Jean Epstein

Biography: life and films

The Forgotten Genius

Until a decade ago, Jean Epstein was all but forgotten, a name that was too easily omitted from discussions of those who did most to shape the art of cinema in its early decades. If he was known at all it was most likely for his breathtakingly weird interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, made in the dying days of silent cinema. As late as the year 2000, this was just about the only film Epstein made that was widely available, the bulk of his work being in too poor a condition to be shown in cinemas or else prevented from being released on video and DVD because of intractable disputes over rights ownership. Even for those with a serious interest in film history, Epstein has been a tricky director to come to grips with. How is it possible to judge an artist and assess his worth when the majority of his artistic output is hidden from view? Now, sixty years after his death, and not before time, things are changing. Every important film that this unjustly overlooked filmmaker made has been restored and is now available on DVD or Blu-ray, and as a result there has been a considerable reawakening of interest in this forgotten master of the seventh art.

Epstein wasn't only a superlative filmmaker he was also an extremely gifted writer, and it is through a series of scholarly yet thoroughly readable essays that he developed his radical and far-reaching ideas about film art. He was barely 20 before he awoke to the artistic possibilities of cinema and once these ideas had lodged themselves in his cranium he refused to let them go. So convinced was he that cinema is the most potent of the arts that Epstein devoted his life to demonstrating this fact, rejecting both conformity and comfort in pursuit of his single-minded goal. Like Roderick Usher in his Poe adaptation, he was a man obsessed with capturing the essence of life in his art, so that ultimately his art would become more real than life itself. Unlike the accursed Roderick, Epstein would never free himself from the demonic lure of his art - it would devour him, smother him and ultimately drive him to obscurity, making him a forgotten prophet in his own lifetime. But true greatness never dies. It merely sleeps. Now it awakes...

Jean Epstein was born in Warsaw, Poland, on 26th March 1897, to a French father and a Polish mother. His sister Marie, who co-scripted some of his films and played a crucial role in preserving his legacy, was born two years later. When his father died in 1907, the family moved to Switzerland, where the young Jean attended a college in Fribourg. The wildly independent young man was hardly a model student and after he had passed his baccalaureate the family settled in Lyon, where Jean enrolled at the École Centrale to follow his father's profession as an engineer. Finding he had more interest in biology than mathematics, Epstein gave up this plan and instead studied for a doctorate in medicine.

By now, our subject was a committed cinephile who devoured films voraciously in his spare time. It was whilst he was at Lyon University that he met Auguste Lumière, who, along with his brother Louis, is credited with the invention of cinema. He worked for Lumière as a translator and was surprised to discover that he considered cinema to be a passing fad with no future. Epstein was convinced otherwise and he had started developing his own theories about poetry and the seventh art. His first essay - La Poésie d'aujourd'hui, un nouvel état d'intelligence - was on contemporary literature and it brought him into contact with Blaise Cendrars, a high profile poet of the period who would greatly influence his thinking. It was with the help of Cendrars that Epstein's first essay was published by La Sirène in 1921.

Abandoning his medical degree, Jean accepted a job as secretary at La Sirène's offices in Paris, and now found he had ample time to develop his ideas about literature and cinema in his writing. He published two important essays - Bonjour cinéma (1921) and La Lyrosophie (1922) - the latter of which propounded the guiding principle of his subsequent art, namely that emotion and intelligence are equally essential for a full appreciation of the world. He was now convinced that cinema was the most potent form of poetry, and the film camera the ideal machine for him to explore his philosophical ideas linking the mind and the heart.

An Experimenter in Impressionism

At the age of 24, Epstein had already begun to be noticed. His published essays led him to become associated with other freethinking artists of the time that collectively came to be known as the Avant-Garde. These included the poet Jean Cocteau, the painter Fernand Léger and established filmmakers Abel Gance, Marcel L'Herbier and Germaine Dulac. It was the work of the latter group - exponents of film impressionism - that Jean was most drawn to. Their philosophy, that film was a medium through which visual impressions are a means to revealing deeper sensations, chimed with his own ideas.

Superimposition, montage, exaggerated close-ups, lighting effects, slowing down or speeding up the film - these were the impressionistic techniques that Epstein would later adopt for his own films, along with influences from German expressionism and Scandinavian cinema. Photogénie was a term that he was fond of, his idea that the moving image could, through some special alchemy arising from the interaction of the camera lens and the consciousness of both the filmmaker and the spectator, preserve the fleeting essence of life. According to the Epsteinian view, cinema has a quality that all other arts lacked - an ability to show us the true nature of reality by virtue of the fact that it is the only art that allows the artist to play with all four of the dimensions of which our universe is composed. He summed up his thesis with the mystical assertion that, one day, the camera would photograph the human angel.

