Nicole Brenez on Jean Epstein

 

Photo: Coeur Fidèle (Jean Epstein; 1923)

 

Two Sides of a French Critical Tradition

Cinema always already lostAbel Gance, Robert Bresson, and Jean-Luc Godard dissociate actual cinema from possible cinema. They criticize the limited character of the former and proclaim the unlimited de jure nature of the latter.

Abel Gance: “Cinema has only developed a small portion of its possibilities: cinema is, and must absolutely become, something other than what it is, something other than what it is made to be.”

Robert Bresson: “I think that the cinematograph is not yet fully realized, there have been attempts, they have been stifled by the theater. It may be that the conditions fit for the cinematograph will be a very long time in coming. The cinematograph is lost from sight, decades may be necessary to find it again.”

Jean-Luc Godard (positive version): “And cinema is going to die soon, very young, having failed to give what it could have given, so we must… we must quickly go to the bottom of things.”

Jean-Luc Godard (negative version): “So cinema has been useless, it has not achieved anything and there have been no movies.”

Cinema forever innateConversely, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, and Gilles Deleuze defend the principle of cinema as genius, conceived as an immovable set of characteristics and powers that thus irrigate movies, even independently from an artistic project.

Louis Delluc: “I know but one pioneer in cinema. It is cinema.”

Jean Epstein: “Intelligence of a machine.”

Gilles Deleuze: “Cinema is always as perfect as it can be.”

For Jean Epstein, cinema is in itself “an experimental device that builds – that is, that conceives – an image of the universe.” Such a conception determines two attitudes: 1) the exclusion of cinema as envisioned by plastic artists outside the legitimate field of art cinema; 2) the investment of all theoretical energy upon the device’s spontaneous and permanent properties, for instance at the expense of the study of films (unlike Louis Delluc) or a reflection on the history of forms (unlike Gilles Deleuze).

Stemming from such a protocol, a line of artists begins to form for whom art consists of looking for purely cinematic forms of expression – that is to say, resulting from cinema’s properties regarding one, several, or all cinematic elements (shot, angle, character development, narrativity). This tradition of great formalists takes us from Jean Epstein to Philippe Grandrieux, via Stan Brakhage or F.J. Ossang.

• Excerpts from  this very insightful essay by Nicole Brenez on Jean Epstein: Ultra-Modern: Jean Epstein, or Cinema “Serving the Forces of Transgression and Revolt”