Jean Epstein

Much of what we now take for granted about cinema as an art form traces back to Jean Epstein. Filmmakers such as Cocteau, Hitchcock, Pasolini and Godard, and Buñuel, who worked as his assistant, drew on his films and writings, as did critics and philosophers including Kracauer, Deleuze and Rancière. This book is the first in English to survey his entire body of work.

Epstein straddled two worlds, working as an avant-garde filmmaker while rejecting the idea that art belongs to an elite. He turned to popular forms like melodrama and documentary, hoping that films could reach viewers of every social class, heal them, and move society toward utopia. He saw cinema as a tool for thinking and perceiving, and he wrote about the screen as a kind of poetry. His concept of photogénie describes the way the camera can reveal a heightened, almost transcendent quality in ordinary things.

To pursue this, Epstein pushed the techniques of his time to their limits, using intense close-ups, rhythmic editing, slow motion and even reverse motion to create experimental images.