Rhapsodic shots of poplar trees form the image track for the title song in this “chanson filmée.”

One of Epstein’s earliest sound films, Mor’Vran tours Brittany’s far-flung islands, where even something as commonplace as the delivery of the mail constitutes a perilous contest with nature. “There is no month without mourning,” observes the narration, and indeed we see the city council’s innumerable records of shipwrecks. Attentive to the sea’s danger, Epstein’s camera is nonetheless entranced by the ocean’s roiling beauty.

At first glance a simple ballad of ill-fated lovers, Song of Armor shows Epstein reaching for the culturally distinct forms of expression he thought uniquely available to the sound film (“The human voice possesses accents which have not yet been revealed; from these the cinema will produce its own style”). A fisherman and a rich man’s daughter fall helplessly in love, their romance distilled in a beautiful low-angle shot of the pair walking beneath a canopy of trees. Epstein uses cinema to delineate the interpenetration of reality and fantasy—and the heartbreak that comes of it.