# Le Cinématographe vu de l'Etna

## Introduction

Le Cinématographe vu de l'Etna was Jean Epstein's fourth published book and the second he devoted exclusively to cinema. Many, but not all, of the articles and lectures on cinema he had published or delivered since 1922 are included, sometimes in augmented or revised form, but none of his other contemporary writings on literature and the visual arts. Circumstantial evidence suggests that it was composed and delivered to the printer before the end of 1925 since it fails to include two short but interesting texts, "L'Opera de l'oeil" and "L'Objectif lui-même," both published in the first weeks of January 1926. The seven short essays extend some of the principal theoretical points first enunciated in Bonjour Cinema: film as a universal language; the transformative powers of the camera apparatus that made it as central to the creation of film art as the men who set up the framing and turned the crank. It is perhaps equally notable for its literary flair. The loosely organized, meandering meditations on the diverse theoretical topics he treats are replete with metaphorical turns of phrases and cultural references that are at once suggestive and elusive, illuminating and frustrating. These strategies were and would remain a distinctive feature of Epstein's reflections on the art to which he devoted his life.

– Stuart Liebman

***

## The Cinema Seen from Etna¹

Translated by Stuart Liebman²

[Jean Epstein, Le Cinématographe vu de l'Etna (Paris: Les Écrivains Réunis, 1926).]

Sicily! The night had a thousand eyes. All sorts of smells shrieked at once. An unfurled coil of wire brought our car, swathed in moonlight as if surrounded by mosquito netting, to a halt. It was hot. Impatient, the drivers broke off singing
the most beautiful love song, striking the car with a monkey wrench and insulting Christ and his mother with a blind faith in their efficacy. In front of us: Etna, the great actor who bursts onto the stage two or three times each century, whose tragic extravagances I had arrived to film. An entire side of the mountain was a blazing spectacle. The conflagration reached up to the reddened corners of the sky. From a distance of twenty kilometers, the rumbling at times seemed to be a triumphal reception heard from afar, as if a thousand hands were applauding in an immense ovation. What tragedian in what theater ever knew such a thunderous success? The earth, suffering but held in thrall, exploded during the curtain calls. A harsh shudder suddenly ran beneath the ground where we stood. Etna's tremors telegraphed the vast scale of its calamity. After that, a great silence descended in which one could once again hear the drivers' songs.

The roads at the foot of Etna had been closed as a precaution. At every crossroad, the black shirts demanded our travel authorization. But these soldiers for the most part did not know how to read, and the multi-colored brochure which had covered my tube of aspirin had a greater effect on them than the Prefect of Catania's authentic signature.

At Linguaglossa, the mule-drivers waited for us in front of the flowing lava, black and shot through with purple like a beautiful carpet. The wall of embers advanced by caving in again and again. Under its impact, the houses, badly protected by their holy images, exploded, making a sound like nuts cracking. Huge trees only touched at the bottom of their trunks by the fire instantaneously burst into flames, from their roots to their tops, and burned like so many roaring torches. The day dawned. The mules, uneasy, tensed their nostrils and flattened their ears. Some of the men, feeling helpless, wandered around.

Glorious volcano! I have never seen expressions comparable to yours. The conflagration had covered everything with the same colorless color, grey, dull, dead. In front of one's very eyes, every leaf on every tree passed through all the colors of autumn until, cracked, twisted and scorched, they fell into the fiery blasts. And each naked, blackened tree held itself upright for but an instant during this scorching winter. There were no more birds, no insects at all. Like the roadway of a bridge when a very heavy truck rolls across it, the earth, lined with thin crevices, was continually traversed by tremors. The lava collapsed with the noise of a million plates breaking at once. Pockets of gas burst, hissing as softly as snakes. The inferno's smell, an odor without scent, filled with tingling, acrid sensations, poisoned our lungs to their very depths. Under the sky, pallid and parched, death truly reigned. The battalions of soldiers, bureaucrats, engineers, and geologists contemplated this distinguished natural actor, who rekindled in these democrats an idea of absolute power and divine authority.

As we climbed on our mules' backs parallel to the lava flow toward the active crater, I thought of you, Canudo,³ who threw so much of your soul into things. You were the first, I think, to have sensed how cinema unites all the kingdoms of
nature into a single order, one possessing the most majestic vitality. It inscribes a bit of the divine in everything. In front of me, at Nancy, a room with three hundred people moaned when they saw a grain of wheat germinate on screen. Suddenly, the true visage of life and death, of a terrifying love, appeared, provoking these religious outcries. What churches, if we only knew how to construct them, could accommodate a spectacle like this, where life itself is revealed. To discover unexpectedly, as if for the first time, everything from a divine perspective, with its symbolic profile and vaster sense of analogy, suffused with an aura of personal identity – that is the great joy of cinema. No doubt, there were games in antiquity and “mysteries” during the Middle Ages that produced this much piety and amusement at the same time. In water, crystals as beautiful as Venus grow, born as she was, replete with the most elusive symmetries, correspondences, and charms. A heavenly game, thus do worlds fall – wherefrom? – into a space of light. It is the same for thoughts and words. All life is covered with ordained signs. In order to grow and unite, rocks make beautifully steady gestures as if they were meeting beloved memories. Under the sea, angel fish and those voluptuous organs, the secretive jellyfish, dance. Insects appear as large as battleships, as cruel as the intellect, and devour each other. Ah, I fear the futurists who are itching to replace true dramas by false ones made with whatever is at hand: aviation and central heating, consecrated hosts and the world war. I fear they will only write some third-rate acting scenes for the crystals and jellyfish of cinema. Why does one even need to imagine? The woollen shoes of our mules pawed the site of a veritable tragedy. The earth had an obstinate, human face. We felt ourselves to be in the presence of someone lying in wait for us. The laughter and dazzling shouts of our eight muleteers were all there were. We marched along silently, so sharing a single thought that I felt it in front of us like an eleventh gigantic person. I don’t know if I can make myself understood about this, but the figure with whom we were all preoccupied was the cinema. And what a character it is! It was as if we had come into the presence of an old and powerful man who rushed around, myopic and rather hard of hearing. You waited for a response, but you understood him less than he understood you, undoubtedly because your languages are different and your thoughts unfamiliar to each other. I once had a friend, a quite Europeanized Chinese man. One morning we were studying flowers in the botanical garden; suddenly, my comrade got angry for no reason at all. I was never able to penetrate the insurmountable anger and sorrow with which he surrounded himself much like the Great Wall does his country. Thus, quite often the extreme points of human sensibilities are inaccessible to us, and sometimes an entire soul, full of power and cunning, is forbidden to us. As if in front of one of these [souls], I stood before Etna.

