Space, Speed, Revelation and Time: Jean Epstein’s Early Film Theory

In October 1921, the prestigious Parisian avant-garde publishing house Éditions de la Sirène released a small volume of essays and poems–what the French call a plaquette–entitled Bonjour Cinéma. The book’s most immediately apparent feature was its diminutive scale, barely larger than the palm of a hand, that recalled one of the programs handed out in prestigious movie theaters of the day. On the reddish-brown field of its strikingly designed, ultra-“modern” cover, slim white letters spelled out the word “Bonjour,” calling to mind the placards welcoming contemporary audiences at the start of a film program. Superimposed on this background was a large letter “C,” and from its center emanated a white triangular shape, as if to represent a projector casting its beam toward a screen lying beyond the cover’s right edge. In this graphic “light,” the letters “i-n-e-m-a” floated, parole in libertà fashion, across the surface, conjuring up the associative realms of “life” and “soul” that frequently circulated through the thinking about films in France during the 1920s and beyond. This lively graphic image also cleverly disclosed the book’s aspirations: nothing less than to cast light on the cinema, the popular art that, more than any other, fascinated the generation of artists and intellectuals who came of age during the decade following World War I.

The author of Bonjour Cinéma was the twenty-four year old Jean Epstein. Born in Warsaw and raised in Switzerland and Lyons, France, he was determined to break into Parisian avant-garde artistic circles as well as the film industry whose principal studios were still located on the outskirts of the French capitol. He soon succeeded at both. During the period beginning with the armistice ending World War I, which allowed the rebirth of French cinema after four devastating years of conflict, and culminating with the institutionalization of synchronous sound recording as the international norm for film production at the end of the 1920s, Epstein not only became a well-regarded literary critic, he was also even better known as one of France’s most innovative filmmakers and its most searching theorist of the new medium. In fact, few European film artists who theorized about their practice during the decade of the twenties produced a cinematic and theoretical oeuvre of greater historical significance than Epstein’s. Since his contemporaries included Balázs, Delluc, Dulac, Eisenstein, Gance, Kuleshov, Pudovkin and Vertov, to name only the most prominent from a very large and distinguished group, such a claim is somewhat controversial. That is because, more than half a century after his death in 1953, we still do not have a thorough grasp of Epstein’s theoretical ambitions and achievements. His insights into as well as his blind spots about the medium that kindled the imaginations of his contemporaries are as fascinating as they are complex, so much so that this essay can highlight only some of his general themes and genuine contributions to the fledgling film theoretical enterprise. It can be no more than a down-payment for a much larger study of his entire theoretical and cinematic oeuvre of the 1920s, which deserves much closer analysis than can be offered here.

Indeed, extravagant statements have sometimes been made for the unique importance of Epstein’s early writings on film. Jean Mitry, among others, has praised Bonjour Cinéma as the first book of film theory. “The first theoretician of the cinema was unquestionably Jean Epstein whose essays published between 1920 and 1922 first established the basis of visual expression founded on means that were properly regarded as fundamental: editing and closeups, that is, rhythm and symbol.” It was, he writes, “the first work about the cinema that was not merely a collection of more or less literary reflections but...an examination of the underlying conditions of its [the cinema’s] autonomy.” Still others, however, such as the fine American scholar David Bordwell, have strongly contested such assertions, arguing that Epstein’s theories, like those of so many of his contemporaries, were often confusing, incomplete, self-contradictory or even incoherent.5

Neither assessment is wholly accurate. Epstein did not formulate his views about cinema in a void. Astonishingly precocious, he was well versed in the many and varied avant-garde as well as industry conceptions of the “seventh art” that had been published in the teens and early twenties. By the time La Sirène released Bonjour Cinéma, in fact, there was widespread agreement about what I have elsewhere called an “Ur-theory” of cinema that encompassed ideas about the fundamental purpose or value of the cinema–to be the newest, most modern art form–as well as of its essential or unique properties. There was also considerable consensus about what cinematic strategies and forms were to be recommended to realize the crucial artistic and/or epistemological vocations of the new medium. Finally, these early French commentators on film shared an understanding of what the nature of the theoretical enterprise was: to serve as a speculative instrument opening new possibilities for what most regarded as a truly revolutionary medium. So–pace Mitry–Epstein was not really the first to synthesize a theory of film, though he did significantly modify and deepen contemporary thinking about it. On the other hand, if as Bordwell correctly notes, the theoretical constructs Epstein and his contemporaries proffered were rarely systematically presented, and if these early writers too often employed terms that defied analysis, Epstein nevertheless did develop a theory of cinema as comprehensive, as original, and in many respects even more radical in its aspiration to get to the roots of the cinematic experience than most developed by his contemporaries in the post-World War I decade.

