By the Lincoln Film Society
During the month of September, the Lincoln Film Society will show a weekly program of films by the great French cinéaste and theorist, Jean Epstein (1897-1953).
A deep discussion of the evolution of French cinema could not afford to leave out the work of Epstein, who emerged onto the youthful front lines as one of its foremost thinkers and makers, one whose incredible legacy is still being pieced together today. Epstein was born in Warsaw, Poland, and grew up in Switzerland. After moving to France for medical school, his first job in film was as secretary to Auguste Lumière, one of the chief architects of the movies. At around the time that he began making his own pictures, in the early 1920s, Epstein also began publishing his theories about filmmaking and storytelling. His earliest known film is a documentary about Louis Pasteur, and his earliest volume (a mixture of poetry, billboard signs and collage), called Bonjour cinéma, appeared in 1921. From the very beginning Epstein wanted to demonstrate, with his films, the ways that narrative simplicity can help the filmmaker recapture tragic grandeur, and can acquaint the audience with the mythic.
He was drawn to simple stories, but rendered them with massive amounts visual invention. One of his first feature films, The Faithful Heart (1923) is spare in terms of story, but full of unconventional flourishes, such as layered images and some improvisatory camera movement, as well as a nascent fascination with the sea. Epstein’s silent films of the 1920s would range from the “poetic realism” of The Beauty From Nivernais (1923), to large-scale exotica with The Lion of the Mogols (1924), to a series chronicling the exploits of a great burglar in The Adventures of Robert Macaire (1925).
Epstein worked for Pathé before striking out on his own, and eventually landed at a studio called Films Albatross, which was owned by Russian emigres. In this new environment, away from standard movie-making practices and with a greater freedom to explore, he also made some of his greatest commercial successes. Ideas flowed freely between Paris and Moscow, and Epstein was able to share his ideas about editing, composition, and architecture with his Soviet counterparts enamored of Eisenstein. While Epstein worked at Albatross, the studio became one of the preeminent successes in France. Many of Epstein’s radical ideas of how cinema could break through its narrative constraints would filter into his films about modern Parisian life. The Double-Love, from 1926, is about the shifting fortunes and loyalties of a compulsive gambler, while 1927’s The Three-Sided Mirror is a delirious portrayal of a womanizing socialite spiraling out of control.
Epstein would adapt Balzac for The Red Inn (1924), and produce a lavish costume drama with Mauprat (1926), after a book that draws on the Gothic novel and chivalric romance. Notably, Epstein’s assistant during the production of Mauprat was Luis Buñuel (the two collaborated again on 1928’s The Fall of the House of Usher), who would go on to regret his tenure with the director as a complete waste of time. In these adaptations Epstein found inspiration and potential for exercising his ideas of heightened visual style. His expressionist take on The Fall of the House of Usher is amazingly creepy, filled with oppressively supernatural atmospheres, and characters illuminated against sacral shadows.
Writing about what attracted him to adapting Poe’s story, Epstein wrote: “What is morbid about this? Is it that knowledge of death that one wishes to be true? Or that profound conception, that unconditional sensibility like that of the medium for the poet, the mother for her son, lovers for one another, that transparency of the grave? The mystery is how that equilibrium comes about which sometimes presents a soul alive, sometimes dead. One thinks at times it’s in the chemistry. The house of Usher enters into its ashen light. There is nothing horrible there.”
The Fall of the House of Usher also marked a turning point in Epstein’s career. Shooting the film on locations in Brittany, Epstein became enamored of that region, and continued to make films there. Influenced by the landscape and people of the storm-ridden coastline, Epstein began a radical shift in his art, taking on an increased degree of documentary, allowing more facets of real life, and in particular the culture of the Breton people, to flow into the films. Finis Terrae (1929) was his first great film done in Brittany, with local people acting out the roles, and in it there is a remarkable texture of real life that would be impossible to replicate in a studio. Besides the profound beauty of the ocean, we truly feel the mythic greatness of the characters’ daily struggles with the elements.
Film essayist and curator Nicole Brenez stresses the continuity between Epstein’s high-energy experimentation of his early days and the lucid, poetic portraits of rural existence on France’s craggy coast. She writes that, “since Jean Epstein’s cinema operates in the field of description, it does not distinguish between fiction and documentary, so that between the 1920s and 1930s, between Parisian modernist essays and modern Breton documentaries, there is no aesthetic break: differences in motifs and speeds appear, of course, but also the same intention of finding, for each film, its own form, away from issues of genre or any type of compliance.” Epstein was constantly looking for ways to further refute story conventions, and found a certain freedom in filming people and places that would not otherwise have appeared in movies at all.
In his late films, those people and places are rendered with depth and detail, and with mesmerizing rhythms that recall times and places that are truly outside of the cinematic tradition. “The formal elements of the Brittany films,” Patrick Friel suggests in the magazine Film Comment, “are entwined with theme and story in a way that is absolute – there is no possibility of teasing them apart.” The films thus achieve that total rupture with functional cinema that Epstein had been working through for much of his career. He brings narrative and description together, to effectively negate one another.
Like many of his inspirations—lighthouse keepers, gamblers, brigands, seaweed gatherers, Edgar Allan Poe—Epstein charted a solitary path, one that led into the cinematic unknown. He himself put it most perfectly in one of his many manifestos:
“Cinema also needs a rear-guard whose inglorious mission is to conquer nothing but to cling to the spot and simply die there.” — Jean Epstein, Naissance d’une académie (1946)
Previously shown in the series: Mauprat and The Fires at Sea (September 2)
Tuesday, September 9 at 7 p.m.