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 re-
born in the world and fills it until it bursts. The grass in the meadow is a smiling,
feminine genie. Anemones full of rhythm and personality evolve with the majesty
of planets. A hand is separated from a man, lives on its own, suffers and rejoices
alone. And the finger is separated from the hand. An entire life suddenly is con-
densed and finds its most pointed expression in this fingernail which mechani-
cally torments a thunder-charged fountain pen. There was a time not so long ago
when hardly a single American drama was without a scene in which a revolver
was slowly pulled out of a half-open drawer. I loved that revolver. It seemed the
symbol of a thousand possibilities. All the desires and desperation that it rep-
resented, the multitude of combinations to which it was a key. It allowed us to
imagine all sorts of endings, all kinds of beginnings; and all of these endowed
this revolver with a kind of freedom and moral character. Is such freedom, such a
soul, more epiphenomenal than the one we claim to be our own?

When the whole man finally appears, he is seen for the first time ever with an
inhuman eye. The place for me to think about this most beloved living machine
was this almost absolutely dead zone extending one or two kilometers around the
first craters. The most careful surgeons prepare their operating rooms less anti-
septically. I slept on the ashes which were warm and moving like the skin of a
large animal. Two hundred meters away, fiery rapids surged from an almost cir-
cular crevice and rushed down the slope to form a river as red as ripe cherries and
as large as the Seine at Rouen. The vapor covered the sky with a porcelain white-
ness. Little gusts of fetid, angry wind raised eddies of ash which fluttered just
above the ground, strange seagulls living at the edge of the gigantic conflagra-
tion. The mule-drivers held the noses of the mules that wanted to flee and could
not be tied up anywhere. Just like a child who plays too close to a fire and who, it
is said, will have an accident, Guichard,⁴ my cameraman, shot a lap-dissolve
whose value no one, I think, will fully appreciate. A tall man suddenly appeared
through the fumes, jumping with incredible temerity from rock to rock along the
crater's edge, like some bizarre guardian angel of a place certainly more propi-
tious than any other to magical transformations. He approached with long
strides. He was old and dry, with ashes powdering every hair in his goatee; the
whites of his eyes were very red, his outfit singed here and there, and he had
about him the general air of a sorcerer. I was not so sure that he was not a real
devil, but he claimed to be a Swedish geologist. While speaking to me he made
gestures with a metal thermometer as long as an umbrella. This man had been
living very calmly for a week solely in the immediate company of this volcano. A
few steps away, he camped under a tent where he could see equally clearly by day
or night and through which the shaking ground stirred a constant current of air.
His pockets were filled with chunks of lava and papers. Taking out his watch, he
noted down the exact time of our encounter. He cupped his hands to form a
megaphone, and his mouth practically at my ear, he shouted some words which I
barely made out: "Today everything looks as if it will remain calm. But yesterday,
an Italian journalist descended half insane.” I already knew this; as we ascended we had met his guides as they were coming down, badly shaken and eager to talk. Where we were, the noise was that of a hundred express trains scorching past a metal viaduct. After a few minutes, the roaring became like silence, propitious to the imagination. And all about us lay ashes.