What is clear is that the roughly forty pages of text in Bonjour Cinéma by no means constitute the whole of Epstein’s earliest speculations about film. These pages represent barely ten percent of his total published oeuvre at the time. Even if one were to include all his other contemporary texts on film, including a vital chapter in La Poésie d’aujourd’hui: Un nouvel état d’intelligence, his breakthrough study of modern literary culture, and his other occasional remarks in short essays and interviews, Epstein’s writings on cinema per se during this first phase of his career are relatively meager. In fact, however, they are of a piece with, and must be read in the context of, his much more voluminous contemporary writings on literature and philosophy: La Poésie d’aujourd’hui; his series of critical articles issued as “Le Phenomène Littéraire” during the summer and fall of 1921 in Ozenfant and Corbusier’s stylish new journal, L’Ésprit Nouveau; and the philosophical tract La Lyrosophie, released by La Sirène in the Spring of 1922, as well as a number of texts on many different subjects (Freud, Kabbalah, etc.) that appeared in some of the leading journals of the time. There would be an evolution, of course, in his thinking as it progressed throughout the 1920s, but to an astonishing degree, even his earliest thoughts about cinema point the way toward his reflections later in the decade, indeed, even to the more voluminous and elaborately argued volumes he published more than two decades later.

Subtending all Epstein’s first thoughts about cinema as well as the new literature of his day was his conviction that the modern age was in profound transition. Central to the change was the increased mechanization and speed of daily life. Motor cars and airplanes had brought an unprecedented dynamism to everyday experience; perceptions as well as conceptions of space and time were in flux. In this respect, Epstein was simply an intellectual of his time who inherited such themes from the Italian Futurists and their French epigones, influenced as they were by the diffusion of popular accounts of scientific developments, especially Einstein’s theory of relativity. More individual, however, was Epstein’s focus on the rapidly changing conditions of the workplace–indeed, to the increasing demands introduced into many commonplace activities–that, he claimed, had been transformed by machines and altered work requirements. Labor and the kind of energy required to negotiate daily life had become increasingly “cerebral,” contributing to a form of mental strain that Epstein, following many contemporary psychologists and sociologists, called “fatigue.” Despite the implications of its name, however, Epstein did not think of this condition as an illness. To be sure, fatigue was considered as a physiological modification of the brain and nervous system as both responded to the strains of increasingly mental work. Epstein borrowed from many of the social scientists to characterize the phenomenon: fatigue did undermine rational attention and produced a passive, “vegetative” state of diminished ego functioning. It also facilitated the emergence of what Epstein, following contemporary usage, called “subconscious” mental processes in daily experience. But contrary to the consensus of concerned experts, Epstein somewhat paradoxically believed fatigue to be a vital, positive feature of French post-war life. Fatigue, he asserted, opened a realm of “primitive undifferentiated sensitivity” that induced moods akin to reverie. Such a state allegedly restored a mental balance, providing relief for “l’intelligence,” the seat of rational mental processes, by activating “le subconscient,” where synesthetic sensations, the ground of non-logical, non-rational modes of cognition that were the source and site of aesthetic sensations, flourished. The fatigue spreading in modernizing Europe and America was therefore not a serious danger, but offered a curious kind of promesse de bonheur.

Indebted to Symbolist strains of thinking from a prior generation of French artists as much as to contemporary labor and educational psychologists, Epstein’s notion of fatigue was the ground for his writings about the forms of contemporary poetry and his notion of “lyrosophical” cognition, both of which lie outside the scope of the present essay. But such ideas clearly also formed the basis for his thinking about such crucial questions as the cinema’s status as an art form and the film stylistics he recommended to realize its artistic goals. However one might ultimately assess the persuasiveness of his general framing of the changing society in which he lived, even the sketch just offered suggests how much Epstein’s attempt to locate the place and appeal of the cinema in modern life was wider in scope, and more complex and searching than most of his contemporaries. Not only did his characterization of current social trends inform his positive response to the novel poetic forms supposedly renewed by fatigue, it also motivated his effort to locate in the broad conditions of modern life the origins of the cinema’s artistic potential.