It so happened that one of the founders of the publishing house La Sirène was Paul Laffitte, a man with an active interest in cinema. It was through Laffitte that Epstein met Louis Delluc, a filmmaker he had come to admire. Impressed by the young cinephile's enthusiasm, Delluc gave him the opportunity to work as an assistant on one of his short films - Le Tonnerre (1922). The assignment was not an enjoyable one since Delluc's sole preoccupation appeared to be the script. Paul Laffitte later introduced him to Jean Benoît-Lévy, a film producer and director who specialised in educational films. To mark the centenary of the birth of Louis Pasteur, Benoît-Lévy had been commissioned to make a drama-documentary, Pasteur (1923), and he was happy to share the directing duties on this film with Epstein. Again, the budding auteur was far from satisfied with this experience. Since the film's production was controlled by a committee that was fixated on honouring the memory of a great man of science, he found he had next to no artistic freedom and once more came away thoroughly disenchanted.

The 25-year-old debutant filmmaker may not have considered Pasteur a personal success but the film was sufficiently well appreciated by Pathé, one of the leading film companies in France, for them to offer him a ten year contract. At the time, Pathé had a policy of giving talented young filmmakers free rein to express themselves, without being too limited by the commercial constraints. Over the next two years, Epstein thrived in this laissez-faire environment and made four films, two of which - Coeur fidèle (1923) and La Belle Nivernaise (1924) - are considered to be among his best work. One of the crowning glories of French impressionism of the 1920s, Coeur fidèle is most memorable for its vertiginous fairground sequence, which uses rhythmic montage (previously employed by Abel Gance on La Roue) brilliantly to express the heightened feelings of the protagonists. This was one of the films of which Epstein was most proud but it was badly received in some quarters and caused a scandal when some screenings were disrupted by violent outbursts. La Belle Nivernaise is the first of the director's films in which his profound love of nature is apparent - it foreshadows both Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934) and his own later Breton films with its tender fusion of lyricism and naturalism.

A Brush With Commercial Cinema

By 1924, Pathé had run into severe financial difficulties and was forced into merging with another company, Cinéromans. The freedom that had been extended to the company's most gifted directors was now withdrawn and Epstein found himself on a commercial treadmill. After he fell out of favour with his bosses on his next film, La Goutte de sang (1924), his contract was terminated by mutual agreement and another director was assigned to complete the film. He was soon on the payroll of another prestigious company, Les Films de l'Albatros, which offered him more freedom than he could now hope to find at Pathé. Although the company's top honcho, Alexandre Kamenka, was sympathetic to his star directors' need for creative leeway Epstein soon became frustrated with the choice of subjects that came his way - crowdpleasers comprising melodramas and historical adventure films. He made four films for Albatros - Le Lion des Mogols (1924), Le Double amour (1924), L'Affiche (1925) and Les Aventures de Robert Macaire (1925) - before throwing in the towel.

The Independent Filmmaker

By now Epstein had had his fill of commercial cinema and was determined to strike out on his own as an independent filmmaker so that he would be free to experiment with his theories of cinema. He established his own film production company in 1926 - Les Films de Jean Epstein - but began by making a conventional period piece, Mauprat, that would be sure to rake in enough money to offset the cost of his subsequent experimental ventures. Buoyed up by the success of Mauprat, the director then made three films that combined melodrama and impressionism so imaginatively and stylishly that, together, they represent one of the pinnacles 1920s French cinema - Six et demi, onze (1927), La Glace à trois faces (1927) and La Chute de la maison Usher (1928). With its wildly inventive visuals that combine expressionistic sets and impressionistic effects, the director's adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's famous tale was bound to be his most widely seen film. It is also one of his most sublime works, although it came too late (just as the talkies were taking over from silent films) to be a commercial success.

The Call of Brittany

La Chute de la maison Usher may not have saved his company from insolvency but it was hailed by the critics and reaffirmed Epstein's standing as one of giants of the French Avant-Garde. For its author it was merely an artistic dead end. He had taken his ideas about cinema art as far as he could within the confines of the conventional way of making films and yet he still longed to go further. So, artistically frustrated, physically worn out and up to his bloodshot eyeballs in debt, the director decided to take a short holiday in Brittany. What came next was a revelation. Within a few days he was in the grips of an amour fou, madly in love with the region - its people as much as its rugged landscape. This, he decided, would be the setting for his next film, Finis terrae (1929), and once he had found a backer he would return with a minuscule crew to film the first of his Bretons poèmes. It was the beginning of the final and most liberating phase of Epstein's career. Is it a coincidence that Finis terrae is the film in which the director's homosexuality is most apparent - through the strong homoerotic bond between the two main characters? When he was once asked why he felt compelled to make films in Brittany in the most perillous of conditions, the director had a ready reply: a fear of the sea.

