The Cinémathèque Française today holds more than 40,000 film prints, but Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher of 1928 was the first. Given a little money to initiate his long-dreamt-of film museum, Henri Langlois procured Epstein’s silent masterwork straightaway—“not only the ultimate expression of ten years of experimentation,” Langlois observed, “but their justification.” For Epstein, however, it was only one in a long line of turning points. After channeling Poe, he repaired to Brittany’s remote islands to make a series of films that now seem positively prophetic in their fusion of ethnographic principles and avant-garde aesthetics. “It was and still is very important to set the camera free in the extreme,” Epstein wrote in 1930, and, indeed, he approached each new work as if the medium itself hung in the balance.

Like many great French auteurs, Epstein (1897-1953) was born outside France. Raised in Warsaw and Switzerland, he attended the University of Lyon to study medicine. The scientific method would continue to inform his experimental approach to filmmaking, but Epstein’s career aspirations were waylaid by his revelatory encounters with cinema and modernism. He struck up a correspondence with the poet and cineaste Blaise Cendrars, who in turn introduced him to a small coterie of impressionist filmmakers and impresarios. One of these, Paul Laffitte, published Epstein’s first books of poetics, La Poésie d’Aujourd’hui, un nouvel état d’intelligence and Bonjour Cinéma (both 1921). “Within five years we will write cinematographic poems: 150 meters of film with a string of 100 images that minds will follow,” he wrote. In the event, Epstein directed his first feature, a commissioned documentary on Louis Pasteur, the following year. His breakthrough came with The Faithful Heart, a dazzlingly hectic melodrama that burned through the full repertoire of impressionist effects. Heralded for his virtuosity, Epstein was characteristically quick to disavow the impressionist mantle: “1924 has already begun, and in a month four films using breakneck editing have already been shown,” he wrote that same year. “It’s too late; it’s no longer interesting; it’s a little ridiculous.”

By turns visionary and polemical, Epstein’s critical writings do not constitute a theory of film so much as the unflagging search for its essence—a mystical something most succinctly described as photogénie. Louis Deluc coined the term, but Epstein was its apostle. Musing on the added value that the film image confers upon reality, Epstein described photogénie in terms of animism: “On screen, nature is never inanimate. Objects take on airs. Trees gesticulate. Mountains…convey meanings. Every prop becomes a character.” His breathtaking use of superimpositions, slow motion and close-ups are rightly seen as underlining this elemental vitality, though Epstein was adamant that photogénie not be limited to a single set of techniques. Accordingly, where most of his contemporaries balked at the transition to sound, Epstein saw fresh territory. In his penultimate work, The Storm Tamer, he experimented with retarding sounds as yet another means of crashing the gates of observable reality. “In detailing and separating noises, creating a sort of close-up of sound, sonic deceleration may make it possible for all beings, all objects to speak,” he wrote after the film. “The mistranslation of Latin scholars, who had Lucretius say that things cry, will thus become an audible truth.”

Long known outside France primarily for The Fall of the House of Usher and The Three-Sided Mirror, Epstein’s richly varied career is finally receiving a fuller accounting in the United States thanks to new translations, critical studies, and the many restored prints included in this retrospective. “The essential generosity of the cinematographic instrument,” he wrote, “consists in enriching and renewing our conception of the universe, making its ways of being accessible to us, that looking and listening cannot directly perceive.” Watching the span of Epstein’s films, we see how much he took this task of revivification upon himself. Edifyingly, Epstein’s conception of cinema dissolves the boundaries between ethnography and surrealism, avant-garde provocation and documentary impulse, surging emotions and scientific observation. His dramas of the senses opened up a rich vein of film narrative later explored by French directors like Maurice Pialat, Claire Denis and Leos Carax, but one must be wary of placing too much emphasis on these lines of influence. For now as then, Epstein’s films and writings remain on the side of what’s still to come. – Max Goldberg, writer and frequent contributor to CinemaScope