Jean Epstein, Thirty Years of Solitude?
By Joël Daire
A look back at the life and work of Jean Epstein (1897-1953) can only lead one to question the place he has been given in the history of French cinema. To define him as one of the major auteurs of the cinema avant-garde is neither sufficient, nor even satisfying.
In fact, it doesn't make much sense to refer to the avant-garde as if it were a homogenous category, especially in the context of the 1920s.1 To be convinced of this, one need only compare Epstein's films with those of his contemporaries, and to read what he himself wrote in that era: "Viking Eggeling's 'absolute film' (1919) – movements paced by rather complicated shapes defined geometrically, in white, grey and black – would probably arouse the greatest pleasure in our old avant-garde, now in fact exclusively consisting of writers."2
Epstein chose to keep his distance from a certain tendency toward abstraction accepted by other artists of that era as the only possible way for avant-garde cinema. Eggeling (Symphonie diagonale, 1924) and Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique (1924) naturally come to mind here, but also Hans Richter (Rhythmus 21, 1921), Marcel Duchamp (Anémic Cinema, 1926), Henri Chomette (Cinq Minutes de cinéma pur, 1925) and Eugène Deslaw (La Marche des machines, 1928).
Epstein was as suspicious of attempts at a surrealist cinema as he was of abstraction, and probably for the same reasons: the fear of seeing cinema cut itself off from a part of its audience, limiting itself to a ghetto by no longer placing the human at the centre of the experience. The provocative aspects of films like La Coquille et le Clergyman (Germaine Dulac and Antonin Artaud, 1927) and Un chien andalou (by his ex-assistant Luis Buñuel, 1928) were foreign to Epstein's creative world. He wasn't a part of this avant-garde which he saw as too radical.3
Only cinema allows us to master space and time
Epstein also didn't identify with the followers of the more naturalist, even social or political vein that would lure filmmakers such as Alberto Cavalcanti, who in 1926 took a touchingly simple approach to film the working people of Paris in the beautiful Rien que les heures, an urban cine-poem that achieves an improbable balance between documentary film and stylistic exercise. But Cavalcanti believed that space and time are beyond our grasp, while Epstein the "lyrosopher"4 believed that only cinema allows us to master them. The following year, Walter Ruttmann made Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, a landmark city symphony. Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and the Belgian Henri Storck were already imperceptibly steering cinema back in the direction of the documentary essay with their respective films Regen (1929) and Images d'Ostende (1929), while Jean Vigo (À propos de Nice, 1930) was moving it toward social satire. Epstein would also evade these paths.
The filmmaker's trajectory in the 1920s followed more nuanced and perhaps solitary avenues instead. Could he have suffered from an excess of prudence or moderation? That's a daring hypothesis when discussing an artist who defined himself as intransigent. In his text "Ciné mystique"5 he wrote: "Intransigent is what I want to be. Without story, hygiene, or pedagogy, the cinema-marvel describes man one bit at a time. Only that; all the rest you couldn't care less about." With this programmatic approach, Epstein expressed the will to emancipate cinema from literature, theatre, the artifice of manufactured screenplays, stucco sets and affected actors. There is also the will here to consider the cinematic spectacle as an unprecedented experiment in which the mobility of the "time" variable becomes as important as that of the "space" variable. Working at Pathé Consortium as of 1923, Epstein endeavoured to impose this new conception of cinema through the films L'Auberge rouge (1923), Cœur fidèle (1923) and La Belle Nivernaise (1923). His references were the films of Louis Delluc (Le Silence [1920], Fièvre [1921]), Germaine Dulac (La Fête espagnole [1920], La Belle Dame sans Merci [1921]), Abel Gance (La Dixième Symphonie [1918], J'accuse [1919], La Roue [1923]) and Marcel L'Herbier (L'Homme du large [1920], El Dorado [1921]). This avant-garde, referred to as "narrative"6 to distinguish it from the "abstract" avant-garde, was the one with which Epstein identified.