Two days before, as I left the hotel for this trip, the elevator was stuck between the third and fourth floors from six-thirty in the morning on. The night clerk, already a prisoner in the cabin for three hours, shook his wretched body, softly groaning into the carpet. In order to descend, I had to take the large staircase, still lacking a banister, where workers were chanting insults at Mussolini. This immense spiral of stairs portended vertigo. The entire shaft was lined with mirrors. I descended surrounded by images of myself, by reflections, by images of my gestures, by cinematic projections. At every turn I was caught from another angle. There are as many different and independent positions between a profile and a three-quarter view as there are tears in an eye. Each of these images lived but an instant, no sooner caught sight of than lost from view, already something else. Only my memory could hold on to one of their infinite number, and by doing so, missed two out of every three. Tertiary images were born from secondary images. An algebra and descriptive geometry of gestures came to light. Certain movements were divided over and over; others were multiplied. I tilted my head and to my right I saw only the square root of a gesture, but to the left, this gesture was raised to the eighth power. Looking at one, then the other, I acquired a different conception of my three-dimensionality. Parallel perceptions were in perfect accord with each other, reverberated against each other, re-enforced each other and then were extinguished, like an echo, but with a speed far greater than acoustical ones. Tiny gestures became very large, just as when words spoken as softly as possible into the ear of Dionysius the Tyrant at the Paradise of the Latomies, swell into a booming shout, thanks to the conductive nature of the rock.⁵ This staircase was the eye of another sort of tyrant, an even greater spy. I descended as if moving across the optical facets of an immense insect. The opposing angles of other images cut across and amputated each other; reductive and fragmentary, they humiliated me. For the moral effect of such a spectacle is what is so extraordinary. Every glance brings a baffling surprise that insults you. I had never been seen this way before and I regarded myself with horror. I understood those dogs that bark and the apes that fly into a rage in front of a mirror. I thought myself to be one way, and perceiving myself to be something else shattered all the vain notions I had acquired. Each of these mirrors presented me with a verse view of myself, an inaccurate image of the hopes I had. These spectating mirrors forced me to see myself with their indifference, their truth. I seemed to be in a huge retina lacking a conscience, with no moral sense, and seven stories high. I saw myself stripped of my sustaining illusions, surprised, laid bare, uprooted unfeelingly and presented truthfully, exactly for what I was. I would have
run a long way to escape this spiraling movement in which I seemed thrust down
toward a terrifying center of myself. Such a lesson in egotism in reverse is pitiless.
An education, an entire course of instruction, a religion had patiently consoled
me to be as I was. Everything had to be begun anew.

Even more than this kind of play with tilted mirrors, cinema produces similarly
unexpected encounters with oneself. The uneasiness experienced in front of one's
own filmed image emerges suddenly and is widely shared. By now the story of the
little American millionaires who cried after seeing themselves on screen for the
first time has become a commonplace anecdote. And those who do not cry are
troubled. One should not understand such an effect as merely the result of pre-
sumptuousness or exaggerated coquettishness. For the mission of cinema does
not seem to have been precisely understood. The camera lens is an eye which
Apollinaire would have called surreal (without any relationship to today's surreal-
ism), an eye endowed with inhuman analytic properties. It is an eye without pre-
judices, without morals, exempt from influences. It sees features in faces and hu-
man movements that we, burdened with sympathies and antipathies, habits and
thoughts, no longer know how to see. For anyone who even briefly considers this
statement, every comparison between theater and cinema becomes impossible.
The very essence of these two modes of expression is different. Thus, the other
original property of the cinematic lens is its analytic power. Cinematic art ought
to depend on it. Alas!

If the first response to our own cinematic reproduction in front of us is a sort
of horror, it is because every day we civilized individuals lie (no need to cite the
theories of Jules de Gaultier or Freud) about nine-tenths of who we are.⁶ We lie
without knowing it any more. Suddenly this mirror's gaze pierces us with its am-
peres of light. The inextinguishable source of the cinematic future lies in its ana-
lytic power. Villiers hardly dreamed of a comparable machine to confess souls.⁷
And I see very clearly new inquisitions drawing overwhelming evidence from
films in which a suspect is captured, flayed, and meticulously betrayed in an un-
biased way by this very subtle mirror's gaze.⁸

***

On Certain Characteristics of *Photogénie*⁹

Translated by Tom Milne

The cinema seems to me like two Siamese twins joined together at the stomach,
in other words by the baser necessities of life, but sundered at the heart or by the
higher necessities of emotion. The first of these brothers is the art of cinema, the
second is the film industry. A surgeon is called for, capable of separating these
two fraternal foes without killing them, or a psychologist able to resolve the incompatibilities between these two hearts.

I shall venture to speak to you only of the art of cinema. The art of cinema has been called 'photogénie' by Louis Delluc.¹⁰ The word is apt, and should be preserved. What is 'photogénie'? I would describe as photogenic any aspect of things, beings, or souls whose moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduction. And any aspect not enhanced by filmic reproduction is not photogenic, plays no part in the art of cinema.

For every art builds its forbidden city, its own exclusive domain, autonomous, specific, and hostile to anything that does not belong. Astonishing to relate, literature must first and foremost be literary; the theater, theatrical; painting, pictorial; and cinema, cinematic. Painting today is freeing itself from many of its representational and narrative concerns. Historical and anecdotal canvases, pictures that narrate rather than paint, are rarely seen nowadays outside the furnishing departments of the big stores – where, I must confess, they sell very well. But what one might call the high art of painting seeks to be no more than painting, in other words color taking on life. And any literature worthy of the name turns its back on those twists and turns of plot that lead to the detective's discovery of the lost treasure. Literature seeks only to be literary, which is seen as a justification for taking it to task by people alarmed at the idea that it might resemble neither a charade nor a game of cards and be put to better use than killing time, which there is no point in killing since it returns, hanging equally heavy, with each new dawn.

Similarly, cinema should avoid dealings, which can only be unfortunate, with historical, educational, novelistic, moral or immoral, geographical or documentary subjects. The cinema must seek to become, gradually and in the end uniquely, cinematic; to employ, in other words, only photogenic elements. Photogénie is the purest expression of cinema.

