A Newly Opened File on Jean Painlevé

In 2019, Minnesota University Press published James Leo Cahill’s Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé. The book’s publication was motivated by the fact that the analyses and contextualisations of Jean Painlevé’s filmmaking still lag behind the actual contribution that this unique filmmaker, torn between strict scientific methods in film and the art movements of his time, especially surrealism, made to the history of French cinema. Cahill’s book proves to be an upgrade of the heretofore publications on the subject. The article describes the main points of analysis that make the book a step forward in the discussions on the filmmaker.