Time to say goodbye to overwritten screenplays, manufactured sets and professional actors
But how could one remain "intransigent" and collaborate with Studio Albatros, as Epstein started doing in 1924? While I won't claim that Epstein compromised his principles, as some of his contemporary critics did, there's no doubt that he agreed to make compromises, both in his films and in his writing. Witness what he wrote in Le cinématographe vu de l'Etna7: "Indeed, an art's best friends always wind up stubbornly insisting on their principles. And with art in its transformation at every moment outstepping its rules, yesterday's best friends become tomorrow's worst enemies, fanatics of worn-out processes. This continual reversal of friendships characterises each step of every artform's evolution. Which explains how finally – finally but a little too late – a few processes of cinematic expression considered strange and suspect just one year ago have today become fashionable. Fashion has always signalled the end of a style."
This explains why Epstein left Albatros in 1926 and decided to create his own production company, les Films Jean Epstein, with which he produced and directed Mauprat (1926), Six et demi, onze [1926], La Glace à trois faces (1927) and La Chute de la maison Usher (1928). Masterpieces all and lauded by the critics, they propelled him into economic disaster nonetheless. Epstein filed for bankruptcy in the summer of 1928.
However, the crisis of doubt that Epstein experienced while making USHER wasn't exclusively or even principally due to his company's financial collapse. He was more aware that he hadn't fully carried out the "intransigent" programme set out in his book-length manifesto Bonjour cinéma (1920). At the age of thirty, he decided to cut whatever ties still tethered his cinema to the ground. La Chute de la maison Usher is a synthesis of his first creative period, his masterpiece as an artisan-filmmaker, but also his farewell to what he saw as an obsolete form of cinema. The fire that engulfs the House of Usher symbolically marked this rupture: it was time to say goodbye to overwritten screenplays, manufactured sets and professional actors.
"Acting isn't living. One must be."
The step Epstein took by making Finis Terrae (1929) on Ushant Island was an authentically radical and emancipatory one, which would nourish his own films until the end and be a source of inspiration for many other filmmakers. The form he defined by the expression "film de nature" ["film from nature"] in the 1930s, and which had been brewing in him as far back as the early 1920s, is in fact a common thread running through his entire body of work from Pasteur (1922) to Les Feux de la mer (1948). In the newspaper L'Ami du peuple, he stated loud and clear that Finis Terrae was a new beginning and a second wind: "And I wouldn't want this film featuring natural performance to be considered like an exception, the application of a kind of process, or a trick that quickly wears thin. I believe that on the contrary one will increasingly have to call on such natural performers, in every country, in every class of society, in every profession; that one will have to use natural settings, real scenarios, authentic atmospheres, which the screen will transplant."8 Epstein had announced what came to pass in the manifesto film Finis Terrae as early as his first writings. Consider this prophecy in "Ciné mystique": "There will be no more actors, but men scrupulously alive. The gesture may be beautiful, but the bud of thought from which it issues is more important (…). Acting isn't living. One must be."9
The film from nature is an autonomous form
Despite the various texts and articles Epstein published from 1928 onwards to illustrate his concept of the "film from nature",10 the filmmaker was generally misunderstood, including by some of his closest friends, such Jean Benoit-Lévy. In his book Les grandes missions du cinéma,11 Benoit-Lévy devoted a chapter to what he calls the "film from life." He defines it as follows: "What are correctly referred to as documentary films are those that reproduce life in all its manifestations: the life of man, the life of animals, the life of nature, without recourse to professionals actors or studios and on condition that the film constitutes a free artistic creation. If one accepts this definition, one will be led to call this genre 'films from life'." In Benoit-Lévy's view, Robert J. Flaherty had fathered this genre with his films Nanook of the North (1921), Moana (1926) and Man of Aran (1934). Benoit-Lévy also suggests that Epstein was directly inspired by Flaherty to make Finis Terrae and Mor'vran, la mer des corbeaux [1930]. Epstein was never reluctant to proclaim his cinematic influences and admirations, but he never said a word about Flaherty. It's likely he had an opportunity to see the American filmmaker's first films. Yet the elements said to define the "film from nature", present as of 1920/1921 in Epstein's first writings, then in his first films,12 are free of Flaherty's realist or naturalist preoccupations. Though apparently similar, the notions of "film from nature" (Epstein) and "film from life" (Benoit-Lévy) don't truly overlap. According to Epstein, the film from nature is an autonomous form that is achieved in the world of fiction as easily and perhaps even more surely than in that of documentary, as evidenced by films like L'Or des mers (1932), Chanson d'Ar-Mor (1934) and Le Tempestaire (1947). Above all, the "film from nature" was for Epstein a cinematic ideal, a poetic quest he pursued his whole life, tentatively initiated, subsequently altered and ultimately coming to full fruition in stages ranging from 1928 to 1948. Those years aligned with a professional and creative arc that was increasingly chaotic, solitary and misunderstood, but powerfully coherent and inimitably original.