What aspects of the world, then, are photogenic, these aspects to which cinema must limit itself? I fear the only response I have to offer to so important a question is a premature one. We must not forget that where the theater trails some tens of centuries of existence behind it, cinema is a mere twenty-five years old. It is a new enigma. Is it an art or something less than that? A pictorial language, like the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, whose secrets we have scarcely penetrated yet, about which we do not know all that we do not know? Or an unexpected extension to our sense of sight, a sort of telepathy of the eye? Or a challenge to the logic of the universe, since the mechanism of cinema constructs movement by multiplying successive stoppages of celluloid exposed to a ray of light, thus creating mobility through immobility, decisively demonstrating how correct the false reasoning of Zeno of Elea was?¹¹
Do we know what radio will be like in ten years' time? An eighth art, no doubt, as much at odds with music as cinema currently is with the theater. We are just as much in the dark as to what cinema will be like in ten years' time.

At present, we have discovered the cinematic property of things, a new and exciting sort of potential: *photogénie*. We are beginning to recognize certain circumstances in which this *photogénie* appears. I suggest a preliminary specification in determining these photogenic aspects. A moment ago I described as photogenic any aspect whose moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduction. I now specify: only mobile aspects of the world, of things and souls, may see their moral value increased by filmic reproduction.

This mobility should be understood only in the widest sense, implying all directions perceptible to the mind. By general agreement it is said that the dimensions deriving from our sense of direction are three in number: the three spatial dimensions. I have never really understood why the notion of a fourth dimension has been enveloped in such mystery. It very obviously exists; it is time. The mind travels in time, just as it does in space. But whereas in space we imagine three directions at right angles to each other, in time we can conceive only one: the past-future vector. We can conceive a space-time system in which the past-future direction also passes through the point of intersection of the three acknowledged spatial directions, at the precise moment when it is between past and future: the present, a point in time, an instant without duration, as points in geometrical space are without dimension. Photogenic mobility is mobility in this space-time system, a mobility in both space and time. We can therefore say that the photogenic aspect of an object is a consequence of its variations in space-time.

This definition, an important one, is not simply a mental intuition. A number of films have already offered concrete examples. First, certain American films, demonstrating an unconscious and highly precocious feeling for cinema, sketched the spatio-temporal cinegrams in rough outline. Later Griffith, that giant of primitive cinema, gave classical expression to these jostling, intersecting denouements that describe arabesques virtually simultaneously in space and time. More consciously and more lucidly, Gance – today our master, one and all – then composed his astonishing vision of trains swept along on the rails of the drama. We must be clear why these racing wheels in *La Roue* comprise the most classic sentences yet written in the language of cinema. It is because in these images the most clearly defined role is played by variations, if not simultaneous at least approximately so, in the spatio-temporal dimensions.

For in the end it all comes down to a question of perspective, a question of design. Perspective in drawing is a three-dimensional perspective, and when a pupil executes a drawing which takes no account of the third dimension, the effect of depth or relief in objects, it is said that he has done a bad drawing, that he cannot draw. To the elements of perspective employed in drawing, the cinema adds a new perspective in time. In addition to relief in space, the cinema offers
relief in time. Astonishing abridgements in this temporal perspective are per-
mitted by the cinema – notably in those amazing glimpses into the life of plants
and crystals – but these have never yet been used to dramatic purpose. If, as I said
earlier, a draftsman who ignores the third spatial dimension in its perspective is a
bad draftsman, I must now add that anyone who makes films without playing
with temporal perspective is a poor director.¹²

Moreover cinema is a language, and like all languages it is animistic; in other
words, it attributes a semblance of life to the objects it defines. The more primi-
tive a language, the more marked this animistic tendency. There is no need to
stress the extent to which the language of cinema remains primitive in its terms
and ideas; so it is hardly surprising that it should endow even the most inanimate
objects it is called upon to depict with such intense life. The almost godlike im-
portance assumed in close-ups by parts of the human body, or by the most lifeless
elements in nature, has often been noted. Through the cinema, a revolver in a
drawer, a broken bottle on the ground, an eye isolated by an iris are elevated to
the status of characters in the drama. Being dramatic, they seem alive, as though
involved in the evolution of an emotion.

I would even go so far as to say that the cinema is polytheistic and theogonic. Those lives it creates, by summoning objects out of the shadows of indifference into the light of dramatic concern, have little in common with human life. These lives are like the life in charms and amulets, the ominous, tabooed objects of certain primitive religions. If we wish to understand how an animal, a plant, or a stone can inspire respect, fear, and horror, those three most sacred sentiments, I think we must watch them on the screen, living their mysterious, silent lives, alien to human sensibility.

The cinema thus grants to the most frozen appearances of things and beings
the greatest gift in the face of death: life. And it confers this life in its highest
guise: personality.

Personality goes beyond intelligence. Personality is the spirit visible in things
and people, their heredity made evident, their past become unforgettable, their
future already present. Every aspect of the world upon which the cinema confers
life is elevated only if it possesses a personality of its own. This is the second
specification which we can now add to the rules of *photogénie*. I therefore suggest
that we say: only the mobile and personal aspects of things, beings, and souls
may be photogenic, that is, may acquire a higher moral value through filmic re-
production.

An eye in close-up is no longer the eye, it is AN eye: in other words, the mi-
metic decor in which the gaze suddenly appears as a character... I was greatly
interested by a competition recently organized by one of the film magazines. The
point was to identify some forty more or less famous screen actors whose por-
traits reproduced in the magazine had been cropped to leave only their eyes. So
what one had to do was to recognize the personality in each of forty gazes. Here
we have a curious unconscious attempt to get spectators into the habit of studying
and recognizing the distinctive personality to be seen in the eye alone.

