Here's another of the short subjects that Painlevé committed to film for the Mathematics department of the Palais de la Decouverte. Beginning with a primitive view of a flat Earth covered by the fixed dome of the sky, he considers the moon, the sun the planets and, breaking free, the stars and beyond to the farthest edges of the universe as seen and imagined in 1937.
In tone, it's by far the most Olympian of Painlevé's shorts I have looked at, and overtly the least humorous. Yet it is in the consideration of the vast scale of the universe as a whole and the unimportant tininess of this earth of ours, that I see the root of the mordant humor he displays in his more accessible, less lecture-like movies. If in considering the egg of the stickleback, he uses microphotography to examine what goes on at a scale of a micrometer, how can we, an entire world, be considered as particularly important, lost in a universe where our galaxy, let alone our sun, cannot be seen?
In tone, it's by far the most Olympian of Painlevé's shorts I have looked at, and overtly the least humorous. Yet it is in the consideration of the vast scale of the universe as a whole and the unimportant tininess of this earth of ours, that I see the root of the mordant humor he displays in his more accessible, less lecture-like movies. If in considering the egg of the stickleback, he uses microphotography to examine what goes on at a scale of a micrometer, how can we, an entire world, be considered as particularly important, lost in a universe where our galaxy, let alone our sun, cannot be seen?