Those stars whose light we only perceive once they no longer exist
In the summer of 1949, when the Objectif 49 group (consisting of André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and the cream of young critics and the future New Wave) organised the Festival du Film Maudit (The Festival of Outcast Film) in Biarritz, its programme's most glaring omission was Jean Epstein (along with Abel Gance), particularly given that those who were featured included Jean Grémillon, René Clair and even Jean Renoir, all of whom far less "outcast" than Epstein. For many at the time, Epstein represented the past, not the future of French film.
The future was embodied by a thirty-two-year-old ethnologist, Jean Rouch, whose film Initiation à la danse des possédés, produced in Niger in 1948, won the Grand Prix at the festival in Biarritz. What the festival organizers didn't know was that when Rouch boarded for Africa, he had slipped a single book into his suitcase: Jean Epstein's L'Intelligence d'une machine. Considered the father of ethno-fiction, Jean Rouch never stopped asserting the influence of Epstein's work on his own films, particularly Finis Terrae and Le Tempestaire. Many others from subsequent generations have been inspired by Epstein's writings or films. They range from Philippe Grandrieux to Othello Vilgard, and from Bruno Dumont to Philippe Cote. These later filmmakers seem to prove the point Abel Gance made when he prophesised: "Like those stars whose light we only perceive once they no longer exist, the radioactivity of Jean Epstein's books will only reach the eyes of people's hearts in many years; allow me to predict that they will serve as a Bible to the young filmmakers of future generations."13
Joël Daire is Director of Film Heritage at the Cinémathèque Française. He also conducts research on French cinema of the 1920s, particularly the work of Louis Delluc, Abel Gance, Jacques Feyder and Jean Epstein, to whom he has dedicated a biography (Jean Epstein, une vie pour le cinéma, La tour verte, 2014) and whose complete works he is co-editing for Les éditions de l'oeil. He teaches at Paris-Cité University and the University of Metz.
(Translation from the French by Nicholas Elliott)
1 On the question of Epstein's relationship with the avant-garde, see Nicole Brenez's beautiful text, "Ultra-moderne. Jean Epstein contre l'avant-garde (repérage sur les valeurs figuratives)" in Jean Epstein, cinéaste, poète, philosophe (Paris: La Cinémathèque française, Collège d'Histoire de l'art cinématographique, 1997), p 205.
2 "L'objectif lui-même," in Jean Epstein, Écrits complets, Volume II, (Paris, Editions de l'œil, 2019) pp.240-243.
3 On the relation to Man Ray's images in Epstein's films, see Dominique Païni, "Epstein, Man Ray: l'histoire d'un déni," in Jean Epstein, cinéaste, poète, philosophe (Paris: La Cinémathèque française, Collège d'Histoire de l'art cinématographique, 1997), p. 149.
4 La Lyrosophie was the title of one of Epstein's first books, published in 1922 by Éditions de La Sirène.
5 Published in Bonjour Cinéma (Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1921), p. 111, translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott.
6 The German critic Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) appears to have been the first to use this notion in the field of cinema. See Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York : Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 179.
7 Jean Epstein, Le cinématographe vu de l'Etna (Paris: Les Écrivains réunis, 1926), p. 55, translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott.
8 "Nos lions", in Jean Epstein, Écrits complets, Volume IV (Paris: Éditions de l'œil, 2022), p.56, translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott.
9 In Bonjour Cinéma, p. 112, translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott.
10 See in particular "Films de nature" and "Photogénie de l'impondérable" in Jean Epstein, Écrits complets, volume III (Paris: Independencia Editions, 2014), p 173.
11 Jean Benoit-Lévy, Les grandes missions du cinéma (Montreal: Parizeau, 1945), quote translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott.
12 See in particular Pasteur (1922), which was in fact produced by Benoit-Lévy.
13 From a tribute to Jean Epstein delivered by Abel Gance shortly after his death on April 2, 1953, at the Cannes Film Festival (April 15 to 29, 1953), and published in Cahiers du cinéma no. 24, June 1953.
