Jean Epstein

The Figure at the End of the World: Revisiting Jean Epstein

Major as he was, Epstein’s output was fragmentary, and his films can prove stubbornly unassimilable for the modern viewer, as packed with visual and aural invention as weighed down with creaking anachronisms. “There are no stories, there are only situations,” he famously claimed, spending a lifetime searching for the piercingly real in the tritest of melodramatic plots and the dreamily fantastical in the blurriest vision of a human face in hyperrealist close-up. For all the insights of his theories about cinema, Jean Epstein was also a working director who had to compromise to get films made, directing serials and orientalist crime capers throughout the 1920s in parallel to his more famous and—ostensibly—more characteristic works.

Postava na konci sveta alebo Návrat k Jeanovi Epsteinovi

Christopher Small

Analýza

Už v skoršom období svojej kariéry hľadal Jean Epstein chvíľky dokonalosti mimo času a priestoru v akomkoľvek spracovávanom žánri, či už išlo o viktoriánsku melodrámu, námornícku epopeju alebo barokový horor. Na rozdiel od iných filmárov a filmárok sa nesústreďoval na konkrétne účinky na publikum – vyvolávanie hrôzy, úzkosti či romantickej túžby –, ale na udržanie určitej nálady.