and is shortly locked in a ferocious battle with a mollusc. The entire functioning of the world below the surface of the water is shown to be dependent on the process by which the flesh of one creature is eaten, digested, enters the body of another as protein, and eventually is birthed as a new creature. This rapacious pattern of destruction and recreation is attached uneasily, by way of narrated metaphors, to politesses familiar to the audience of the time: courtship, waltzing, turns around the garden, pride in one’s appearance. A short text by Painlevé entitled ‘A Walk in the Garden’ seems to describe an underwater paradise, until: ‘The enormous oven-shaped mouth of the angler fish suddenly opens and closes; it digests its food and again sets out its fishing line. This lazy creature ejects the residue of digestion simply by opening its mouth – the garden needs fertilizer to thrive.’ [Emphasis mine].7
Painlevé and Hamon’s work aimed to demonstrate that nothing is exempt from cycles of death, digestion and reproduction, including ourselves. In an interview with Hélène Hazéra and Dominique Leglu in Libération in 1986, Painlevé implicates humans very clearly in the marine food chain, citing as one of the highlights of his job “the ability to eat one’s actors – crab, shrimp, sea urchins, squid, all finely cooked in new and unusual ways”.8 If this comment seems barbaric, it is only because of Painlevé’s refusal to describe this activity as ‘eating seafood’. Instead, he allows himself to enter the dramas that unfold in his films. His own appetite becomes yet another agent of earth’s great digestive machine. Elsewhere in the same interview, he places the digestive system at the centre of all human existence:
I’m very proud that we live in an era that finally recognizes its dependence on shit. All of genetics relies on colon bacilli, which in turn rely on our faeces. All experiments are done on it. We’re deep into the shit.9
The line connecting humans to the inhabitants of the underwater garden is one of bodily fluids and intestinal tracts: the secret digestive infrastructure that underpins all life. And yet its presence is not constant or predictable. It comes gushing forward at odd and unpredictable moments, as if a pipe somewhere has burst. In ‘Feet in the Water’, Painlevé writes of the frustration of its intrusion upon fleeting moments of beauty: “a shrimp might vomit in front of the lens just when one expects the most ethereal ballet from it”. When the “ethereal ballet” is captured, the world pivots to accommodate it. It is at these moments that Fuller appears in Acera and Hyas and Steronhycus: movements become rhythmic, the music becomes harmonic, and everything pulls itself into an unexpected cohesion. And yet we are never allowed to forget the bodily chaos that ultimately dictates and necessitates this beauty. By the time the Great Fan Worm in Hyas and Stenorhynchus begins its “ballet à la Loie Fuller”, we have already learned – by way of a close up on the “vibratory cilia” lining its feathery skirt – that this elaborate costume is yet another tool for digesting and recycling matter: “at the centre of the breathing plume, the mouth.”
Fuller’s dancing would not fit so seamlessly into the pair’s films if it, too, did not carry uneasy echoes of digestive violence. When I first watched a recording of Loie Fuller’s dancing on YouTube, I thought of something chewing itself up and spitting itself out again in new forms. It’s like watching a live Rorschach test.10 Her movements carry what Painlevé has called the “grace and terror of gestures”11 and yet – as with the sea creatures she resembles – we are denied the framework of a human body through which to understand these gestures. Fuller’s dancing embodies the exact combination of reverie and uneasiness evoked by Painlevé and Hamon’s creatures; their combination of alienness and familiar humanity, their gory physicality and strange elegance. If the physicality of Fuller’s dancing is often underplayed, perhaps this is because the Symbolists12 (including the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé) jumped on her performance as the new embodiment of their movement. Mallarmé saw Fuller’s ‘Fire Dance’ and instantly related it to his poetics of the “missing centre”13: Fuller’s body, obscured by light and fabric, became the unnameable sublime at the ‘heart’ of a (man’s) work of art. ‘Fire Dance’ begins with a shot of a butterfly, which abruptly metamorphoses into Fuller flapping her ‘wings’ in time with the music, just like the Acera, before dissolving into a series of repetitive and ambiguous shapes, and finally ending with a floating tornado-shaped spiral of fabric by which her body seems to have been consumed, as if by flames. The woman who disappears was a popular spectacle precisely because it could be related to Symbolist associations between woman and spirit, an ethereal life force or mirage, who – because disembodied – almost certainly wouldn’t “vomit in front of the lens just when one expects the most ethereal ballet from it” (Painlevé, ‘Feet in the Water’). But if we choose not to interpret Fuller’s dancing as Symbolist art, the body starts to seep back into her performance. Her disappearance at the end of the ‘Fire Dance’ is as much a metamorphosis as her transformation from butterfly to woman at the very beginning of the dance. Fuller does not disappear, but instead is digested by the endless churning of these fabrics. It is as if all the shapes we see in the place of her body – fire, water, wings – are not conjured up out of nothing, but out of her own living matter. She is staging her own decomposition and reconfiguration.