How, then, was the cinema to be understood? Despite some initial equivocations, Epstein joined most of his contemporaries in asserting that film was a novel art form and not simply a recording device. “We have hardly begun to understand that an unexpected art has been created,” he wrote. Simply and totally new. We must understand what this means...Olympus wished to number the muses. To their official figure which, reduced to a half dozen is merely a bluff, man has added only a few mannerisms, interpretations and extensions...Variety, here is a new, mysteriously conceived species.

Moreover, it was a discrete, independent art form; it had an appeal all its own and possessed strategic resources to which it should remain faithful. “Each art constructs a forbidden city, a domain that is exclusive, autonomous, specifically its own, one that is hostile towards all that lies beyond it. It may sound incredible, but literature should be literary; the theater should be theatrical; painting should be painterly; and the cinema should be cinematic.” And Epstein stressed–also like his peers, although in even more hyperbolic terms–that the cinema was above all an art of vision, one greater than any available before its invention. “This is a cyclopean art, a unisensual art, an iconoscopic retina. All life and attention are in the eye...Although sight is already acknowledged by everyone to be the most developed sense, and even though the viewpoint of our intellect and our mores is visual, there has nevertheless never been an emotive process so homogeneously, so exclusively optical as the cinema. Truly, the cinema creates a particular system of consciousness limited to a single sense.”

The cinema was certainly a–perhaps the preeminent–visual art, but how was this art to be conceived? Epstein at times flirted with a rather conventional expression theory of art. In this view, film was, at least potentially, a creative projection of an individual’s shaping intelligence. For example, he celebrated La Roue shortly after its premiere, noting that, in it, “matter is modeled to fit the hollows and reliefs of a personality; all of nature and all objects appear the way a man dreams them...We...can see through eyes that are simultaneously intoxicated with alcohol and love and joy and misery, that is, through Gance’s eyes...” But already in Bonjour Cinéma, Epstein strikingly asserted another claim about film art, ultimately one far more characteristic of his thinking, that belied the central role in cinematic creation assigned to the filmmaker’s personal vision.Yes, the cinema may be an art. But then it is the first, incomparably the foremost in quality and aesthetic power, the foremost because it is the only mechanized, self-propelling art... For the first time, the camera introduces a subjectivity, a mechanical, automatic, inorganic subjectivity, neither living nor dead, which is controlled by a crank and lies outside man.

And he added:

We speak of nature seen through a temperament or of a temperament seen through nature. Now there is a lens, a diaphragm, a developing chamber, an optical system. The artist’s role is limited to the pushing of a button. And even his intentions come undone through accident. A harmony of satellite gears, that is what temperament is....The Bell & Howell is a metallic brain. Standardized, mass produced, distributed in thousands of copies, it transforms the exterior world into art. The Bell & Howell is an artist and only behind it do we find other artists: a director and a cameraman.

Epstein was not the first, only perhaps the most provocative, early film critic to allocate at most a secondary role to the director and to make the art of cinema depend primarily upon the instrumentalities of the camera. One of Epstein’s early colleagues, the director Marcel L’Herbier, had praised the camera’s unparalleled ability to transcribe the world “as faithfully, as truthfully as possible, without transposition or stylization... according to its own specific possibilities of precision” and thus to provide access to “a certain phenomenal truth.” And even earlier than that, the poet Philippe Soupault had made a similar pronouncement.

Man has been endowed with a new eye...Its power is formidable because it overturns all natural laws: it is unaware of space and time, overcomes gravity, ballistics, biology, etc...Its eye is more patient, more penetrating, more precise. It behooves the creator, the poet to make use of this power this wealth that has been neglected until now for his imagination is now master of a new servant.