6½ x 11 (Six et demi, onze)
France / 1927 / silent with English intertitles. 83 minutes
From the height of Epstein’s modernism comes 6½ x 11, showing his early preoccupation with the plasticity of the film strip and his disdain for stasis. The sub-title of the film “…a Kodak” refers both to the format onto which this nasty piece of melodrama was rendered, and one of its main plot devices. Wealthy doctor Jérôme makes heart-breaking discoveries regarding the disappearance of his brother Jean years ago, while going through the young man’s personal effects. The clues he finds point him toward his fiance, an entertainer with a patchy history. While Epstein dexterously weaves with time, referring events back to their causal beginnings, he and cinematographer George Périnal (who would go on to film movies for Carol Reed and Michael Powell) also use the camera space to its most metaphorical ends, employing two or even three super-impositions at once—such as layering the faces of the naive couple, their jalopy speeding down the road, and violent waves roiling in a rocky inlet. The cast, including Nino Constantini and Fertet René, as well as the sublime geometries of art director Pierre Kefer, are all familiar from Mauprat.
The Sea of Ravens (Mor’vran)
France / 1931 / silent with English intertitles. 25 minutes
Film preservationist Henri Langlois’ calling The Sea of Ravens “a true poem about Brittany and the sea,” while quite accurate, also masks the grim and grinding way of life depicted within it, and probably refers less to the beauty of the film than the associative structuring that Epstein uses to tension. On the isle of Sein, tragedy happens with monotonous regularity as the ships shove off onto the dark waves, to an even murkier fate. A documentary infused with dramatic flourishes and a social-realist sheen, the film also adds modern touches, such as a roulette wheel spinning, to add grim references to chance on the high seas.
Tuesday, September 16 at 7 p.m.
The Three-Sided Mirror (La Glace À Trois Faces)
France / 1927 / silent with English intertitles. 41 minutes
This delightful comedy of fast living feels too heavy in its themes and visual experimentation to be labeled a farce. Epstein’s interest in transforming the ephemeral into concrete imagery, at times, reaches giddy heights (such as a tracking shot of a telephone line overlaid with visions of the people who are having conversations over it), working alongside his new-found love for the scientific work of the close-up. In The Three-Sided Mirror, a playboy with a fear of commitment divides his time between three women, none of whom know about the others. While Epstein grudgingly went on to integrate sound into his films, his assertion that the eye is the true proprietor of human attention really shows in the ways in which he manages the rest of the senses—most beautifully, hearing—all visually. Music, laughter, and the spring breeze dance across the frame.
The Cradles (Les Berceaux)
France / 1931 / in French with English subtitles. 6 minutes
For this musical short film, set to a poem by Nobel laureate Sully Prudhomme, Epstein returns to his common themes of the harsh life of the Breton sailors, and the peaceful fatalism with which they envisage nature’s cruelty. He viewed cinema as blind to eternity but perfectly suited for documenting the shifting nature of things, and “therefore eminently favorable to the devil’s innovative work.” While preoccupied with beauty, softness, and diaphonous formations floating through air, The Cradles is also a succinct exposition of Epstein’s cinema of transgression, of rupturing with the old to create new forms.
The Song of Ar-Mor (Chanson D’ar-Mor)
France / 1932 / in Breton & French with English subtitles. 43 minutes
Epstein’s musical ode to Brittany and its people is framed by a tale of young love that is doomed by the strictures of tradition. A young man absconds from a seminary to return to lay life in his home village, on the way rekindling a romance with a wealthy, lonely young woman who lives in a castle. Her family rejects him for being poor, and his own family rejects him for leaving school. One lively scene in a traditional village dance sees the star-crossed couple making furtive attempts to get closer, while being stalked by a mentally-disabled “village idiot.” The film’s soundtrack vibrates richly with Breton-language bardic singing, and the luminous cinematography renders the idyllic glades as swirling proscenia, and the rough, deadly ocean an iridescent void.
Tuesday, September 23 at 7 p.m.
The Storm Tamer (La Tempestaire)
France / 1947 / in French with English subtitles. 22 minutes
Filmed on the Breton island of Gerveur (Belle-Île in French), The Storm Tamer adds a degree of magic to the ethnographic fiction developed throughout Epstein’s Brittany period. A young woman, fearing for the life of her fiancé who is out fishing during a storm, consults a “tempestaire” who reputedly has the power to settle the savage winds and deliver fishermen to safety. Like in The Gold of the Sea, the performances of the non-professional actors (local people from the very areas where it was made) give the film an ethereal, somewhat entranced quality, anchoring but also heightening the numinous atmosphere with which nature is imbued.
The Gold of the Sea (L’or des mers)
France / 1932 / in French with English subtitles. 71 minutes
A landmark for the “poetic realism” that would gain prominence in France in the 1930s, and very much in line with the likes of Jean Vigo and René Clair, Epstein’s initial forays into representing Brittany mainly use non-actors in their real-life surroundings to realize what Brenez refers to as “ultra-figurativeness.” The coastal peasants, many of them fishermen and seaweed-harvesters, continually hope for the ocean to give back more than its meager stock. An elderly drunk, who is an outcast of the village, finds just that with a sunken trunk washed ashore in a storm. With his new-found wealth, he finally attracts the respect and attention of his neighbors, and may be able to marry off his socially-awkward daughter, Soizic. Like many of Epstein’s films in this late, realist phase, the pace of The Gold of the Sea is plodding, and at the same time busy with the hard-bitten details of everyday life – the eternal whistle of wind against the stone houses, the intimate crackle of the hearth, the deeply-creased and uninflected faces of the people.