And a close-up of a revolver is no longer a revolver, it is the revolver-character,
in other words the impulse towards – or remorse for – crime, failure, suicide. It is
as dark as the temptations of the night, bright as the gleam of gold lusted after,
taciturn as passion, squat, brutal, heavy, cold, wary, menacing. It has a tempera-
ment, habits, memories, a will, a soul.

Mechanically speaking, the lens alone can sometimes succeed in this way in
revealing the inner nature of things. This is how, by chance in the first instance,
the *photogénie* of character was discovered. But with the proper, by which I mean a
personal, sensitivity, one can direct the lens towards increasingly valuable discov-
eries. This is the role of the author of a film, commonly called a film director. Of
course a landscape filmed by one of the forty or four hundred directors devoid of
personality whom God sent to plague the cinema as He once sent the locusts into
Egypt looks exactly like this same landscape filmed by any other of these film-
making locusts. But this landscape or this fragment of drama STAGED BY some-
one like Gance will look nothing like what would be seen through the eyes and
heart of a Griffith or a L'Herbier. This is how the personalities of certain men, the
soul, and, finally, poetry erupted into the cinema.

I remember still *La Roue*. As Sisif died, we all saw his unhappy soul leave him
and slip away over the snows, a shadow borne away in angels' flight.

Now we are approaching the promised land, a place of great wonders. Here,
matter is molded and set into relief by personality; all nature, all things appear as
a man has dreamed them; the world is created as you think it is; pleasant if you
think it so, harsh if you believe it to be. Time hurries on or retreats, or stops and
waits for you. A new reality is revealed, a reality for a special occasion, which is
untrue to everyday reality just as everyday reality is untrue to the heightened
awareness of poetry. The face of the world may seem changed since we, the fif-
teen hundred million who inhabit it, can see through eyes equally intoxicated by
alcohol, love, joy, and woe, through lenses of all sorts of madness: hate and ten-
derness; since we can see the clear thread of thoughts and dreams, what might or
should have been, what was, what never was or could have been, the secret forms
of feelings, the startling face of love and beauty – in a word, the soul. “So poetry
is thus true, and is as real as the eye itself.”

Here poetry, which one might have thought mere verbal artifice, a figure of style,
a play of antithesis and metaphor – in short, something next to nothing – achieves a
dazzling incarnation. “So poetry is thus true, and is as real as the eye itself.”

The cinema is poetry's most powerful medium, the medium most capable of
realizing the unreal, the 'surreal,' as Apollinaire would have said.

This is why some of us have entrusted to it our highest hopes.

***
Langue d'Or¹³

Translated by Mireille Dobrzynski and Stuart Liebman

Almost as much as they hate one another, human beings love one another. And they dream of a prodigious universal tongue that would facilitate their monetary and emotional exchanges. But if the tenacious will to understand each other which led to the development of Esperanto was not checked by the vertigo that stopped Babel's expansion as the tower tapered off in the clouds, that desire was nonetheless in vain. A methodical framework alone is not enough to build the quivering architecture of speech. Patient in their work, facile in their ability to imitate, and logical in their efforts at synthesis, scholars [of Esperanto] succeeded in coining words: leaves without trunks or roots. They also developed a grammar, but without having to incorporate thousands of generations of a hundred thousand living hearts. Artificial and lacking in inspiration, their lingo ended up being forgotten, after having amused a few sufficiently uneducated anarchists; one can not even say that it died, since, strictly speaking, it was never born.

But, springing forth from the dense mass of things, a spark was struck from the tragic friction between peoples; the universal tongue, reigning over the six thousand idioms of the world, was meant to be. It came into being. So many ears pricked up to record its first syllable. And the first syllable emerged without breaking the silence, so that many who were listening too hard still haven't been able to hear it, although it has been speaking for about ten years. In the darkness said to be favorable to telepathic phenomena – that is, to the comprehension of the most remote things and the most secret correspondence between minds – the surprising language was born; its nature was unexpected, easily assimilated through the eye but not through the ear. It isn't read, it is seen, and this act of “seeing” is truly the most nuanced exercise, the most subtle, the most exacting, and the most specialized of all visual exercises. The cinema, both popular and high-brow, familiar and spectacular: a universal language. Its undeniable share of requisite vulgarity produces deep roots that sustain its life. A modern machine of frightening complexity. A golden language, much more expensive than was silence in a time long ago when speech was silvery. Each celluloid word consumes dollars, marks, francs. And it cannot be pronounced except upon the say-so of bankers, pregnant with capital, after signing contracts in which hundreds of thousands are pledged, exchanged, won, promised, lost, divided, and multiplied. Each word must pay for insurance and customs duty, be amortized and rake in a lot. For this word to be pronounced properly – that is to say, to be pronounced in a way that pays, amortizes, rakes it in – some curt, tough, buttoned-up men in black who represent gold, who think gold, who give, protect and recover gold, have decreed and applied a cinematic canon more meticulous and more author-
itarian than the classical rule of the three unities.¹⁴ Something upheld to a greater extent than this rule, probably.

