A few days after Painlevé was born, his mother, Marguerite Petit de Villeneuve, died from complications arising from an infection contracted during childbirth.
In the Lycée Louis Le Grand, he was a poor and inattentive student who preferred to skip classes and go to the Jardin d'Acclimatation where he was assisting the guard in taking care of the animals.
[2] Among the few friends he made in his adolescence were future film critic Georges Altman, and writer and precious stones specialist Armand Moss (Moschowitz), who later appeared as an extra in Mathusalem.
The Hamons' residence in Port Blanc, Penvenan, named "Ty an Diaoul", (which some locals had dubbed "Maison du Diable", "House of the Devil") eventually became a second home for Painlevé.
Painlevé, along with Georges Altman and others, in 1918, created in his school an affiliate union to the "Socialist Revolutionary Students", an anarchist organisation established in the previous century.
In the article, which could be considered a declaration of principles, Painlevé preached the "recording of reality", which, added to the imagination of the screenwriter and cinema's techniques of slow motion, accelerated speed and the blur, can create "a surrealist esthetic".
Most of Painlevé's subsequent designs on cinema are gathered in this article, where he affirmed "the superiority of reality", the "extraordinary inventiveness of Nature", over "the artifice" of traditional cinematographical scenes.
Painlevé first came to the cinema as an actor, alongside Michel Simon,[4] and also as assistant director in the René Sti unfinished film L'inconnue des six jours (The Unknown Woman of Six Days), 1926.
Advocating the credo "science is fiction," Painlevé managed to scandalize both the scientific and the cinematographic world with a cinema designed to entertain as well as edify.
He portrayed sea horses, vampire bats, skeleton shrimps, and fanworms as endowed with human traits – the erotic, the comical, and the savage.