Long before Jacques Cousteau and Richard Attenborough, a Frenchman named Jean Painlev©♭ made documentaries that captured the natural world in a unique manner. "Science Is Fiction" collects 23 of these short films. Painlev©♭ (1902-89) spent his life straddling the arts and the sciences, studying biology at the Sorbonne, but also hanging out with Man Ray and Luis Bu©łuel. Long fascinated by marine life, Painlev©♭ helped develop the underwater camera, one of the first handheld cameras, and high-magnification lenses that allowed him to observe creatures like sea urchins, jellyfish, and mollusks in their natural habitats. Though relatively obscure in the United States, Jean Painlev©♭'s films embrace genre, combining documentary, educational film, and avant-garde experimentalism to create an aesthetic that captures the fantastic by means of the purely factual.