If this sounds grotesque, it is only because the ideas of decomposition, decay and impermanence epitomise horror in contemporary western society. Nothing is more repulsive to us than the rot that succeeds death. Some link connecting us to the planetary digestive processes of which we are a part has been broken – we create forms that resist or disrupt cycles of growth and decay, and find ourselves drowning in their accumulation: carbon dioxide in our oceans and atmosphere, plastics on the deep ocean floor. Ecologist and scientific historian Santos Casado argues that every historical period is characterised by one of two tendencies. Either: to be enthralled with the “fluid generative capacity of living”, the ability of forms to continuously transmute and metamorphose into new forms, or: to admire the ability of things to remain stable in their forms, and for these forms to be multiplied with perfect accuracy (an idea of nature as mass-production).14 Tending towards the former, Europe in the 19th century and early 20th century was much more comfortable with the idea of decomposition – that vital process whereby all matter is recycled – than we are now. The discovery of radium in 1898 fuelled the early 20th-century fascination with growth and mutability, Casado writes. Radium, present in nature as part of the decay chains of natural thorium and uranium isotopes, seemed to be the perfect illustration of one thing breaking down to create something new and magical. Like that of Painlevé and Hamon, Fuller’s art was inspired by science. She patented several chemical compounds with which she coloured camera lenses and made fabrics luminescent, and actually wrote to Marie and Pierre Curie asking about the possibility of a dress created entirely out of radium. They gently discouraged this plan but did provide their advice and assistance, alongside that of American inventor Thomas Edison, on how Fuller might achieve an effect of phosphorescence with calcium salts. The result was described in the Los Angeles Herald in May of 1904:
“The tissue of twinkling stars floats about, circles, sweeps along the floor, or is wafted up until it assumes the shape of a great luminous vase. The dancer’s face is never seen, her form being vaguely outlined by the glowing lights.”15
Fuller’s decision to call her dance ‘The Radium Dance’ (as opposed to the ‘Calcium Dance’) points to a widespread fascination with properties of radium beyond merely that of light, which could be achieved by other means. Radium was fascinating precisely because its light was a by-product of decay. Similarly, after discussions with French astronomer Camille Flammarion, Fuller concluded in her writings that “colour is just disintegrated light”.16 At the turn of the century science seemed to support, across various disciplines, the idea that decay and disintegration were not processes of destruction, but instead creation.
When we revisit a performance like the ‘Fire Dance’ in this context, it seems grossly over-simplistic to read Fuller’s work as embodying the Symbolist fantasy of the ‘missing centre’. Instead, we can see it as representing a body broken down into its smallest possible components, which – as Fuller understood – are just “concentrated energy”,17 and can therefore be effortlessly turned to something new: fire. Fuller’s abstraction of her own body made it possible for her to create an ambiguity of scale: it is never clear whether we are witnessing bodies, or the minute concentrations of energy those bodies are made up of, or both at once. In order to achieve the same effect, Painlevé relied on zooming in to reveal minute processes and zooming out again: a technique now well entrenched in the conventional scientific documentary format and which, perhaps consequently, has lost its surreal power. We see inside the respiratory system of the Great Fan Worm, inside the womb of the male parent seahorse, inside the respiratory system of the octopus. Bodies always seem ready to collapse into their constituent parts; it becomes difficult to define what the ‘correct’ scale for viewing a body should be, or what stage of the development of a body should be considered the ‘final’ one. In one of his later films, Liquid Crystals (1978), Painlevé devotes an entire film to research clips made by a French microbiologist called Yves Bouligand. Set to an unsettling soundtrack by François de Roubaix, shapes make and unmake themselves, collapsing into rivers just when they seem about to form something resembling a body, before reforming to make patterns again. Bouligand was researching morphogenesis: the biological process by which the form of a body emerges from a soup of cells. The self-assembling properties he observed in liquid crystals challenged the distinction that had previously existed between living and dead matter, allowing him to hypothesise as to how other structures in nature were formed: plant cell walls, the shells of crustaceans, the protective casing around fish eggs, the bones of vertebrate animals.
We see this process happening throughout Painlevé’s films – life in formation inside the eggs of acera, of seahorses, of the imposing octopus, inside the bulbs by which minute jellyfish and marine polyps reproduce. This obsession with growth – and in particular embryology – was not particular to Painlevé and Hamon. It was also a characteristic of the Surrealist movement with which their films are often associated. The impossible forms of surrealism were validated by an imaginative turn in biological sciences that gave equal attention to not just all forms in existence at any stage of development, but any form that was “theoretically imaginable”.18 Both Painlevé and Hamon, and Fuller, responded to this turn by foregrounding not what a body was but what a body was capable of becoming. In denying the permanence or inevitability of any form, they moved away from defining a body according to its “innate characteristics” and towards something that Ann Cooper Albright perhaps articulates best when she refers to Fuller’s “sexy, slippery – potentially queer – glory”.19 Beyond alluding to Fuller’s own homosexuality, Albright is picking up on an aesthetic of fluidity in her work that disrupted categorisation. In many ways, both Fuller and Painlevé can be considered forerunners of what is now known as ‘queer ecology’ – a collection of disciplinary approaches that address heterosexist framings of sex and nature, and seek to understand ecology – and our place in it – by drawing on queer theory, such as the writings of Donna Haraway. Painlevé and Hamon actively emphasise the refusal of creatures to fit into a two-by-two ‘Noah’s ark’ framing of nature: instead we see bisexual acera, a male seahorse that gives birth, polyps and jellyfish that reproduce without a partner, simply by dividing their own cells. In a time when fascist thought was sweeping across Europe, supported by pseudo-scientific claims of ‘inherent nature’ and ‘natural order’, this was a radical direction in which to point the camera.