And I can only clumsily express just how difficult this language is. It is agony, like a nightmare in which one fights against sleep, finally to pronounce a syllable in a faltering, liberating breath. The world is made up of four simple elements; film is composed of all the others acting for or against each other, accumulating straightforwardly in sums, and collapsing into pyramids of secondary elements. The human face, so soulful, attacked by electricity. Light, a shower of fire, cooks and reheats the face, corrodes and ripens it, gives it luster, coats and paints it in the colors of passion. The face cracks, is peeled apart, splits in half all the way to the bottom, suffers and laughs, then rises like a revered sun. The touch of amperes inscribes thoughts on the forehead. The arc-light bears the shadow of memories into the eye that it frames, pins to the star's gaze a strength of will, and blows, like God, onto the clay of mouths so that even the saddest feelings about love might appear as a smile. But if the arc-light should blink, farewell to profound perspectives of feeling! May the actor, yielding to the storm of clarity, cease to forget himself and thus reclaim the soul being torn from him. The lens is quarrelsome. Do not think for a moment that it is taking photographs. It displays what is hidden, hides what is displayed, first wants something, doesn't want it the very next moment, composes and recomposes, then resolves its very personal vision despite all the blinkers in ways contrary to any expectations. And, male that it is, it impregnates the film, until that moment said to be virginal, even more unpredictably than human beings are born. Film is also reticent. One evening, we all had to turn our backs on it so it would stop its cruel whims. Our gazes disturbed it: who knew?

And from so many fevers and burns, from so many sweating hands and hearts, from work that wears one down like love itself, what is left? A film image, a reflection of what we wanted, filtered a hundredfold, weakened, faded, wounded a hundred times by the one hundred adverse realities it had to overcome, almost dying, born after at least five months of effort for a life lasting but sixty-five minutes, then, dream that it is, forgotten.

Because it is so complex, this language is also incredibly subtle. All the details pronounced – expressed without recourse to words – simultaneously trigger the words that lie at their roots as well as the feelings that precede them. Then the screen turns on its silent loudspeaker sky. The atmosphere of Swedish films, cold as reformed religion, is unloaded on foreign hearts at the speed of light. Hayakawa's gaze, as heavy as an oath, crushes us white men, who do not know what honor in the East is, or a love without kisses, a fire under ashes, or a fifteen-year betrothal. A wordless telegraphy teaches us the precise meaning of peoples' souls. All around the earth are roads upon roads along which we love and kill each other; seas and still more seas, on whose shores people sit, their chins on their fists, waiting; and cities forty stories high where men fall asleep on their
phone every night and die one day, finally happy, having had no time to notice it.
There is an album of the world's hearts, in sarcophagi made of gelatin.

And this is even more beautiful: in the same way that pleasure and pain in
living things only express the instinct of self-preservation, the film's financial ne-
cessities similarly determine its moral qualities (I dare not speak of artistic quali-
ties; it is obvious that cinema is already more than an art). In order to satisfy its
need for capital, films tend to extend beyond the borders of the country that pro-
duced them. This is not necessary; it could be cut. It is a vital necessity. Cinema
will either be a global form of writing, or it will be nothing more than a kind of
theater made worse by photography. For a long time now, the first American
images have flown above our heads with the lassos of the Wild West. Then we
got to know Ince and his rustic dramas. Today we like Griffith – a brutal Jew and
restrained Protestant – who is the very incarnation of passion. They know little
about the five or six films we could show them. Thus far, Gance, your J'accuse
alone fell from so far high up and down into American hearts that they became
heavier.

***

The Photogenic Element¹⁵

Translated by Tom Milne

The cinema is at that happy period when new forms of expression for thoughts
and human emotions meet with misfortune. If I said that the young arts, the
young sciences, the young philosophies waxed strong on easy successes, you
would not believe me. Their successes were always difficult, blended with the
measure of failure that tempers character. I mean that cinema is in its apostolic
period, an era corresponding in the history of religions to their militant days. And
if I call them happy, very happy, these difficult times cinema is going through, it
is because they alone, through their very difficulty, permit the explosion of great
enthusiasms. Above all, they alone conjure the will and the talents that are the
most valuable, the individual aspect of these enthusiasms. These pioneering indi-
viduals are missionaries sent by the Cause to prepare its triumphs and convert the
barbarians.

Tonight my thoughts cannot but turn to memories of two of these missionaries
for the cinema: Canudo and Delluc. And there must certainly be some of us who
will admit to having been converted to the cinema by one or the other, or possibly
both, and to owing them heartfelt thanks.

Canudo was the missionary of poetry in the cinema; Delluc, the missionary of
photogénie.
As early as 1911, Canudo published an essay on cinema so farseeing that one cannot reread it today without being astonished. In 1911, when cinema for years to come was to be, in both theory and practice, no more than a holiday diversion for schoolboys, a darkish place of assignation, or a somewhat somnambulistic scientific trick, Canudo had understood that cinema could and should be a marvelous instrument for lyricism. And although this new lyricism really only existed then as a prophecy, he immediately foresaw its limits and possibilities, its determine and indeterminate qualities.

The concept of painting was born on the day when color sprang as an abstraction into the minds of our very remote ancestors. Similarly, the concept of sculpture or architecture was born the moment the notion of volume emerged in the human mind. In 1919, Delluc formulated and wrote of this word which for a time seemed magical, and to this day retains its mystery. With the notion of *photogénie*, the concept of cinema as an art was born. For how can one better define the undefinable *photogénie* than by saying: *photogénie* is to cinema what color is to painting and volume to sculpture – the specific element of that art.

If Canudo quickly scanned the reaches of cinema's horizons, Delluc discovered this *photogénie* which is a sort of refractive moral index to this new perspective.

