Audio transcription
For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.
John Quackenbush 0:00
January 29, 2016. The Harvard Film Archive screened films by Jean Epstein, including 6 ½ x 11 and The Faithful Heart. This is the audio introduction by HFA Director Haden Guest, HFA Programmer David Pendleton and film historian Sarah Keller.
Haden Guest 0:19
Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Haden Guest. I'm Director of the Harvard Film Archive. I want to welcome you all to this very exciting evening. This is the opening night of an extensive retrospective that we have organized, dedicated to the great filmmaker Jean Epstein. Really one of the towering figures of French cinema, and yet, I think Epstein has remained under-appreciated for many, many years. Best known in this country, and through much of the world, for one film, and for one idea. The film being his innovative 1928 Poe adaptation, The Fall of the House of Usher. And the idea being that often ambiguous concept of photogénie that he explored and expanded upon in a series of seminal essays. For Epstein and for many of his contemporaries in the silent era, photogénie offered a way to try and define a certain quintessence of cinema as a modern art, a rare essence that lay somewhere within the luminosity, and possibilities of movement that cinema alone, they felt, possessed. A movement both within the image, but also a movement found somewhere within cinema’s emotional, intellectual, and visceral engagement with the spectator. Epstein is renowned not only as a filmmaker, but also as a theorist. As one of the most innovative, one of the most original filmmaker-thinkers, I think, of not only his generation, but of the history of cinema. We could compare Epstein, indeed, to Eisenstein, if we consider the rigor and passion of his determination to discover and demonstrate—both through his writings and through his filmmaking—the unique possibilities of cinema as an art. And really this is a body of work that really needs to be seen in its full entirety. And that's why we are so excited to have this expansive retrospective, which traces the full arc of Epstein's career, and reveals the full complexity of his cinema, which is balanced somewhere between a kind of shimmering fantasy and a poetic realism. I think you will start to understand why Epstein can be seen as a great influence and precursor to such distinct filmmakers as Luis Buñuel, Robert Flaherty, Jean Vigo, even Andrei Tarkovsky, some might say.
Despite his remarkable achievements as a pioneering artist and thinker, Epstein has been strangely overlooked for a very long time. Fortunately, that situation has changed. A number of scholars, a number of institutions, have dedicated themselves to rediscovering Epstein, inspired by the work done to restore Epstein's films by institutions such as the Cinémathèque Française, and inspired as well by the recent availability of Epstein's papers. Among the scholars who've done really pioneering work on Jean Epstein is tonight's special guest, Sarah Keller, who is an Assistant Professor of Art and Cinema Studies at the University of Massachusetts here in Boston. And this is an indispensable book that Sarah Keller co-edited, which is a series of essays. It compiles a series of original essays by senior and junior scholars, as well as a number of writings by Epstein himself. So I encourage you to seek out this volume, which is published by the University of Amsterdam Press.
Before I welcome Sarah Keller to the podium, I first want to thank the Cinémathèque Française for making so many of these beautifully restored prints, such as the two we'll see tonight, available to us. I also want to thank our very dear colleague at the Pacific Film Archive, Kathy Geritz. And they, the PFA, will be presenting an Epstein series later on this spring.
I should note that we're going to be screening Sa tête, the short film from 1929, first, and then we'll be seeing Six et demi onze, 6 ½ x 11, from 1927. There’ll be no break between the films. I should first welcome the man at the piano, Rob Humphreville, and I want to thank him for being here tonight. We're always delighted, we’re always thrilled when Rob is tickling the ivories. Let's give him a round of applause. Rob Humphreville!
[APPLAUSE]
Haden Guest
Please turn off any cell phones, any electronic devices that you have on you. Please refrain from using them. And please join me now in welcoming Sarah Keller.
[APPLAUSE]
Sarah Keller 5:36
Thank you Haden. And thank you also to David Pendleton and the Harvard Film Archive for inviting me to come and speak at the inaugural event of the Jean Epstein series. You'll notice that I say “Epshtine,” which is how Marie, his sister, says it in interviews. But there's debate about this. So if you want to say “Epsteen,” you're very welcome to. You know, there's a song about that in an Astaire/Rogers musical, I think, “Epstine, Epsteen.”