It is important to note, however, that no more than Epstein did these early French theorists regard the camera simply as a mimetic device to record the world in a process André Bazin later likened to mummification.” Rather, like the telescope or microscope Epstein often referred to in his writings, the cinematic apparatus was conceived of as a creative epistemological tool that did not simply mirror the phenomenal world, it radically re-imagined it. Indeed, the cinema’s rendering through its specific instrumental powers of a believable, if at times fantastic world on screen was, according to Epstein, a key to spectatorial engagement. The camera’s revolutionary contribution was to break through ordinary forms of seeing as well as artistic conventions of depiction. Its apparatus “distilled” and “amplified” the world in front of the lens to create “the appearance of things that do not exist.” It fashioned a stunningly new symbolic realm that engaged the subconscious, and thereby became an art for legions of fatigued spectators around the world.

Indeed, the very environment in which films were shown facilitated the emergence of subconscious responses in those who attended the screenings. “Wrapped in darkness, ranged in the cell-like seats, directed toward the source of emotion by their softer side, the sensibilities of the entire auditorium converge, as if in a funnel, toward the film. Everything else is barred, excluded, no longer valid.”

Correctly conceived and rendered cinematic images ensured that film spectators would be spontaneously catapulted from the drab realm of contrived artistic conventions into the realm of consciousness or, to be more precise, “le subconscient,” where the experience Epstein prized as “poésie” became possible.

In La Lyrosophie, he writes,

Poésie is one thing and art is another; they are not comparable. Poésie is an affective state in large measure subliminal. Art is a system, a mode of composition, a trade intended in principle to elicit poésie. It is a goal that is not always attained.

Attaining poésie was therefore crucial for the new art of film, which could be accomplished only if filmmakers used the apparatus to obtain what Epstein called “photogenic” images that for him constituted the essence and aim of cinematic art. Photogénie was a term floating around in French film criticism at least since Louis Delluc revived it in his critical essays of the late teens and his eponymous book published in 1920. Originally developed in the nineteenth century as a synonym for “picturesque,” photogénie had in Delluc’s writings acquired a variety of different shadings. He had used it to describe the plastic values of individual images, the attractive qualities of the subject to be filmed, the astonishing aspects of the world revealed by the cinema, and various admirable qualities of a film’s structure or rhythm, among others. Epstein adopted it, even as he proclaimed it to be a “muddled and fashionable word. A new ferment, dividend, divisor and quotient. You can break your chops trying to define it.” Nevertheless, he attempted to give the concept–not always successfully–more precise definition.

For Epstein, photogenic images were above all those that moved. “Photogenic mobility is simultaneously movement in space and time. It can therefore be said that the photogenic aspect of things is a result of its variations in space-time.” This formulation is hardly useful, however for it fails to distinguish photogenic from non-photogenic film images that also move. Epstein therefore expanded and qualified the notion of mobility, though one would have hoped for greater precision on his part. “This mobility can only be understood in the most general sense and according to all the dimensions perceptible by the mind.” And further,

Cinema is all movement without any heed for stability or equilibrium. Of all the sensory logarithms of reality, the photogenic is based on movement. Derived from time, it is acceleration. It opposes the event to stasis, relationship to dimension...This new beauty is as sinuous as the curve of the stock market index. It is no longer the function of a variable but a variable itself.

In this somewhat vaporous haze of abstraction, it would that the defining characteristic of photogeneity involves the perceived speed of change of the photograms on the projected film strip. Extremely rapid movement, however produced, was conceived of as a kind of exciting drug that cinema alone could provide, and the prescriptions Epstein offered for film style followed as a consequence. Spectators had to be caught up in the thrill of the vibrantly pulsing phenomenal world on screen, for it was the rapid flux of film images that mimicked the pace of changing pensée-associations flowing through le subconscient and thereby induced the forms of cognition vital to poésie. Equally important, however, was a second qualification for photogeniety Epstein introduced. “I shall call photogenic those aspects of things, of beings and souls whose moral stature is enhanced by their cinematographic reproduction. And any aspect that is not improved by cinematographic reproduction is not photogenic.” This rather obscure idea was glossed as follows: “Personality is the visible soul of things and of people; it is their apparent heredity, their past become unforgettable, and their future that is already present.” These puzzling passages can perhaps be illuminated by borrowing a concept–“aura”–that Walter Benjamin more than a decade after Epstein wrote these words.