Given how powerful the mobilisation of ‘nature’ can be as a rhetorical tool, it is crucial to interrogate narratives such as the ‘kingdom’ of nature and the unidirectional ‘food chain’. These narratives validate the idea that hierarchies are ‘natural’ and can be used to support any system of oppression, as has happened in the recent past with disastrous consequences. When humans are figured as the ‘naturally’ dominant species, it is only a small step from there to get to the idea that some humans are more ‘naturally’ dominant than others. Humans are being eaten all the time, and not only at the moment of death: we are nibbled on all our lives by the insects that drink our blood to survive, by the bacteria and fungi in our bodies. By contrast, mainstream environmental discourse tends to frame humans as exclusively consumers of resources, ones who eat but are never eaten. We displace the consequences of our actions onto the (separate) ailing body of the earth, which has skies that are ‘choked’, seas that are ‘clogged up’, and flesh that is being ‘eaten away’ faster than it is ‘growing back’. In her book The Second Body (2018), Daisy Hildyard describes the artificial line we draw between our first body (physical) and little acknowledged ‘second body’, an abstract extended web of the impacts the first body has on earth systems, impacting other bodies in turn.20 These ideas are starting to catch on: recently, the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) has called for the introduction of a measure of ‘planetary health’, which connects the health of an individual to the health of the system in which it functions. When Fuller dances, disappears and becomes a particle of radium, an entire ocean or a flame, or when Painlevé and Hamon’s mollusc dances, disappears and becomes Fuller, what we see is an imagined state in which there is no distance between a first body and a second body to collapse. We might call this a vision of ideal ‘planetary digestive health’, where individual entities are revealed as nothing more than temporary arrangements of borrowed matter. These arrangements are dependent on a seemingly endless cycle of digestive and reproductive processes which occur on every scale, providing both the internal machinery of bodies and the wider framework within which these bodies operate. Representations of the body-in-constant metamorphosis re-implicate us in complex planetary processes of change, decomposition, absorption and growth. Our matter begins as proteins and cells in the body of another, and when we die this material will be reused to form the proteins of cells of a new body: perhaps plant, perhaps mollusc, perhaps eventually human again. As Painlevé put it: “the garden needs fertilizer to thrive”, and for better or worse, we’re very much part of the garden.
1. Reported dates vary. 2. A common orthographic variant is Akera bullata. 3. All citations from the films are English subtitles translated from the original French. Science is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé, Criterion Collection, 2009. 4. Reported dates vary. 5. Jean Painlevé, ‘Feet in the Water’, in Andy Masaki Bellows,Marina McDougall, Brigitte Berg (eds), Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé, San Francisco: Brico Press-MIT Press, 2000, p. 136. 6. Jean Painlevé, cited by James Leo Cahill, ‘Anthropomorphism and its Vicissitudes: Reflections on Homme-Sick Cinema’ in Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway (eds), Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human, Berghahn Books: New York and Oxford, 2013, p. 82. My translation. 7. Jean Painlevé, ‘A Walk in the Garden’, Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé, p. 64. 8. Jean Painlevé, ‘Jean Painlevé Reveals the Invisible,’ interview by Hélène Hazéra and Dominique Leglu, Libération, 1986, full text featured in Science is Fiction. 9. ibid. 10. A recent film that achieves a similar effect is Amy Cutler’s brilliant Leave Me on a Rainy Afternoon (2018), featuring sped-up and looped archival footage of cloud formations. She also composed a film inspired by Jean Painlevé entitled The White Princess (2017). 11. Le Vampire (Jean Painlevé, 1945). 12. Often considered a precursor to surrealism, the Symbolists were a group of late 19th century (largely male) writers and artists whose works dealt with themes of eroticism, mysticism, dreams and fantasies. 13. Elizabeth Coffman, ‘Women in Motion: Loie Fuller and the “Interpenetration” of Art and Science’, Camera Obscura 17:1, 2002, p. 73-105. 14. Santos Casado, ‘Living Fluxes: Insect and Metamorphosis in Science, Culture and the Popular Imagination’ in Aurora Herrera Gómez (ed.) Body Stages: the Metamorphosis of Loie Fuller (Milan: Skira, 2014), p.95–107. 15. Los Angeles Herald, Volume XXXI, Number 215, 1 May 1904. 16. Fifteen Years of a Dancer’s Life (Loie Fuller, 1913), London: H. Jenkins. 17. ibid. 18. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917, p. 269. 19. Ann Cooper Albright, Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2007, p. 47.
Lauren Collee is a writer and researcher from Sydney, living in London. Her poetry, prose, journalism and woodblock prints have appeared in various independent publications. She is currently researching forms of ‘night vision’ in Dark Sky Parks as part of her PhD in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths.