<< Back to the program Jean Epstein
A look back at the life and work of Jean Epstein (1897-1953) can only lead one to question the place he has been given in the history of French cinema. To define him as one of the major auteurs of the cinema avant-garde is neither sufficient, nor even satisfying.
In fact, it doesn't make much sense to refer to the avant-garde as if it were a homogenous category, especially in the context of the 1920s.1 To be convinced of this, one need only compare Epstein's films with those of his contemporaries, and to read what he himself wrote in that era: "Viking Eggeling's 'absolute film' (1919) – movements paced by rather complicated shapes defined geometrically, in white, grey and black – would probably arouse the greatest pleasure in our old avant-garde, now in fact exclusively consisting of writers."2
Epstein chose to keep his distance from a certain tendency toward abstraction accepted by other artists of that era as the only possible way for avant-garde cinema. Eggeling (Symphonie diagonale, 1924) and Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique (1924) naturally come to mind here, but also Hans Richter (Rhythmus 21, 1921), Marcel Duchamp (Anémic Cinema, 1926), Henri Chomette (Cinq Minutes de cinéma pur, 1925) and Eugène Deslaw (La Marche des machines, 1928).
Epstein was as suspicious of attempts at a surrealist cinema as he was of abstraction, and probably for the same reasons: the fear of seeing cinema cut itself off from a part of its audience, limiting itself to a ghetto by no longer placing the human at the centre of the experience. The provocative aspects of films like La Coquille et le Clergyman (Germaine Dulac and Antonin Artaud, 1927) and Un chien andalou (by his ex-assistant Luis Buñuel, 1928) were foreign to Epstein's creative world. He wasn't a part of this avant-garde which he saw as too radical.3
Only cinema allows us to master space and time
Epstein also didn't identify with the followers of the more naturalist, even social or political vein that would lure filmmakers such as Alberto Cavalcanti, who in 1926 took a touchingly simple approach to film the working people of Paris in the beautiful Rien que les heures, an urban cine-poem that achieves an improbable balance between documentary film and stylistic exercise. But Cavalcanti believed that space and time are beyond our grasp, while Epstein the "lyrosopher"4 believed that only cinema allows us to master them. The following year, Walter Ruttmann made Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, a landmark city symphony. Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and the Belgian Henri Storck were already imperceptibly steering cinema back in the direction of the documentary essay with their respective films Regen (1929) and Images d'Ostende (1929), while Jean Vigo (À propos de Nice, 1930) was moving it toward social satire. Epstein would also evade these paths.
The filmmaker's trajectory in the 1920s followed more nuanced and perhaps solitary avenues instead. Could he have suffered from an excess of prudence or moderation? That's a daring hypothesis when discussing an artist who defined himself as intransigent. In his text "Ciné mystique"5 he wrote: "Intransigent is what I want to be. Without story, hygiene, or pedagogy, the cinema-marvel describes man one bit at a time. Only that; all the rest you couldn't care less about." With this programmatic approach, Epstein expressed the will to emancipate cinema from literature, theatre, the artifice of manufactured screenplays, stucco sets and affected actors. There is also the will here to consider the cinematic spectacle as an unprecedented experiment in which the mobility of the "time" variable becomes as important as that of the "space" variable. Working at Pathé Consortium as of 1923, Epstein endeavoured to impose this new conception of cinema through the films L'Auberge rouge (1923), Cœur fidèle (1923) and La Belle Nivernaise (1923). His references were the films of Louis Delluc (Le Silence [1920], Fièvre [1921]), Germaine Dulac (La Fête espagnole [1920], La Belle Dame sans Merci [1921]), Abel Gance (La Dixième Symphonie [1918], J'accuse [1919], La Roue [1923]) and Marcel L'Herbier (L'Homme du large [1920], El Dorado [1921]). This avant-garde, referred to as "narrative"6 to distinguish it from the "abstract" avant-garde, was the one with which Epstein identified.
