TSPDT

Key Production Country: France
Key Genres: Drama, Silent Film, Short Film, Romance, Documentary, Fantasy, Music, Avant-garde/Experimental
Key Collaborators: Léon Mathot (Leading Actor), Gina Manès (Leading Actress), Albert Brès (Cinematographer), Jean Lucas (Cinematographer), Paul Guichard (Cinematographer), Pierre Hot (Leading Character Actor), Pierre Kefer (Production Designer)

"Key figure of the Impressionist school who arrived on the film scene with the 1921 publication of Bonjour Cinema, a collection of essays celebrating the medium in lyrical, poetic style. Epstein made his directing debut with Pasteur (1922) and then signed a ten-year contract with Pathé. After several films including the Balzac adaptation L'Auberge rouge (1923) and the exceptional, photographically sophisticated The Faithful Heart [Coeur fidèle] (1923) he dissolved the contract, forming his own production company, Les Films Jean Epstein, in 1926. Epstein is perhaps best known for his inspired adaptation of Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)." - The Virgin International Encyclopedia of Film, 1992

"Epstein’s conception of cinema dissolves the boundaries between ethnography and surrealism, avant-garde provocation and documentary impulse, surging emotions and scientific observation. His dramas of the senses opened up a rich vein of film narrative later explored by French directors like Maurice Pialat, Claire Denis and Leos Carax." - Max Goldberg (Harvard Film Archive, 2016)

"Collaborated with Jean Benoît-Lévy in the film Pasteur (1922), an official documentary study of the work of Pasteur. He then began a career which made him one of the leading imaginative directors of the French silent cinema, as well as a writer of influential essays and even poems in praise of the stars of the American screen." - Roger Manvell (The International Encyclopedia of Film, 1972)

"If the trajectory of his career must unfortunately be described as a descending arc, Epstein nevertheless was able to make more than forty films of varying lengths in an array of genres for companies small and large over the course of thirty years. Some of his movies are disappointingly conventional, yet in almost every one there are moments when his creative intelligence shines through. And the best of his films, particularly some of those made in the ’20s and early ’30s, are spectacular artistic successes: Coeur fidèle, La glace à trois faces, La chute de la maison Usher, Finis Terrae, and Le tempestaire are important, innovative works that can stand comparison with any produced by his contemporaries. Major filmmakers such as René Clair, Jean Renoir, Jean Grémillon, Eisenstein, Robert Flaherty, and Luchino Visconti have testified to the profound impact Epstein’s films and ideas had on their own work." - Stuart Liebman (Artforum, 2016)

"Jean Epstein belongs to the generation of 1920s French filmmakers who were drawn to the cinema by the impact of the Hollywood productions of Griffith, Chaplin, and Ince. Gifted with a precocious intelligence, Epstein was one of a number of these filmmakers who had previously been interested in literature. He had already published books on literature, philosophy, and the cinema when he made his debut as a filmmaker with a documentary on Pasteur in 1922 at the age of only twenty-five. Three fictional features in the following year, including Coeur fidèle, which contains virtuoso passages to rank with the work of Gance and L’Herbier, put him in the forefront of French avant-garde filmmaking… Epstein is a complex and uncompromising figure whose filmmaking was accompanied by a constant theoretical concern with his chosen medium." - Roy Armes (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 2000)

"The close-up is the soul of cinema." - Jean Epstein