L'hippocampe (The Seahorse), dir. Jean Painlevé, France, 1934, 13 min.
Book tickets
Damon R. Young writes:
"Aqua-cinema brings together three films selected in response to Elisa Giardina Papa’s She Flickered In and Out of History, an 18-minute video installation centered on an island that emerged between Tunisia and Sicily in 1831, was immediately claimed by competing colonial powers, and disappeared again beneath the sea. Filmed largely underwater and without recourse to AI, Giardina Papa’s work turns away from human mastery and toward a submarine world of flicker, opacity, and unstable relation.
The aquatic cinemas of Painlevé and Vigo emerge from early experiments with underwater filming using newly invented underwater equipment. In Jean Painlevé’s L’Hippocampe (1933), the seahorse appears as a strange, hybrid figure that unsettles norms of sex and reproduction, even as the film’s scientific gaze carries an unredeemed violence toward the creatures it studies. In Jean Vigo’s visionary short feature L’Atalante (1934), underwater imagery enters fiction cinema as a medium of longing, estrangement, and erotic fantasy, intensifying the queer resonance in the film’s study of life adrift on a barge. Gunvor Nelson’s Moon’s Pool (1973) discovers in the submerged camera a haptic cinema of refraction, touch, and flicker.
Together, these films trace an alternative history of the moving image below the surface. In dialogue with Giardina Papa’s exhibition, Aqua-cinema explores the queer resonances of the camera submerged in a translucent medium whose refractions loosen the hold of colonial narration and allow other lifeworlds, temporalities, and forms of relation to shimmer into view."
Running order:
L’Atalante, dir. Jean Vigo, 1934, 85 min.
Moon’s Pool, dir. Gunver Nelson, 1973, 15 min.
Damon R. Young is associate professor of French and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies (Duke, 2018, shortlisted for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize), as well as numerous essays on film theory, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and digital media. His next book, Century of the Selfie, is forthcoming with Harvard University Press in May 2027.
This event is part of the public programme of Elisa Giardina Papa: She Flickered In and Out of History.
Book tickets
Wed, 12 Aug 2026
Cinema 2
06:30 pm
Wed 12 Aug, 6:30pm
Ticket includes free exhibition entry on the same day.
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Cinema 2
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Damon R. Young