So Haden's actually already said several of the things that I might have said, just to introduce you to Epstein's work. However, I have a few things that I want to share with you that are a little bit more specific to the films that you're going to be looking at tonight. It is such a pleasure to be here with many people whom I'm assuming have never seen these two films. Is that safe to say? Is there anyone who's seen either of these films in this room? Just one person. Fantastic! So we're all going to get to experience it together and it is a real treat. These are two of my favorite of Epstein's films, especially Six et demi onze, which will be shown second. It happens that these films are made at a time when Epstein is sort of at his greatest powers in terms of something that he became famous for, which is creating a mélange between narrative powers and experimental techniques, and putting those two things together in a really lively, provocative way. He, at certain times, disowned his relationship to the avant-garde, but he's clearly still, as you'll see, experimenting with certain narrative techniques, and specifically cinematic techniques, including slow-motion, superimposition, etc., in order to tell a story, in a sometimes elliptical and strange manner.
The other thing that I want to say about these films is that they happen just prior to Epstein's travels to Brittany—and this happens in about 1928, 1928—at which point, he really starts to turn a lot of his attention to documentary. The will to experiment never leaves him, so even within those semi-documentary films that happen after this point—especially Finis Terrae, which is also a masterpiece of his—he's still experimenting visually, but he really sort of turns away from narrative in the way that he is interested in it here. So it's a moment to witness both the sort of pinnacle of his powers and the moment when it's about to crumble a bit, the interest in telling stories in this way.
I wanted to talk a little bit about photogénie but Haden did a fantastic job of doing that. So I will simply note that there's one quality of photogénie that I feel comes out, especially in Six et demi, onze, and I just have to find the page number. Just a second. And, oh, I even marked it. Well, aren't I clever? And that is the way that objects and faces have a kind of vitality of their own when in a specific and special relationship to being filmed. He writes, in 1926, the year before Six et demi, onze, “One of the greatest powers of cinema is its animism. On screen, nature is never inanimate. Objects take on airs. Trees gesticulate. Mountains, just like Etna, convey meanings. Every prop becomes a character. The sets are cut to pieces, and each fragment assumes a distinctive expression. An astonishing pantheism is reborn in the world and fills it until it bursts.” And you'll see that sort of radiant attention to objects throughout both of these films.
The other thing that I just want to point out so that you're watching for it is Epstein's interest in the intersection between the mechanical and technological, and the distinctly human. So, especially in Six et demi, onze, again, you'll see a special attention to things like cars, telephones, and in particular, the camera itself, which plays an important role. You'll notice, and I don't think it is translated in the sub-? It is translated in the subtitles. Well, he gives credit not only to his actors, he names who his actors are who will be playing roles in the film, but also to the lens, and to the sun. And they definitely play characters in that film, as well. So I think that's all that I want to say for the moment because I really don't want to spoil anything about the films before you see them. But I will be here afterwards, if anyone wants to come up and ask questions about them. I'd be delighted to talk with you about them. And I really, truly hope you enjoy the films. Thanks so much.
[APPLAUSE]
John Quackenbush 10:57
And now the introduction to The Faithful Heart by David Pendleton and Sarah Keller.
David Pendleton 11:05
[INITIAL AUDIO MISSING] Harvard Film Archive, here to welcome you to the second evening, this the second screening on the first evening of our Jean Epstein retrospective. I want to ask you, first of all, if you have any devices on your person that might make noise, or shed light, to please turn them off, and please leave them off while the house lights are down.
We're very happy here at the Archive to be presenting this Epstein program, given that Epstein is one of the most important French filmmakers, and the least known among the major filmmakers, I would argue, probably the least well known in this country. He was active primarily in the 1920s and the 1930s. The film that we're about to watch, Cœur fidèle, sometimes translated as The Faithful Heart, is one of his major feature films from the late 1920s. Probably the peak of his career in the late 1920s. And somebody who was championed for many years by Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinémathèque Française, who really helped keep the memory of Epstein alive among the French filmmaking community. And it seems not inappropriate here to mourn the passing of Jacques Rivette, another great French filmmaker, who finally left us at an advanced age, but left behind a remarkable body of work. One of which we’ll be featuring this weekend and next, his thirteen-hour magnum opus, Out One, that we’ll be showing six-and-a-half hours tomorrow and six-and-a-half hours on Sunday, with the same thing happening again next weekend. It seems like a lot, and if you don't need to see the Super Bowl, you could see the first half tomorrow and the second half a week from Sunday. That's my suggestion, although it also gains from being seen all in one, in one massive go. But that's a plug for our upcoming screenings.
To get back to Epstein, I want to thank the Cinémathèque Française for their cooperation, without whom this series would have been impossible. Those who are at the Cinémathèque currently are continuing Langlois’, their founder’s, championing of Epstein by making new prints of almost all of his feature films. However, one of those for which there is no great print available is Cœur fidèle. We actually have a rare 16 millimeter print here in the Archive’s collection, which is what we had planned to show. But that print actually turned out to have some severe problems. We were fortunate to get permission from Pathé to show this beautiful digital version. Pathé did a digital restoration a few years ago, and it actually looks exquisite.
