Jean Epstein

Corporeal cinema and film philosophy

Christophe Wall-Romana

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784993481
• eBook ISBN: 9781526111364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

If cinema can be approached as poetry and philosophy, it is because of Jean Epstein. Cocteau, Buñuel (who was his assistant), Hitchcock, Pasolini and Godard, and theoreticians Kracauer, Deleuze and Rancière are directly influenced by Epstein's pioneering film work, writings, and concepts. This book is the first in English to examine his oeuvre comprehensively. An avant-garde artist and an anti-elitist intellectual, Epstein wanted to craft moments of pure transformative cinema. Using familiar genres – melodramas and documentaries – he hoped to heal viewers of all classes and hasten social utopia. A lover of cinema as cognitive and sensorial technology, and a poet of the screen, he pushed cinematography – as photogénie – towards the experimental sublime, through daring close-ups, rhythmic montage, slow motion, even reverse motion. Polish-born, half-Jewish, and the author of a treatise on homosexuality, Epstein has been unfairly relegated to the shadows of film history. This book restores him to the limelight of interwar world cinema, on a par with Renoir, Lang, Capra and Eisenstein.

From literary modernism to photogénie

Mass culture and cinepoetry

Born in 1897, Jean Epstein belongs to the generation that came of age during the protracted carnage of World War One, as did André Breton (b. 1896), Tristan Tzara (b. 1896), René Clair (b. 1898), or László Moholy-Nagy (b. 1895). Recall that this was not one conflict among many, but the deadliest war in history, with more than 30 million dead, and an average of over 3,000 soldiers killed daily. Such mad figures resulted from unprecedented technological ‘progress’ deployed on all sides: huge-calibre canons, machine guns, carpet-bombing, grenades, minefields, asphyxiating gas, tanks, and air bombardment. Europe’s supposedly enlightened civilization of democracy and positivism had turned cannibalistic and sadistic. The two determining figures in Epstein’s early career, Blaise Cendrars and Abel Gance, were both survivors of the carnage. The bodily marks they bore and the lessons they drew would not be lost on Epstein as he launched on his radical path.

As soon as the war appeared close to an end, after it became clear the US would enter the conflict in 1917, artistic reactions accelerated in European capitals. In France, intellectual circles reconnected with the pre-war avant-garde ferments, transfiguring war trauma into absurdist and dada comedies, such as the ballet Parade by Cocteau, Diaghilev, Satie, and Picasso, and Les Mamelles de Tirésias by Apollinaire. Both performances, interestingly, include references to film, particularly American movies, which had flooded the home market during the war, once and for all dethroning France as the global leader in the film industry. Nevertheless, regardless of differences between specific movements and inspirations, 1917 signals the year when avant-garde works as a whole integrate references to cinema.¹

The 1913 avant-garde of the ‘banquet years’ (pace Roger Shattuck) had been ecstatic and optimistic. Things were different this side of the war. The 1917 avant-gardes wondered how to save a shred of forward-thinking from the overwhelming sense of bankruptcy of the pre-war ideals. On the bright side, the Tramp films of Chaplin arrived in France in 1916, offering wonderfully inventive variations on the figure of the clown triste who overcomes the ruins. For artists and intellectuals, Chaplin had as much global importance as the infamous mutinies of French soldiers at the front in 1916 and the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 – and for the same reason: it showed that for too long the lower classes had disproportionately shouldered the human cost of so-called progress. In Gance’s 1919 film J’Accuse, the war dead come back from the tomb, horribly disfigured, mutely accusing the living of having died for nothing. Gance featured actual disfigured veterans known as gueules cassées (‘broken mugs’), among whom Blaise Cendrars made a cameo, since he’d lost his right arm at the front. Of course, in the film the living had no retort. European modernity had argued that utopia and humanism ultimately outweighed the negative aspects of innovation, exploitation, alienation, and colonization. Post-war modernism faced a radical quandary: what should now be the project of modernity? How could science, nationalism, commerce – even intellectuals themselves, who had been largely pro-war as a class whether in France or Germany – be trusted? What kind of art might guide the social ethos of Europe back from the brink?

While Epstein scarcely refers to World War One in his writings or film work, it is clearly from this set of urgent questions that he began reflecting on art and literature. Like his contemporaries Tzara and Breton, Epstein started from the diagnostic that instrumental reason alone was no longer a valid basis for the future of Western civilization and culture. Tzara famously rejected reason altogether to pursue the radical negation and absurd protests of dada, while Breton opted for unreason, automatism, the marvel of mythical events and the unconscious of Freud. Epstein, by contrast, took a third way, at once more concrete, less centred on the artist as unique guide and, on the face of it, much more far-sighted. What science and art had overlooked and misunderstood, he began to suspect, was the perennial bad child of Western Judeo-Christian thought: the body. And not just the body in the abstract, nor merely bourgeois domesticated sexuality, but the larger body social – the bodily needs and experiences of the working masses.