Time to say goodbye to overwritten screenplays, manufactured sets and professional actors
But how could one remain "intransigent" and collaborate with Studio Albatros, as Epstein started doing in 1924? While I won't claim that Epstein compromised his principles, as some of his contemporary critics did, there's no doubt that he agreed to make compromises, both in his films and in his writing. Witness what he wrote in Le cinématographe vu de l'Etna7: "Indeed, an art's best friends always wind up stubbornly insisting on their principles. And with art in its transformation at every moment outstepping its rules, yesterday's best friends become tomorrow's worst enemies, fanatics of worn-out processes. This continual reversal of friendships characterises each step of every artform's evolution. Which explains how finally – finally but a little too late – a few processes of cinematic expression considered strange and suspect just one year ago have today become fashionable. Fashion has always signalled the end of a style."
This explains why Epstein left Albatros in 1926 and decided to create his own production company, les Films Jean Epstein, with which he produced and directed Mauprat (1926), Six et demi, onze [1926], La Glace à trois faces (1927) and La Chute de la maison Usher (1928). Masterpieces all and lauded by the critics, they propelled him into economic disaster nonetheless. Epstein filed for bankruptcy in the summer of 1928.
However, the crisis of doubt that Epstein experienced while making USHER wasn't exclusively or even principally due to his company's financial collapse. He was more aware that he hadn't fully carried out the "intransigent" programme set out in his book-length manifesto Bonjour cinéma (1920). At the age of thirty, he decided to cut whatever ties still tethered his cinema to the ground. La Chute de la maison Usher is a synthesis of his first creative period, his masterpiece as an artisan-filmmaker, but also his farewell to what he saw as an obsolete form of cinema. The fire that engulfs the House of Usher symbolically marked this rupture: it was time to say goodbye to overwritten screenplays, manufactured sets and professional actors.
"Acting isn't living. One must be."
The step Epstein took by making Finis Terrae (1929) on Ushant Island was an authentically radical and emancipatory one, which would nourish his own films until the end and be a source of inspiration for many other filmmakers. The form he defined by the expression "film de nature" ["film from nature"] in the 1930s, and which had been brewing in him as far back as the early 1920s, is in fact a common thread running through his entire body of work from Pasteur (1922) to Les Feux de la mer (1948). In the newspaper L'Ami du peuple, he stated loud and clear that Finis Terrae was a new beginning and a second wind: "And I wouldn't want this film featuring natural performance to be considered like an exception, the application of a kind of process, or a trick that quickly wears thin. I believe that on the contrary one will increasingly have to call on such natural performers, in every country, in every class of society, in every profession; that one will have to use natural settings, real scenarios, authentic atmospheres, which the screen will transplant."8 Epstein had announced what came to pass in the manifesto film Finis Terrae as early as his first writings. Consider this prophecy in "Ciné mystique": "There will be no more actors, but men scrupulously alive. The gesture may be beautiful, but the bud of thought from which it issues is more important (…). Acting isn't living. One must be."9
The film from nature is an autonomous form
Despite the various texts and articles Epstein published from 1928 onwards to illustrate his concept of the "film from nature",10 the filmmaker was generally misunderstood, including by some of his closest friends, such Jean Benoit-Lévy. In his book Les grandes missions du cinéma,11 Benoit-Lévy devoted a chapter to what he calls the "film from life." He defines it as follows: "What are correctly referred to as documentary films are those that reproduce life in all its manifestations: the life of man, the life of animals, the life of nature, without recourse to professionals actors or studios and on condition that the film constitutes a free artistic creation. If one accepts this definition, one will be led to call this genre 'films from life'." In Benoit-Lévy's view, Robert J. Flaherty had fathered this genre with his films Nanook of the North (1921), Moana (1926) and Man of Aran (1934). Benoit-Lévy also suggests that Epstein was directly inspired by Flaherty to make Finis Terrae and Mor'vran, la mer des corbeaux [1930]. Epstein was never reluctant to proclaim his cinematic influences and admirations, but he never said a word about Flaherty. It's likely he had an opportunity to see the American filmmaker's first films. Yet the elements said to define the "film from nature", present as of 1920/1921 in Epstein's first writings, then in his first films,12 are free of Flaherty's realist or naturalist preoccupations. Though apparently similar, the notions of "film from nature" (Epstein) and "film from life" (Benoit-Lévy) don't truly overlap. According to Epstein, the film from nature is an autonomous form that is achieved in the world of fiction as easily and perhaps even more surely than in that of documentary, as evidenced by films like L'Or des mers (1932), Chanson d'Ar-Mor (1934) and Le Tempestaire (1947). Above all, the "film from nature" was for Epstein a cinematic ideal, a poetic quest he pursued his whole life, tentatively initiated, subsequently altered and ultimately coming to full fruition in stages ranging from 1928 to 1948. Those years aligned with a professional and creative arc that was increasingly chaotic, solitary and misunderstood, but powerfully coherent and inimitably original.
