LGM Film Club, Part 366: The Sounds of Science
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Back in 2001, some people were putting together a compilation of the weird and awesome undersea documentaries of the French filmmaker Jean Painleve. They didn’t want to play these with the original voiceover. No, they got Yo La Tengo to jam to them and then just used subtitles to replace the footage. This is almost totally unseen since it was completed a couple of years later. I mean this literally–there are 15 ratings of this on IMDB, one of which is mine. Of all the movies I’ve seen that no one has seen, this might be the most obscure and the most incomprehensibly obscure since Yo La Tengo fans would eat this up. What’s particularly interesting about it is that the band did release an album of the material/ I had never even heard of the film but then Criterion grabbed it and this is some mesmerizing stuff. Would you like to watch octopus or mollusk sex while Yo La Tengo makes weird noises or just hits a groove and jams on it for 10 minutes? I know I did!
Anyway, here it is: