Le Vampire”, produced between 1939 and 1945, is a classic of the documentary film.

At the beginning, shots of sailing seahorses, scrambling octopuses, predatory caterpillars, tweaking ticks follow one another, quickly and unconnectedly.

According to the off-screen narrator, the belly of a Cameroonian beetle may have inspired “negro masks” – the black-and-white stripes are based on the sounds of two hits from Duke Ellington's onomatopoeic “Jungle” period.

Explain all this - but according to what logic?

– that the human imagination transformed the eponymous vampire into a human being who sucked blood directly from a wound inflicted on the human neck – “like Nosferatu in Murnau's film”.

(At this point said Carpathian count, pale as chalk and rat-toothed, twitches across the screen.)

But the vampire exists, the off-voice continues: Its scientific name is "Desmodus rotundus".

The second half of the almost nine-minute film shows a rather puny specimen of this South American bat species sucking blood from the nose of an unimpressed-looking guinea pig.

Isn't the musical allusion to Chopin's funeral march at the end of the more amusing than unsettling sequence a bit over the top?

It is not at all, considering the trypanosomes transmitted by Desmodus rotundus, which a microscopic image shows scurrying around human blood cells.

They can be understood as a metaphor for a different, ideological infection that was affecting the brains of women and men across Europe at the time the film was made.

Molting under the magnifying glass

Much of what filmmaker and resister Jean Painlevé was can be found - explicitly or implicitly - in "Le Vampire".

Born in Paris in 1902 and deceased there in 1989, Paul Painlevé, the son of the eminent mathematician and two-time French Prime Minister, is considered a pioneer of documentary film, with a focus on wildlife, and in particular on France's slippery coastal fauna.

He has filmed crabs and cnidarians all his life;

his most famous strip concerns the reproduction of seahorses.

In contrast to the much better known Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Painlevé never worked under the surface of the sea, but mostly photographed the heroes of his films behind the glass of aquariums.

Between 1927 and 1982, he assembled twenty “films de vulgarisation” from his purely observational “films de recherche” that he created for research.

These were initially intended for the supporting program of movie theaters and used all sorts of tricks to win the favor of ordinary moviegoers: accompanying music, often specially composed;

subtitles or spoken texts spiced with humor;

in addition, the humanization of the animal protagonists, but above all the fertilization of scientific objectivity with artistic subjectivity.

The result was cinematic objects that were difficult to classify and which, by their own definition, were simultaneously instruments of culture, teaching aids, plays and works of art.