The many short films Painlevé made featuring crustaceans and other sea creatures possess an informational function true to the filmmaker’s formation as a biologist. Yet coupled with this is a desire to activate a sense of wonder and, at times, to draw upon a surrealist-inflected simultaneity of fascination and repulsion. In "La Pieuvre", the octopus’s movements can be disarmingly graceful, but equally elicit a very different feeling: the soft undulations of the cephalopod’s skeleton-less body provoke an unsettling sensation of oozing putrefaction. Painlevé associated his films with a subversion of reason, asking, “Does the complete understanding of a natural phenomenon strip away its miraculous qualities? It is certainly a risk. But it should at least maintain all of its poetry, for poetry subverts reason and is never dulled by repetition. Besides, a few gaps in our knowledge will always allow for a joyous confusion of the mysterious, the unknown, the miraculous.”