It was Canudo, in those sessions at the Salon d'Automne, who first thought of publicly presenting selected extracts from films, of building up an anthology of cinema. This notion of a cinematic anthology was extremely valuable because, through these fragments of film, it drew attention to cinematic style: it isolated style from narrative. This attempt to analyze cinema's resources should be pursued even more rigorously: by taking not extracts from various films, but images in the strict sense. And not images from various films, but images in a quality of style, a photogenic quality. Those programs at the Salon are in fact still very much in the flow of evolution and refinement today. It is this classification of cinema's resources that I propose should be undertaken more in the spirit of a grammarian or a rhetorician.

An army commander should, I presume, know exactly what armaments he has at his disposal, the range and caliber of the guns with which he is to fight. A writer should know the value of the word combinations he will employ in writing. And to understand this art of writing, he learns grammar and rhetoric, both consciously and unconsciously. But we filmmakers, who should have a detailed knowledge of all the elements of cinematic expression, find any such grammar or rhetoric totally lacking. My aim is to attempt to establish the premises for a cinematic grammar.

We must not, however, yield to facile and misleading analogies. It would be convenient to say: a long shot is like a substantive phrase, and the close-up stressing a detail in the overall view is comparable to an adjective which underlines some quality in the substantive. This would be easy but erroneous, because a detail shot is often more important, more substantive than the long shot, which
exists only in relation to the detail. And where repetition, for example, is often
used as a means to reinforce expressiveness in writing, repetition of the same
images in a film weakens their effect.

The grammar of cinema is a grammar uniquely its own.

Unattended, without words, an air of conviction alights from the screen on
eighteen hundred pairs of eyes. Words slither like wet cakes of soap around what
we try to say. This evening a friend, trying to put everything too precisely into
words, suddenly shrugged twice and said no more. I believed him, as others
might have been persuaded verbally, on the strength of this wearied silence. And
when a scientist takes pains to use words with precision, I no longer believe. I
know his words respond to definitions not within him or me, but outside and
between us, in some lecturer's diplomatic, imagined nowhere. There are, too, at
least twelve words for each thing, and at least twelve things for each word; strictly
speaking, therefore, no word is the word for a thing, and no thing is the thing for
a word. On the line of communication by speech we are interrupted by an unex-
pected static of feelings. Everything remains to be said and we give up, exhausted.
Then the screen lights up its silent loudspeaker sky. How convincing is this lan-
guage dispensed by a square, sputtering eye. The screen captures a theft of auto-
mobiles. Above these heads, between the arc lamp and screen, Babylon passes,
intangible as smoke, reconstructed in flashes of light.

All details that are expressed without recourse to words simultaneously trigger
the words that lie at their roots as well as the feelings that precede them. Just as
the mathematician indubitably demonstrates on paper properties that are not
there, so a thousand eyewitnesses in front of a cinema screen would swear on
their lives to what cannot be there. The film shows a man who betrays; neverthe-
less there is no man and no betrayer. But the ghost of something creates an emo-
tion which nevertheless cannot come to life unless the thing *be* for which it was
created. So an emotion-thing is born. You believe in more than a betrayer, you
believe in a betrayal. Now you need this betrayal; because you feel it, and feel it
so precisely that no other betrayal but this imaginary one will satisfy you.

In this unreality, validated by emotion, authenticity is absurd and universal. If
conventions seem so very out of place here, it is not that they are insufficiently
plausible; on the contrary. These limitations – obstacles so stimulating to the
theater – cannot be permitted by a form of imagination that casts them all aside
from the outset. Whereas in grammar the part – not without effrontery – replaces
the whole, here the whole is substituted for by the part which is better equipped
to excite emotions. “In those times, it was...” says the storyteller; here, instead of
having been, things are, and the time is always today, a continual today in which
yesterday collides with tomorrow at a speed of 3,600 seconds per hour, bringing
past and future into the present.

Already this is more than an art. So it is no longer an art just when the herd of
critics, journalists, artists, actors, orchestra leaders, and pyro-engravers, all regu-
larly twenty-five years behind the times, finally admit that among the arts, cinema
is one. Is it already a language? In the absence of words, it has the chance to
discover a profound precision. But will cinema ever secure seekers of its stable,
unimpeachable, universally perceptible elements?

***

For a New Avant-Garde¹⁶

Translated by Stuart Liebman

I just want to say this: you have to love it and hate it at the same time – and love it as much as you hate it. This fact alone proves that the cinema is an art with a very well-defined personality of its own. The difficulty lies above all in the choice of what is right to hate about it. And if this choice is difficult, it is because it must be revised at extremely short intervals.

Indeed, the best friends of an art always end up becoming infatuated with their ideas. And because art as it evolves goes beyond its rules at every moment, these best friends of yesterday become the worst enemies of tomorrow, fanatics devoted to shopworn methods. This continual overturning of friendships is characteristic of the slow evolution of all the arts.

Thus it is that today at last – at last, but a little too late – some methods of cinematic expression, still considered strange and suspect a year ago, have become à la mode. Being fashionable has always signaled the end of a style.

Among these methods we can chiefly include the suppression of intertitles,
rapid editing, the importance accorded to sets and to their expressionist style.