Benjamin famously believed that the “mechanical reproduction” methods of cinema produced a loss of an object’s or person’s aura; that is, in their photographic and cinematographic representation, they lost a kind of spiritual nimbus or charge that rendered them unique and individual. For Epstein, however, the cinema promised to recover the aura that objects or persons lost either while functioning as a cipher in a system of routinized perceptual and social relationships, or once they had been inserted into the semiotic schemes of conventional art. The cinema somehow restored this lost authenticity; to use Epstein’s more mystical language, the cinema recovered the object’s “soul,” rendering it more open to a labile ebb and flow of meaning and metaphorical resonance that dynamized a spectator’s perception, engendered anticipation, introduced drama and enlisted the subconscious. Examples of such highly metaphorically charged readings of photogenic images, preeminently of closeups, abound in Epstein’s early writings.

The closeup limits and directs the attention. As an emotional indicator, it overwhelms me. I have neither the right nor the ability to be distracted, It speaks the present imperative of the verb to understand. Just as petroleum potentially exists in the landscape that the engineer gropingly probes, the photogenic and a whole new rhetoric are similarly concealed in the closeup. I haven’t the right to think of anything but this telephone. It is a monster, a tower, and a character. The power and scope of its whispering. Destinies wheel about, enter, and leave from this pylon as if from an acoustical pigeon coop. Through this nexus flows the illusion of my will, a laugh that I like or a number, an expectation or a silence. It is a sensory limit, a solid nucleus, a relay, a mysterious transformer from which everything good or bad may issue. It looks like an idea.

It would lead too far afield to explore the ramifications of this unpacking of photogénie and rooting it in Bergson’s philosophical project that so greatly influenced so many artists in the early twentieth century. Suffice it to say that for Epstein the camera operated at its best when it could generate the semiotic flux that he believed to constitute the ground of cinematic poetry. Despite his claims that the camera operated almost independently of the will of the filmmaker, such photogenic poetry could be produced more regularly or even augmented, Epstein believed, if film artists used techniques that allowed the cinematic apparatus to work unfettered by constraining conventions. Thus, one finds scattered through Epstein’s early writings a series of proscriptions specifying which techniques not to use as well as of recommended strategies he prescribed. All are predicated on the ideas mentioned earlier, namely, that cinema is, and should be, an autonomous art form that realized its essential photogeneity. Early in “Le Sens 1 bis,” he lists several kinds of borrowings from other art forms to avoid.

Yes, there are impurities: literature, plots and intellectuality; all are harmful accessories...No painting. Tableaux vivants in contrasting black and white are dangerous. Images for magic lanterns. Impressionist corpses. No texts. The true film does without them.

At the level of individual film images, certainly, painting could not provide a model for the filmmaker. “In cinema, the picturesque is zero, nothing, negation. ..The picturesque and the photogenic coincide only by chance..” The frozen forms of sculpture were no better models.

While Epstein recognized that some form of anecdote or story line was essential for the engendering and articulation of emotion in films, he was particularly vehement against the rigid and mechanical plots favored for commercial productions.

The feuilleton is rotten with logic, and its plots, however stupid they may seem, are structured like syllogisms. It is unusual indeed if the hero of a melodrama sneezes without his sneeze being the consequence or premise of some important event. Popular literature is more teleological than religion.

Such “logic” interfered with the essential non-logical warp and woof of subconscious cognition and thus with the possibility of film art. He therefore argued instead for a looser, thematic organization of images that dispensed almost entirely with plots.

The cinema is true; a story is a lie...Drama is continuous like life... So why tell stories or narratives that always presuppose ordered events, a chronology, the gradation of facts and sentiments? Perspectives are only optical illusions. Unlike those Chinese tea tables that successively beget a dozen, one from the next, life is not subject to deduction. There are no stories. There have never been any stories. There are only situations without order, without beginning, middle or end; with no right and no wrong side; you can look at them from any direction.

Such films necessarily called for shooting scripts whose minute découpage allowed for audience engagement in piecing together the action.