Epstein began articulating this alternative argument in the years 1919–20, and it informs his first book, La Poésie d’aujourd’hui: un nouvel état d’intelligence (1921) as well as related essays concurrently published in six issues of the journal L’Esprit nouveau under the title ‘Le Phénomène littéraire’. The argument also runs through his second and third books written in 1921–22: Bonjour cinéma and La Lyrosophie. Let us delve into this original theory of social embodiment and aesthetic transformation, since it aims to explain how cinema is especially suited to modernity’s needs and how it is poised to become the ascendant medium.

La Poésie d’aujourd’hui: un nouvel état d’intelligence (1921)

The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. (A brilliant and extreme statement of this view, with which it is not requisite to associate oneself, is that of M. Jean Epstein, La Poésie d’aujourd’hui.)

(T.S. Eliot, 1975: 65 [1921])

Epstein’s central assumption in La Poésie d’aujourd’hui is that urban masses live in a state of semi-exhaustion and affective and sexual frustration resulting in a nervous condition that has initially little to do with what goes on in the mind. This is what he calls ‘la fatigue’. Moreover, for him exhaustion and pent-up feelings are directly linked. Because we are exposed to constant sensorial jolts in our means of transportation and repetitive tasks in our workplaces, our bodily capacities naturally become blunted, like the diminishing response to an ongoing stimulus. And because we belong to a systems-central industrial world that streamlines our experiences, our affective capacities are rarely solicited in their fuller spectrum and thus appear dormant, diffuse, or dammed up. Epstein does not see fatigue as a loss or shortage of energy, but rather as a state of sensorial and affective anaesthesia. The solution to both forms of anaesthesia consists in finding new routes to and from the subconscious (le subconscient). That is what modernist literature and especially poetry proposes to do, according to him, quite programmatically. The riddle of modernism, after the devastations of World War One, can only be solved by coming up with a new art that can heal the anaesthesia and trauma of the masses. And the paradigm for such a new art is very simply cinema. The intermittency, shock and speed that cause fatigue and sensorial erosion in the first place are, as it were, native to the film apparatus, and thus the latter is ideally suited to healing our sensing bodies in a homeopathic way.

To begin unpacking this conceptual programme, it is crucial to point out the difference between the subconscious and the unconscious. Epstein considered Freud’s theory of the unconscious as some secret chamber or locked room within the bourgeois soul, as amounting to little more than a cheap device found in cheap novels (and films) such as those of detective Nick Carter. In ‘Freud ou le nick-cartérianisme en psychologie’ (1922c), Epstein affirms that our thought processes are too complex to encrypt only one (latent) message in any (manifest) expression. After a convincing critique of the arbitrary determinism Freud displays in the analysis of dream, Epstein concludes – rather hastily – that psychoanalysis therefore is mere delirium. However partial this view is, Epstein does hone in on the problematic (and necessary) lack of evidence for Freud’s unconscious, and its resemblance to a novelistic ploy whereby only the psychoanalyst is capable of reading a missing or purloined document. Although he is not entirely fair to Freud – whom, however, he was among the first to read in France – Epstein rejects the Freudian unconscious principally because it is made of specific thoughts and words, rather than something much more bodily.

If we indeed repress anything – Epstein is not opposed to the process of repression – it is sensorial impressions, affective comportments, unsettled sexual desires, curtailed emotions, interpersonal mistakes, etc. For Epstein it makes no sense to believe that these would be first translated into words and thoughts then stored in some recess of the mind. Instead of words or signs, what we repress is sentient, motile, alive: ‘Cette vie a été appelée vie végétative, vie sympathique. C’est une vie sourde, profonde, active, silencieuse, animale’ (Epstein, 1921a: 153).² Repression and fatigue – including of a sexual nature (ibid.: 32) – impress themselves onto our bodies. According to Epstein, the fascination for this bodily subconscious is precisely what characterizes modernism: ‘Non seulement l’esprit moderne se laisse envahir par la vie végétative, mieux il va au devant d’elle, se penche sur sa rumeur, l’ausculte, la scrute, l’interroge et en attend beaucoup de merveilles’ (ibid.: 156).³ This attention to one’s own bodily states, with a view to intellectualizing it down the road, Epstein calls ‘coenaesthesis’, which he defines as ‘le visage physiologique du subconscient’, ‘the physiological face of the subconscious’ (ibid.: 83). Coenaesthesis is the root of the aesthetic impulse, rather than intellection, and Epstein radically takes for granted ‘la nonparticipation [sic] de la volonté, du jugement, du libre choix, etc. à l’émotion esthétique’ [‘the non-participation of will, judgement, free choice, etc., in aesthetic emotion’] (ibid.: 32).

