Jean epstein

Jean Epstein was born in Warsaw, at the time when Poland was integrated into Russia, on March 25, 1897, although he was a French citizen. He began to study medicine, but he was more attracted to art, so he developed an intense activity as a poet and literary critic, and cultivated his philosophical and aesthetic training. It is therefore not surprising that while he was developing his film career, he also wrote valuable theoretical essays on the incipient Seventh Art. Curiously, his first film, Pasteur (1922), connected with his initial scientific training by shedding light on the founder of microbiology.

The filmmaker is considered part of the avant-garde movement, and the truth is that he contributed a lot to the language of cinema with his use of slow motion, his inserts of close-ups, and a dynamic montage. The carousel scenes in Coeur fidèle (1923) are considered by some to have inspired Alfred Hichcock in Strangers on a Train . Be that as it may, his experimentation with the language of the cinematograph leads him to works as perfect and hypnotic as The Three-Face Mirror.(1927), with a bold narrative structure in its look at the heartbreak of a ‘bon vivant’ with three women. Epstein explains that it is “a drama that would not want to have an exposure, or a threshold, and that ends suddenly. Events do not happen and yet be exactly answered. The fragments of various pasts come to be implanted in a single today.

The climax of his innovation in the use of images was reached in his best-known work, The Collapse of the House of Usher (1928), a very personal and dreamy adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe ‘s story about the breakdown of a marriage due to illness. of her, which affects the husband and his home. The idle applies it in a surprising way, Epstein explains that “I don’t know anything more absolutely emotional than a face freeing itself, at idle, from an expression”, which happens to the sick woman. In any case, Epstein cannot always be at the forefront, sometimes he has to shoot what others ask of him, and thus he made the serial The Adventures of Robert Macaire (1925) for the producer Alexander Kamenka.

A very different stage of his career is made up of the films shot on the Brittany coast, which he captures in a way that connects in part with neorealism, the humble way of life of fishermen. But in Finis terrae (1930), Mon vran (1931), L’or des mers (1932) and El domador de tempestades (1947) the force of nature stands out, more with the incorporation of sound, with which he also experiments through its slowing down, because, as he pointed out, “the monotonous and confused howl of a storm breaks down into a finer reality, into a multitude of very different noises, never heard before.”

There is something organic, almost visceral in Epstein’s cinema, which is tremendously poetic and dreamy at the same time. The great filmmaker, who died in Paris on April 2, 1953, was always in search of film perfection with new ways, always non-conformist, always an artist.