Freshwater Assassins (1947) Poster

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7/10
But Don't Go Near the Water
boblipton4 September 2018
It's eat or be eaten, and sometimes both, accompanied by hot jazz and plenty of frantic drumming in Painlevé's survey of the life in a nice freshwater pond. It turns out it's full of hideous creatures, all hungry all the time and attacking each other in various disgusting ways, sure to send anyone who likes the occasional dip in clean water over to the nearest swimming pool and its nice, safe, dead, chlorinated water.

It's clear evidence of Painlevé's black humor and clear supporting evidence in why your mother -- well mine, anyway -- told me not to go swimming right after eating. Watching a beautiful dragonfly hover above the water, one would never guess how bizarrely its larvae dine, nor imagine that the deadly scorpion has an even more chthonic cousin that lives in the water.
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4/10
Okay, but not among the filmmaker's best
Horst_In_Translation23 March 2016
Warning: Spoilers
"Assassins d'eau douce" or "Freshwater Assassins" is a black-and-white documentary that runs for slightly under half an hour and it is one of filmmaker Jean Painlevé's longer works. There is no denying he was a pioneer when it comes to the genre of animal documentary and he made this one here shortly after World War II. It is in french like his other works, so if you really want to understand every bit of it, you may need a good pair of subtitles. I personally have some of his work and found this one not too interesting. But that is just subjective as the animals depicted in here, mostly water creatures, but no fish, aren't something I am too interested in. Still there are a couple decent video recordings as usual with Painlevé, so it's not a failure at all. It is also pretty brutal again in terms of animal violence among each other.
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