At this time, Epstein was pretty unique in turning his back on the studio system and setting out to make films on a shoestring budget with non-professional actors in real, often hard to-get-to locations. Yet so strong was the impulse of working in Brittany that the 32 year old filmmaker couldn't resist returning to the region, to its remote, sparsely populated islands (Ushant, Sein, Bannec, Hoëdic), to make films that are neither documentaries nor dramas, but some indefinable enchanting mix of the two. After Finis terrae, there came Mor vran (1931), L'Or des mers (1932) and Chanson d'Armor (1934) - each one a captivating cinematic jewel that captures the soul of Brittany and stirs something deep within the heart of anyone who watches it.

Like many directors of his generation, Epstein had some difficulty with the migration from silent to sound cinema, although this was helped through his association with a company, Synchro-Ciné, which had been preparing for the transition since the early 1920s. After he had made a short documentary on Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris for them, the company invited him to direct a series of chansons filmées, short films that combined songs and images, the best examples being Les Berceaux (1931) and Le Cor (1932). Synchro-Ciné also financed his next Breton feature, L'Or des mers, although their work on the soundtrack did little for the film's credibility and it was a commercial failure. Throughout the 1930s, Epstein had a hard time finding financial support for the projects he wanted to undertake in Brittany, and for most of the decade he had to content himself with commissions, which he tackled diligently but with no great enthusiasm - films such as L'Homme à l'Hispano (1933) and La Femme du bout du monde (1938).

A Great Career Halted

The outbreak of World War II brought a sudden halt to Epstein's filmmaking career. With France under Nazi occupation, the director was forbidden from working in cinema just because he happened to have a Jewish-sounding name. Had he wished it, he could have applied for a certificate affirming he was neither Polish nor a Jew, but he refused to do so and suffered the consequences. For the duration of the Occupation, he was confined to an office, doing clerical work for the Red Cross. Jean's fears that he and his sister might be deported appeared to have been justified one day when he was arrested by the Gestapo. After being subjected to the humiliation of an examination to see if he had been circumcised, he was set free, but continued to live in fear until the Liberation. During the war, the director's name was taken off all prints of his films in circulation and he was deprived any earnings from the showing of his films. Fortunately, he had a friend in Henri Langlois, director of the Cinémathèque française - if he had not taken the trouble to hide the negatives and prints of Epstein's films some would no doubt have been lost to posterity.

After the war, Epstein immediately resumed his writing career and published two important essays - L'Intelligence d'une machine (1946) and Le Cinéma du diable (1947) - in which he further developed his theories about cinema, in particular the way the art allows its representation of time to be manipulated (accelerated, decelerated, even sent in reverse) to create new perspectives on the nature of reality. No one seemed to be willing to back the film that the director was now desperate to make, one inspired by a popular Breton legend about a strange race of men who have the power to tame storms. It was thanks to Nino Costantini, an actor in his earlier silent films, that Epstein was finally able to realise this dream and conclude his series of Breton poems with his most beguiling work, Le Tempestaire (1947). This was the one occasion where the director was able to fully marry sound and image and create a truly original work of cinema - his last great achievement.

Epstein's ardent wish to return to Ushant, the location of his first Breton film Finis terrae, then came when he was offered a commission to direct an educational documentary about lighthouses as part of a series of films conceived by the United Nations. Les Feux de la mer (1948) was to be the director's last film, although, seriously ill at the time and working to a very restricting brief, he struggled to impose his unique signature on it. Over the next five years, Epstein continued writing about cinema, although his hopes of making further films were not to be fulfilled. By now, virtually forgotten by his profession, he faded from sight and no more was heard of him until he died in Paris on 2nd April 1953, succumbing to a brain haemorrhage at the age of 55.

Resurrection and Recognition

Epstein's passing was marked at that year's Cannes Film Festival, with warm tributes from his former Avant-Garde associates Jean Cocteau and Abel Gance. Despite various sporadic attempts to reawaken interest in his work by Henri Langlois and other fervent admirers of his work, Epstein remained almost completely overlooked for the six decades after his death. It is only since a large body of the director's work has been restored (mostly through the work of the Cinémathèque française) and made available on DVD in the last few years that his standing as one of the foremost visionaries of film art has started to gain currency.

Not just a talented innovator and shining example of the film auteur, Epstein was one of the few practitioners of his art to realise its unbounded possibilities and commit himself to exploring these, often at huge personal inconvenience. Here was a man who had an unshakable belief in the power of cinema to open our eyes to whole new vistas, to help us to see the world differently and thereby arrive at a much deeper appreciation of the universe. It is open to debate whether he succeeded in his goal during his lifetime, but his work and his ideas are undoubtedly an inspiration to future filmmakers and give us a tantalising glimpse of what cinema may be capable of delivering to us - if only we have the courage and imagination to grasp its potential.

Filmography

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