The originality of this thesis consists in positing an embodied layer of repressed or delayed experiences that informs new artistic stances and innovations almost materially, although through the crucial mediation and interpretation of the artist. The reason cinema becomes central within such a model is that the film apparatus is much closer to the chain: fatigue → subconscious → coenaesthesis → aesthetic production than is the word-based intellectual process. So cinema becomes the medium where coenaesthesis discloses itself, and a homeopathic remedy is proposed to heal fatigued perception.

Epstein does not stop there. He goes on to isolate a number of formal features in the modernist writings of poets such as Max Jacob, Jean Cocteau, Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, etc., and compares each of them on the one hand to specific perceptual and cognitive properties, and on the other hand to technical possibilities of the cinema. Hence the ‘esthétique de succession’ [‘aesthetics of succession’], that he describes via the quick visual touches present in poems by André Salmon or Blaise Cendrars (ibid.: 74–6), keeps cerebral excitation up by stimulating surprise and variation. In turn, this drive for succession, as ‘l’utopie physiologique de voir ensemble’ [‘the physiological utopia of seeing everything at once’], is directly satisfied by film technology’s quick and angular succession of shots approximating ‘le cercle parfait du simultanéisme impossible’ [‘the impossible simultaneism of the perfect circle’] (ibid.: 173). Proximity, mental quickness, suggestion, sensuality, metaphor, and ephemera constitute other elements of modernity that cut across poetry, psychology, and film in such a way that Epstein is led to posit a new realm that fuses all three – what he calls ‘the unique intellectual plane’. We’ll return to this complex idea later on, but for now let us note that modernist poetry becomes in large part the transcription of events taking place in the bodily subconscious, the importance of which was disclosed through movie-viewing.

La Poésie d’aujourd’hui mentions no specific movies, and it furthermore singles out pulp literature – which he calls ‘sub-literature’ – as a direct inspiration to modernist poetry before cinema, especially in its reliance on melodrama. Now, for avant-garde thinkers like Breton, Tzara, and Adorno, the melodrama’s celebration of the status quo and its manipulative play of identification, render it unsuited to artistic revolution and instead a substantial tool for conservative forces. Here again, Epstein sees things otherwise. For him, the melodrama provides satisfaction to any number of authentic drives – justice, an ethical worldview, happy endings – and any number of causes for despair – loneliness, exploitation, disappointment, everydayness. Sure, melodramas are cultural opiates; yet taking the psycho-physiological needs of the working masses seriously, rather than holding such needs to be delusions and capitulation, represents a rare recognition by an intellectual of the actual embodied condition of mass workers. Epstein’s aesthetic choices always privilege the embodied other (actual working-class persons) over avant-garde ideological stances, especially when they aim to overcome mass culture as if in all its aspects it was a political bad object.

This theory about modernist poetry should appear to us striking in a variety of ways. To begin with, it precedes by fifteen years similar concerns from the mid-1930s about mass phenomena and the culture industry analysed within both the Frankfurt School in Germany and the Collège de sociologie in France. More specifically, Epstein’s medical training allows him to anticipate Benjamin’s Freudian invocation of shock and innervation to try to explain the psychic and corporeal effects of film (see the section on photogénie and aura, below). Although several ideas akin to those of Epstein’s book were floating in the late war journals such as SIC, Nord-Sud, Littérature, Le Film, or L’Esprit nouveau, no one had yet sought to fully integrate modernity, poetry, cinema, melodrama, the body’s inner sense, and psycho-physiological research within a single framework. It shouldn’t surprise us then that, in spite of several positive reviews, the book’s holistic thesis remained too far ahead of its time. Within f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• LIST OF PLATES
• SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• Introduction: Epstein at the crossroads
• 1 From literary modernism to photogénie
• 2 Avant-garde working-class melodramas
• 3 Technology, embodiment, and homosexuality
• 4 Brittany, the edge of the modern world
• 5 Documentaries and sound films
• 6 ‘A young Spinoza’: Epstein’s philosophy of the cinema Conclusion: Epstein as pioneer of corporeal cinema
• FILMOGRAPHY
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX