Sea Ballerinas

Painlevé returns his cameras to the sea thirty years after his first documentary, to take a look at star fish in this typical professorial short on these underseas creatures.

His photography is just as brilliant as ever, and in this one he and his co-director,Geneviève Hamon use the usual array of microphotography, high-speed cameras and now tinted lenses to bring their subjects into clearer focus. Despite their weird appearances and counter-intuitive life cycles (the feather stars seem to be unusual in that they go from a fixed, sessile phase of life to a mobile one), the film makers make evident the grace and beauty of these animals.

This is one of the few movies in which Painlevé's sense of humorous not just black, but determinedly mawkish, as if he is trying to be funny in a shocking manner, but fails. Well, not all jokes work.