“A film by Nicole Vedrès and Jean Rostand”: the scientist is credited as a full co-author of this unusual collaboration, subtitled Aspects de la biologie française. The film combines quotations from scientific films with new scenes. Three years after Rostand’s appearance in La Vie commence demain, the biologist uses cinema to explore the possibilities of life in the future. Present mostly through his words, after a literary introduction by Vedrès, Rostand considers life and the prospects of human intervention on heredity. After the chemical fertilization of a sea urchin in 1900, and the reproduction without a male of frogs in 1910 and rabbits in 1939, in the year 2000 it should be women’s turn: they “would probably only give birth to girls”.

In addition to Rostand, the film shows the work of Étienne Wolff and Paul Becquerel, who appear on screen. Curiously, Rostand, a pacifist and feminist, refers to Alexis Carrel (as he had already done in La Vie commence demain) without distancing himself at all from the scientist whose theories on eugenics and natalism corresponded to those put into practice by the Third Reich. The film, echoing its title, therefore takes on a strange dystopian tone. But it would be going too far to credit this turn toward science fiction to its editor Alain Resnais, future director of Mon oncle d’Amérique (inspired by the work of neurobiologist Henri Laborit). For the record, Resnais appears in the film wearing a white lab coat, and the hands we see holding two frogs are his.

Bernard Eisenschitz