The hand of the conductor rises and grabs the handle of the departure signal. It turns the cord obliquely, and then pulls the handle toward the cord. It rises again, stops, hesitates. Suddenly, the wrist twists and forcefully rings the bell. There, given light and truth, is cinema. In fragments such as these lie cinema’s independence and emotional power...If the banker has to rise from his desk and go towards the door, avoid saying too much at once. This movement will photograph much better if it [the sequence] is broken into three parts and conveyed by its authentic elements: the shoe tapping on the carpet, the arm-chair suddenly thrust back, and his arm swinging as it walks.

Such scripting allowed closeups to become the “keystone” of the cinema Epstein desired to see. The scale at which they were presented on screen led to a uniquely cinematic form of intensity. “The closeup is an intensifying agent because of its size alone...Whatever the numerical value [of the intensity of emotion it produces], this magnification acts on one’s feeling more to transform than to confirm them...” Furthermore, from writers such as the young Louis Aragon, he developed, most brilliantly in “Grossissement,” formulations that underscored the value of the shifting nexus of meanings in correctly constructed closeups.

A scene conceived in terms of photogenic closeups, moreover, was susceptible to rhythmic articulation, a desideratum already posited in the Ur-theory, for example, in the call by the art historian Elie Faure, among many others, for an art of “cineplastics” that embedded carefully contrived moving forms in a quasi-musical structure.

All the issues concerning cinematic rhythm, whose aesthetic power is now recognized, are related to the problem of the cinematic inscription of time. In a film, we designate as rhythmic those passages composed of shots whose lengths are precisely determined with respect to each other. If a rhythmic passage is to produce an effect pleasing to the eye, the passage must possess, in addition to its dramatic qualities, shots whose lengths are in simple ratios to each other. This is particularly important for rapid montage in which fragments of 2 or 4 or 8 images create a rhythm that would necessarily be destroyed b y shots of 5 or 7 images. There is a very clear analogy here between the laws governing musical chords.

To round out this shortened list of cinematic techniques Epstein recommended, one must finally mention camera movement. Once again, the impression of speed was of primary importance.

The ‘landscape’s dance’ is photogenic. Through the window of a train or a ship’s porthole, the world acquires a new, specifically cinematic vivacity. A road is a road, but the ground that flees under the four beating hearts of an automobile’s belly transports me. The Oberland and Semmering tunnels swallow me up, and my head, bursting through the roof, hits against their vaults. Seasickness is decidedly agreeable. I’m on board the falling airplane. My knees bend. This area remains to be exploited. I yearn for a drama aboard a merry-go-round, or more modern still, in airplanes. The fair below and its surroundings would be progressively confounded. Centrifuged in this way, and adding vertigo and rotation to it, the tragedy would increase its photogenic quality ten-fold.

Written at a moment when Epstein had not yet become a film director, the passage undoubtedly seemed quixotic, beyond the imagination of commercial studios in 1921. But the force of these ideas would soon allow Epstein to realize his vision in Coeur Fidèle (1923), the film that confirmed that a major talent had arrived on the French filmmaking scene. Under the influence of passages such as this, rapid camera movement soon came in vogue in works such as L’Inhumaine (1924) and Feu Mathias Pascal (1925) by stylish directors like L’Herbier or in more abstract works like Ballet Mecanique by Epstein’s friend, the painter Fernand Léger. Curiously, Epstein does not stress one possible technique–variable speed recording, and slow motion in particular–in what might be termed the formative phase of his theory (1921-1925). Yet his praise of scientific stop-motion films (of plants blossoming in minutes, to cite a famous example) makes clear that he was alert early on to the surprising effects achieved through this uniquely cinematic technique. His further meditations on slow-motion eventually yielded the unforgettable portrayals of Roderick Usher in La Chute de la Maison Usher (1928), and statements on behalf of a cinematic device he deemed capable of producing greater psychological insights than psychoanalysis. The cinematic construction of time, the ability of the film apparatus to launch spectators into the realm of what he called the “imponderable” was to become the ground of his later, now largely–and unjustly–ignored philosophical ruminations about cinema from the 1930s until the end of his life.

Epstein’s early theoretical writings on cinema emerged from a corpus of occasional, but often sophisticated speculations about the new art, even as they simultaneously anticipated the development of a discipline whose tasks and parameters would eventually be more fully defined. Formulated at a historical watershed, his essays provided a glimpse of things to come while posing a series of challenges to our thinking about the appeal of the cinema that might still be usefully addressed.

by Stuart Liebman