The Sea Speaks: Two Sound Films by Jean Epstein
Jean Epstein was afraid of the sea. It was the kind of fear, he said, that forces a man to do what scares him. On the islands off the coast of Brittany, where he made many of his films starting in the late 1920s, the director and theorist discovered a terrifying ocean and a people for whom death at sea was woven into the pattern of life. Houses on these islands were built from the wood of wrecked ships, and everyone wore black as though ready for mourning. From Finis Terrae (1929) on, Epstein returned again and again to the subjects of lighthouses, storms, boats setting out, boats in peril, islanders waiting for boats to return. It’s a matter of life and death, but it’s also a matter of rhythm and composition, of drama that builds like weather or music.
Mor’vran (1931) and Le Tempestaire (1947) address the same subject and share much of the same imagery, yet the two films have very different effects. Mor’vran (Sea of Ravens) has a documentary detachment, mapping the physical and emotional geography of the Breton islands in a remarkably concise yet encompassing cinematic poem. Le Tempestaire (The Storm Tamer) is narrowly focused on a single incident, and it’s a peerless masterpiece of mood. The films start the same way, with montages of static shots—beached boats, a crucifix against telegraph wires, graves of shipwrecked sailors—but in Le Tempestaire there is immediately an ominous sensation of waiting. It’s created not only by the unearthly music (by Yves Baudrier), but by the timing of the close-ups and the way Epstein plays with the speed of the film. People are frozen at first, as if under a spell, while the sea laps outside.
“If we can change time,” Epstein wrote, “an object becomes an event.” By the same token, perhaps, an event becomes an object. The films Epstein made before he went to Brittany, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Mirror has Three Faces, are more overtly experimental in their narrative and stylistic techniques. On the islands, Epstein said, he was seeking the real, and he achieved a unique blend of the lucid and the fantastic, physical immediacy and dreamlike unreality.
Mor’vran has a recorded sound score, but no dialogue. The title cards provide digestible chunks of information about the archipelago of Breton islands, but also drift into poetry that is closer to the lyrical spirit of the images. Lighthouses are called the eyes of the sea, hinting at their centrality in Epstein’s vision, their lenses and searching beams offering a heroic metaphor for the camera. (In 1948, Epstein made a reverential documentary about lighthouses for the United Nations, called Les Feux de la Mer (Lights That Never Fail). Another title card in Mor’vran tells us that “the sea speaks.” It is most eloquent in a hypnotic sequence of waves exploding over sea walls in a gale, rushing forward and being blown backward at the same time, so that the surging water collides with itself and spray streams behind it like white hair.
Each detail carries weight and fits into place as solidly as a stone in a well-built wall: tight close-ups of the embroidery on women’s clothes, girls passing with baskets balanced on their heads, gorgeous wide shots of the marketplace at Brest. Here a small thread of narrative is introduced, as we see a sailor buying a necklace for his sweetheart before embarking for home. Later, without comment or drama, we see the sailor sprawled face-down on the rocks like a piece of flotsam, the necklace lying in the mud beside him.
Then we see men going out to repair the buoys damaged in the storm that killed the nameless sailor. Let out swiftly, a heavy chain leaps like a snake over the side of the boat, embodying the irresistible gaiety of life, which breaks out among the villagers after each disaster. Clothes flutter on wash-lines like prayer-flags, and the wind fills out a hanging dress like the memory of an absent body.
Le Tempestaire burrows into private fears and the legends and folk culture that the islanders have built around these fears. An old woman spinning, in an early scene, introduces a fairy-tale mood and a dark undercurrent of fate and mortality. Her granddaughter fears the rising wind as her fiancé goes out fishing, but he shrugs off her foreboding. In the sudden darkness of a coming storm, surf creams on the rocks. The violent storm is captured in a strangely calm and dreamy way, blurred in soft focus, the relentless moan of the wind overlaid by an eerie, ethereal folksong the girl sings. The prismatic halo of a lighthouse blazes and dims, and in the cottage where the girl waits the light flashes on and off like the neon sign outside a hotel window in a film noir, revealing and concealing a model of a ship in a bottle.
The grandmother tells the girl of old superstitions about “storm tamers” who could calm the wind, and she goes in search of an old man who, after initial reluctance, pulls from a sack a crystal ball—actually a glass float of the kind used for fishing nets. As the man gazes into the glass, clouds race at high speed and seas heave in slow motion. The surf runs in reverse, waves sucked back off the rocks. The fiancé returns safely and the film ends with the tiny figures of the couple walking away under an enormous sky.
The storm tamer’s crystal ball is another obvious symbol of the camera’s power to control time and master images. That it is really a humble everyday object strengthens this connection: it’s the basic mechanics of the camera, and simple cinematic techniques like over-cranking, under-cranking and running film backwards, that create the film’s otherworldly mood. Epstein manipulated film in order to make images “tremble” on the screen. In an essay called “The Intelligence of the Machine,” he expounded on how the camera, which can function like a microscope or a telescope, changes the way we see the world. Like the beam of a lighthouse, Epstein’s camera pulses with illumination: an eye that changes each thing it sees.
by Imogen Sara Smith