Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy par Christophe Wall-Romana

Abstract

of immigration and selfish excess come to the fore.While his character is less endearing in this regard, such behavior reflects a shift in the power dynamics of Arab-European relations—here in the context of a homosexual and transnational love affair.Although filmic adaptations of literary works quite often result in a compromise between the elasticity of literature and the rigidity of the camera’s lens, L’armée du salut demonstrates that the subjective tonality of the novel translates into a powerful, convincing, and thought-provoking piece of cinema. Even though the film’s sudden ending elucidates Taïa’s creative vision, many questions remain unanswered, inciting reflection. University of Miami Walter Shawn Temple Wall-Romana, Christophe. Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2013. ISBN 978-0-7190-8623-6. Pp. 224. $95. Foundational to avant-garde interwar film culture and to philosophical approaches to film after World War II were the writings of Jean Epstein (1897–1953), the noted proponent of photogénie for whom the close-up and altered motion (reverse, fast, slow) could reinvigorate a social body exhausted by warfare and excessive stimuli (19) to reveal realms of experience otherwise inaccessible. Echoing L’Esprit Nouveau’s modernist call to order (171), Epstein’s early books La poésie d’aujourd’hui and Bonjour cinéma (both 1921) not only helped shape photographic and editing styles when silentera poetic experimentalism in France was at its peak; by exposing the enmeshed character of time, movement, and the sensate body onscreen, they unveiled, in WallRomana ’s far-reaching reassessment,a“corporeal subconscious”(28) that later informed the film phenomenology of Edgar Morin, Jean-Luc Godard, and Gilles Deleuze. Thanks to historian Richard Abel, English-language readers had been aware since the 1980s of Epstein’s stature as a theorist—a moniker Wall-Romana contests—while protracted legal battles and poor distribution kept in limbo his directorial output, save La chute de la maison d’Usher (1928, after Poe). Yet Epstein, who had assisted luminaries Abel Gance, Louis Delluc, and Marcel L’Herbier, directed over twenty fictions, from the classic melodrama Cœur fidèle (1923) to the commercial throwaway Mauprat (1926, after Sand). Placing Epstein’s more artistically solid explorations of “borderline sensations and affects”(43) in a fantastic, Symbolist lineage,Wall-Romana makes a strong case for the director of La glace à trois faces (1927) and L’homme à l’Hispano (1932) as a pioneer of queer cinema in France, on a par with Jean Cocteau. Exemplifying Eve Sedgwick’s notion of the “glass closet,” Epstein’s œuvre “rather than simply evacuating and closeting homosexuality, insistently makes it a visible part of heterosexual construction”(80); the critic’s duty,then,is to show,beneath an apparently conventional “heterosexual matrix” (85), how films, and melodrama in particular, ultimately“queer”our vision (81).References abound to Epstein’s better-known French contemporaries Gance and Renoir, but also to Hitchcock who plays master of suspense 210 FRENCH REVIEW 88.2 Reviews 211 to Epstein’s art of “suspension” (54). Particularly revelatory in this painstakingly researched volume is chapter 4, “Brittany, Edge of the Modern World.” Epstein’s film essays on France’s savage coastal fringe presage the vérité techniques and collective authorship of Jean Rouch, as well as the rough location shooting of Italian neorealism. Ultimately,this documentary practice,which culminated in the immersive Le tempestaire (1947), may prove more central to our understanding of French film history than Epstein’s poetico-symbolist narratives.While Wall-Romana downplays the importance of screenwriter/actress/director Marie Epstein’s collaboration with her brother, his assessment of the film philosopher’s broader influence is robust: Deleuze’s “timecrystal ”(179) in Cinema I and II, Jacques Rancière’s account of narrative films as fables “thwarted” by moments of photogénie (182); and Ang Lee’s corporeal flights of wuxia fancy in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (197) owe not a little to the subject of this probing and exacting study. Johns Hopkins University (MD) Derek Schilling Literary History and Criticism edited by Marion Geiger Bahier-Porte, Christelle, éd. (Re)lire Lesage. Saint-Étienne: PU de Saint-Étienne, 2012. ISBN 978...