We're fortunate here in Boston and Cambridge. For one thing, we have the presence of musicians like tonight's accompanist, who'll be back here again in a couple of weeks to accompany Mauprat, another one of Epstein's feature films from the 1920s. Performing the live accompaniment this evening will be Robert Humphreville.
[APPLAUSE]
And we're also fortunate because living here in Boston, teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, is one of the world's foremost experts on Jean Epstein. Again, particularly fortunate since he's not that well known in American circles. The co-editor of this anthology called Jean Epstein that I highly recommend for those of you who are interested in reading more, not only articles and essays about Epstein, but translations of his own work, since one of the things that makes him unique was the extent to which he was actually a film, someone who thought about film and wrote what we could call early film theory. So here to say a few words about Cœur fidèle and about Jean Epstein, please welcome Sarah Keller.
[APPLAUSE]
Sarah Keller 15:23
Thank you, David. And thank you so much for the invitation to come and talk about the Epstein films tonight. I'm very delighted to be here and to witness sharing these with people, when they really haven't been as available as many other major filmmakers from the late silent era. Epstein does transition into the sound era, and there are going to be some of those films being screened here, as well, as part of this amazing and comprehensive retrospective here.
Cœur fidèle is actually from 1923. It's one of the earliest of his features. His first film was a documentary that he makes about Louis Pasteur in 1922. And then he makes The Red Inn, and then he makes Cœur fidèle. So it's a really fairly early work. And yet, it's the film that has secured his legacy probably most profoundly, in large part because of two reasons and two sequences from the film. So I just want to alert you to them, so that they don't pass you by without you paying some special attention to them.
The first is not even actually really a sequence, but sort of a device that Cœur fidèle was talked about at great length, when it came out in 1923 in Paris, and that is the close-up. It doesn't sound like it's all that radical a device, but the way that it's being used here in this film is really quite radical. So I would just draw your attention to an early sequence, maybe about ten minutes into the film. It's a story that involves Jean and Marie, John and Mary, a very universal kind of tale. And Jean comes into the bar. And there's a sort of tension that happens. And it unfolds almost entirely in close-ups. So think just a little bit about the radicality of showing an entire sequence that's composed of close-ups, and then attend to those throughout the rest of the film, because they're really being mobilized in some interesting ways. And, I actually just want to take one second to read something that Epstein wrote about the close-up in 1921. Before he had even made a film, he started thinking through the implications of certain stylistic devices. This is from La Poésie D'aujourd'hui: Un Nouvel État d'Intelligence, Poetry of Today: A New State of Intelligence. It's his first book where he talks about the cinema, and it's about maybe a third of the book that he devotes to the cinema. And he has a section that's entitled “Aesthetic of Proximity.” And this is what he says about the aesthetic of proximity: “The succession of details with which modern authors have replaced narrative development, and the first close-ups generally attributed to Griffith, are part of this aesthetic of proximity. Between the spectacle and the spectator, no barrier. One doesn't look at life, one penetrates it. This penetration allows every intimacy. A face is seen under a magnifying glass. Exhibiting itself, it flaunts its fervent geography.” It's starting to sound a little warm, I think! “Electric waterfalls cascade into the fault lines of this relief and collect under the 3,000 degrees of the arc lamps. This is the miracle of real presence. Life made manifest, opened like a beautiful pomegranate and stripped of its covering. Easily absorbed, barbaric. A theater of flesh. No vibration escapes me. A shift in shots upsets my equilibrium. Projected onto the screen, I land on the line between the lips. What a valley of tears, and how silent. The lips become agitated and begin to quaver. They tremble, part, slip away, and flee. Splendid warning for a mouth set to open. Compared to the drama of muscles moving in close-up, how paltry a theatrical performance made of words.” And this is what you're going to see again and again in this film, a drama that unfolds in the very minutiae of muscular changes.
The other sequence that I just want to alert you to is the fairground sequence. And, I want to note, before you see it, that it actually is going to happen twice. And, if you would think just a bit about the changes from one to the next. The first one is the really famous one, it lasts for quite a while. You'll, I think, immediately understand why it was exciting to people. And then it recurs at the very end of the film. And you might just be aware of that recurrence and the difference that's happened in between those two sequences.
I'm really delighted that you're going to get to see this film on the large screen, because proximity, in large part, needs to be seen in that way in order to have that sort of aesthetics of proximity that Epstein is talking about. So I really hope that you enjoy it. Thanks so much.
[APPLAUSE]
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