Jean Epstein - Écrits complets, volume 2

Under the direction of Nicole Brenez, Joël Daire and Cyril Neyrat

Preface: Marylène Negro

Introduction: José Moure

13.6 x 20.5 cm / 320 pages / May 2019

isbn : 978-2-35137-265-4

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This volume contains the following texts: Bonjour Cinéma. Cinéma je t'emmène. Conférence Lacroix. Conférence prononcée devant l'association des étudiants de Montpellier. Le Cinéma mystique. Réalisation de détail. Le Temps T. El Dorado. Éloquence d'yeux. La Roue. Comment j'ai conçu et exécuté le film de "Centenaire Pasteur". A l'affût de Pasteur. Pourquoi j'ai tourné Pasteur. Abel. Le Décor au cinéma. Le Regard du verre. L'Opéra de l’œil. L'Objectif lui-même. La Recherche du style cinématographique. Film et cinéma. Les Grands Docteurs. Hommage à Canudo. Abel Gance. Le film que l'on écrit n'est déjà plus celui que l'on a pensé (Préambule au découpage de Six et demi Onze). Temps et personnage du drame. Art d'évènement. Les Images relativement à nous. Le Cinématographe vu de l'Etna.

"In 1920, Jean Epstein was twenty-three years old. He still dreamed of literature, probably sensed that creating made one "live more and more", believed firmly that poetry existed and was very real, and already knew that all knowledge was knowledge of love and reason. But he was still unaware that a fantastic decade was opening up before him during which, in the fervour of continuous creation, he invented himself not only as a filmmaker, but also as a film writer; a decade during which, with a pen in his hand or behind the camera, in this tension between the dream and the reality of an art that he tried to tame and bring to incandescence, he explored and exalted the technical, poetic and philosophical mystery of cinema.

From the summer of 1920, everything happened very quickly for this impatient young man, fond of speed: the decisive meeting with Blaise Cendrars, the first visit to a film set where he met Germaine Dulac; the creation with two friends of an avant-garde literary magazine, called Promenoir; […] Louis Delluc gave him his start as an assistant on Le Tonnerre (1921) and Jean Benoit-Lévy asked him to direct his first film, Pasteur (1922) […] Up until 1928 and The Fall of the House of Usher , no fewer than twelve feature films followed, including the masterpiece Cœur fidèle which established him, at the age of twenty-six, as a master of the cinematographic avant-garde.

It is this creative and intellectual frenzy and this dazzling and chaotic trajectory that the texts collected in this volume reflect. In their diversity and succession, these texts bear witness to the fervor with which the poet never ceased to dream of cinema, the theorist, to think about it and the filmmaker, to explain its constraints and reality. Written between 1920 and 1928, they cover what one could call Jean Epstein's first creative and theoretical period and trace the path of a poet, theorist and filmmaker who writes the ardent experience of his loving proximity with an art that is something other than art and whose possibilities he tries to conceive and experience." Jose Moure