Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:01 

February 27, 2016. The Harvard Film Archive screened Jean Epstein’s Mauprat. This is the recording of the introduction by film programmer David Pendleton and film historian Sarah Keller.

David Pendleton  0:15 

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'm David Pendleton of the Harvard Film Archive, and it's a great pleasure to welcome all of you to this evening's screening of Mauprat by Jean Epstein. First of all, I want to ask you to please be sure and turn off any devices that you have on your person that might make noise or shed light during the screening, especially because we'll be watching a silent film with live musical accompaniment. And second of all, I want to thank our partners in this series, Kathy Geritz at the Pacific Film Archive. Our great colleagues in Berkeley, California, did a great job of helping to oversee the importing and loaning of all of these prints. Almost everything that we're seeing is a 35 millimeter print from the Cinémathèque Française. Legendary founder of the Cinémathèque, Henri Langlois, was a great supporter of Jean Epstein's, who was in his heyday in the 1920s and 1930s, but continued to make films into the 1940s. And Langlois befriended him at the end of his life, when he was basically retired from filmmaking. And in recent years, the Cinémathèque Française has undertaken an effort to preserve and/or restore almost all of Epstein's major films. And so we've been watching them on 35 millimeter prints from the Cinémathèque Française, as we will be tonight with tonight's film, as well as with our second screening at nine o'clock. So I also want to thank Emilie Cauquy and the team at the Cinémathèque Française for their help, as well as the French Consulate here in Boston, which is always a great supporter of anything having to do with French cinema. We’re grateful to them.

I won't say too much more about tonight's film. I do want to announce two changes to next week's programs. Epstein's earliest films were made at Pathé, which is now, finally, given the renewed interest to Epstein, apparently getting around to restoring the films that he made for them. In the meantime, it means that they have withdrawn, suddenly, a number of prints. So we won't be able to show La Belle Nivernaise. I’ve been hoping against hope we can get a print somewhere else. The good news is that The Red Inn, which is also a Pathé film, we're actually showing a rare print that belongs to our collection, a 16 millimeter print that was apparently donated to a Cambridge ciné club by Henri Langlois decades ago. So we will be showing The Red Inn. We won't, however, be showing La Belle Nivernaise. We'll be showing instead The Man in the Hispano Car, which is one of the sound films that Epstein made in the 30s, as a director for hire, but it's a film with plenty of charm, as is tonight’s nine o'clock film, as you'll see. And the second thing I should announce is that the very last program in the series, La Bretagne, the documentary from the 30s, and The Woman from the End of the World will both be shown in French without subtitles. That was a mistake on our part; we won't be able to get subtitled prints, we do not have subtitles to project. So you are free to enjoy the visuals, or practice your French, as you prefer.

That's all I'll say for tonight, because I'm very pleased that we're joined by somebody who's not only a great speaker and a very charming person, but also one of the world's foremost experts on Jean Epstein, if I put it that way, co-editor of a great anthology of writings by and about Epstein, because there's a whole other side of Epstein that, of course, we're not really foregrounding in the series, which is the marvelous writings that he wrote about cinema. He was a great film theorist, one of the great film theorists who was also a silent filmmaker—up there with Sergei Eisenstein. And anyway, I'm speaking of Sarah Keller, Professor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. So here to say a few words about Mauprat, please welcome Sarah Keller.

[APPLAUSE]

Sarah Keller  4:13 

Thanks so much, David. And thanks for the invitation to come and say just a couple of words about some of the films in this series. Mauprat is an interesting film in this series for me, in part because it's one of the few films that I haven't seen on a big screen before, so I'm very excited to do that. And I think that that accounts for why I'm a little bit dismissive of it in [LAUGHS] my introduction in the book. So I'm hoping to be pleasantly thrilled by another Epstein film, maybe for the first time. I failed to remark upon it when I wrote the introduction about five years ago, and I had only seen the film on a lightboard at the Cinémathèque Française. So I'm very excited to see it projected tonight. What I did say about the film in the introduction, and a couple of things that are worth knowing about it before you see it: first, it is the first film that Epstein made in and for his own production company, Jean Epstein Productions. It seems like a somewhat odd choice, as he was enjoying, kind of, his first freedom as a producer of his films, as well as a maker of his films. Because it's a historical drama, and it's based on a novel by George Sand, it seems not to have the earmarks of his own project, or something that was very dear to him. But he was a fan of Sand’s, and was really very fond of the story that it tells. You'll see that story, so I won't summarize it here, but I will just say one thing about it, and that is that it tells the story of the education of a rogue, basically, a man who's much in need of a sort of education in emotions and in behavior. And Epstein was very interested in the story, in part because I think he identified with him. I want to just very briefly read something that was printed in a news item as Epstein was making the film. And, I think this speaks to where Epstein was coming from at the moment that he was interested in making this film. I think it plays out even more in the film that follows this, Six et demi onze, which many of you may have seen, because it was screened a couple of weeks ago here. But I think it finds purchase in Mauprat, also. This is him to the reporter at the time that he was making this film: “As a child, I was afraid to go to the cinema. I had heard perfectly reasonable adults speak strongly about horrific details of the conflagration at the charity bazaar where, it seemed, a bishop was burned alive. In my premature logic, I told myself that if a bishop can die at the cinema, all the more reasonable that I would, since I was surely not so well protected by the will of God. I would cry and stamp my feet and enter into mad crises of despair when I would see my parents prepare to go to the cinema. I was never sure they'd return alive.” So this sort of blend of what the cinema can create in terms of worlds, Epstein is very much interested in at this moment. The last thing that I want to say is that—whether it is a pet project of his or not—he imports some of his favorite actors, including Nino Constantini and René Ferté, who appear in many of his films. And so that definitely marks this film as something that is his own. And it also seems to appeal to a popular audience who would have been very familiar with this sort of tale and story in the 1920s in French cinema. And I believe that that's partly because he wanted to build a base for the production company that he was making. But the film did relatively well at the box office, and allowed him to make another series of films that would actually be a bit more experimental in the following two or three years after this, before his production company closed. So I hope you very much enjoy the film. I'm looking forward to enjoying it with you. And thanks very much.

[APPLAUSE]

David Pendleton  8:42 

And let me make one last announcement. Well, maybe two. I feel a little bit compelled to defend Mauprat after that. You'll see Epstein is a master at shooting nature, I think, and you'll definitely see that in the film. But I also have the great pleasure to introduce one of our beloved accompanists here at the Harvard Film Archive, accompanying the film live at the piano, please welcome Mr. Robert Humphreville.

[APPLAUSE]

© Harvard Film Archive