Those stars whose light we only perceive once they no longer exist
In the summer of 1949, when the Objectif 49 group (consisting of André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and the cream of young critics and the future New Wave) organised the Festival du Film Maudit (The Festival of Outcast Film) in Biarritz, its programme's most glaring omission was Jean Epstein (along with Abel Gance), particularly given that those who were featured included Jean Grémillon, René Clair and even Jean Renoir, all of whom far less "outcast" than Epstein. For many at the time, Epstein represented the past, not the future of French film.
The future was embodied by a thirty-two-year-old ethnologist, Jean Rouch, whose film Initiation à la danse des possédés, produced in Niger in 1948, won the Grand Prix at the festival in Biarritz. What the festival organizers didn't know was that when Rouch boarded for Africa, he had slipped a single book into his suitcase: Jean Epstein's L'Intelligence d'une machine. Considered the father of ethno-fiction, Jean Rouch never stopped asserting the influence of Epstein's work on his own films, particularly Finis Terrae and Le Tempestaire. Many others from subsequent generations have been inspired by Epstein's writings or films. They range from Philippe Grandrieux to Othello Vilgard, and from Bruno Dumont to Philippe Cote. These later filmmakers seem to prove the point Abel Gance made when he prophesised: "Like those stars whose light we only perceive once they no longer exist, the radioactivity of Jean Epstein's books will only reach the eyes of people's hearts in many years; allow me to predict that they will serve as a Bible to the young filmmakers of future generations."13
Joël Daire is Director of Film Heritage at the Cinémathèque Française. He also conducts research on French cinema of the 1920s, particularly the work of Louis Delluc, Abel Gance, Jacques Feyder and Jean Epstein, to whom he has dedicated a biography (Jean Epstein, une vie pour le cinéma, La tour verte, 2014) and whose complete works he is co-editing for Les éditions de l'oeil. He teaches at Paris-Cité University and the University of Metz.
(Translation from the French by Nicholas Elliott)
1 On the question of Epstein's relationship with the avant-garde, see Nicole Brenez's beautiful text, "Ultra-moderne. Jean Epstein contre l'avant-garde (repérage sur les valeurs figuratives)" in Jean Epstein, cinéaste, poète, philosophe (Paris: La Cinémathèque française, Collège d'Histoire de l'art cinématographique, 1997), p 205.
2 "L'objectif lui-même," in Jean Epstein, Écrits complets, Volume II, (Paris, Editions de l'œil, 2019) pp.240-243.
3 On the relation to Man Ray's images in Epstein's films, see Dominique Païni, "Epstein, Man Ray: l'histoire d'un déni," in Jean Epstein, cinéaste, poète, philosophe (Paris: La Cinémathèque française, Collège d'Histoire de l'art cinématographique, 1997), p. 149.
4 La Lyrosophie was the title of one of Epstein's first books, published in 1922 by Éditions de La Sirène.
5 Published in Bonjour Cinéma (Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1921), p. 111, translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott.
6 The German critic Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) appears to have been the first to use this notion in the field of cinema. See Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York : Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 179.
7 Jean Epstein, Le cinématographe vu de l'Etna (Paris: Les Écrivains réunis, 1926), p. 55, translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott.
8 "Nos lions", in Jean Epstein, Écrits complets, Volume IV (Paris: Éditions de l'œil, 2022), p.56, translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott.
9 In Bonjour Cinéma, p. 112, translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott.
10 See in particular "Films de nature" and "Photogénie de l'impondérable" in Jean Epstein, Écrits complets, volume III (Paris: Independencia Editions, 2014), p 173.
11 Jean Benoit-Lévy, Les grandes missions du cinéma (Montreal: Parizeau, 1945), quote translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott.
12 See in particular Pasteur (1922), which was in fact produced by Benoit-Lévy.
13 From a tribute to Jean Epstein delivered by Abel Gance shortly after his death on April 2, 1953, at the Cannes Film Festival (April 15 to 29, 1953), and published in Cahiers du cinéma no. 24, June 1953.
<< Back to the program Jean Epstein