The first films without intertitles were made almost simultaneously in America
and in Germany. In America it was in a film by Charles Ray, *La Petite Baignade* [The
Old Swimmin' Hole, 1921], distributed and titled here, though only after consider-
able delay. Retreating from its novelty, the distributors were careful to add about
fifteen intertitles to the film. In Germany, it was *Le Rail* [Scherben or Shattered, 1921]
by Lupu Pick. I haven't come here to justify the so-called "American" title – incor-
rectly named, for it is, alas, often French too – that beforehand first explains to
the spectator what he is about to see in the next image, then afterwards tells him
a second time in case he either wouldn't see or understand. Certainly, the sup-
pression of the title has had its value as a new method, not entirely in and for
itself, but as a useful one among others. And Lupu Pick, who must be considered
the master of the film without titles, last season presented us with a kind of cine-
matic perfection, that is, *Sylvester* [*New Year's Eve, 1923*], perhaps the most filmic
film ever seen, whose shadows conveyed the extremes of human passion on film
for the first time. And the theory that is the basis for the film without titles is
obviously logical: cinema is made to narrate with images and not with words.
Except that one should never go to the limits of theories; their furthermost extent
is always their weak point where they give way. For one can't deny that watching a
film absolutely free of intertitles is, for psychological reasons, depressing; the
 subtitle is above all a place for the eye to rest, a punctuation point for the mind. A
title often avoids a long visual explanation, one that is necessary but also annoy-
ing or trite. And if you had to limit yourself to films without titles, how many
otherwise beautiful scenarios would become unrealizable. Finally, there are var-
ious kinds of information that I still believe are more discreet to provide in a text
than through an image; if you must indicate that an action takes place in the
evening, maybe it would be better simply to write it than to show a clock face
with the hands stopped at nine o'clock.

Obviously, in a good film an intertitle is only a kind of accident. But on the
other hand, advertising a film by stating that it has no intertitles, isn't that like
praising the poems of Mallarmé because they don't have punctuation marks?

Rapid editing exists in an embryonic state in the gigantic work of Griffith. To
Gance goes the honor of having so perfected this method that he deserves to be
considered its inspired inventor. *La Roue* is still the formidable cinematic monu-
ment in whose shadow all French cinematic art lives and breathes. Here and
there, attempts are being made to escape from its hold and its style; it is still
difficult. And if I insist on this point, it is so that what I am going to say in a
moment cannot in any way be construed as a criticism of *La Roue*. It contains,
moreover, elements far more noble, more pure, and more moral than the discov-
ery of the rapid editing technique, which seems to me nothing more than an
accident in the film. But if in *La Roue* this is a very fortunate accident, how dis-
agreeable it becomes in so many other films. Today, rapid editing is abused even
in documentaries; every drama has a scene, if not two or three, made up of little
fragments. 1925, I predict to you, will inundate us with films that will precisely
correspond to this most superficial aspect of our cinematic ideal in 1923. 1924
has already begun, and in a month four films using breakneck editing have al-
ready been shown. It's too late; it's no longer interesting; it's a little ridiculous.
Wouldn't our contemporary novelist be ridiculous if he wrote his work in the
Symbolist style of Francis Poictevin¹⁷ where, invariably, he uses the word "re-
membrance" [*resouvenance*] for "memory" [*souvenir*] and "disheartenment" [*désés-
perance*] for "despair" [*déséspoir*]?

If you must say about a film that it has beautiful sets, I think it would be better
not to speak about it at all; the film is bad. *The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari* is the best
example of the misuse of sets in cinema. *Caligari* represents a serious cinematic
malady: the hypertrophy of a subordinate feature, the great importance still ac-
corded to what is an "accident" at the expense of the essential. I do not want to
talk primarily about *Caligari's* shoddy, "ready-made for thirty francs" expression-
ism, but about the principle of a film that is hardly anything more than photo-
graphs of a group of sets. Everything in *Caligari* is a set: first, the décor itself; next,
the character who is as painted and tricked up as the set; finally, the light, which
is also painted – an unpardonable sacrilege in cinema – with shadows and half-
tones illusionistically laid out in advance. The film is thus nothing more than a
still life, all its living elements having been killed by strokes of the brush. Along
with a thousand other things, cinema has borrowed sets from the theater. Little
by little, if it is independently viable, cinema will pay back its debts and this debt
as well. No more than it revived the theater, the work of painters will not succeed
in reviving cinema. Painting is one thing, cinema something else entirely. If the
“Théâtre d’Art” declared at its birth: “The word creates the décor as well as every-
thing else...,” the “Cinéma d’Art” now being born declares: “The gesture creates
the décor as well as everything else.” In cinema, stylized sets ought not and can-
not be. In the fragments of those few films that are almost true cinema, the sets
are anatomical, and the drama played in this intimate physical arena is superla-
tively ideal. In close-up, the eyelid with the lashes that you can count is a set
remodeled by emotion at every instant. Beneath the lid appears the gaze which is
the character of the drama and which is even more than a character: it is a person.
With its imperceptible movements whose religious secret no emotional micro-
scopy has yet been able to reveal, the circle of the iris transcribes a soul. Between
the tuft of the chin and the arc of the eyebrows an entire tragedy is won, then lost,
is won anew and lost once more. Lips still pressed together, a smile trembles
toward off-screen space, within those wings that are the heart. When the mouth
finally opens, joy itself takes flight.

If I criticize three techniques especially misused by modern cinema, methods
that now enjoy a belated vogue, it is because these methods are purely material,
purely mechanical. The mechanical period of cinema is over. Cinema must
henceforth be called the photography of delusions of the heart.

I remember my first meeting with Blaise Cendrars.¹⁸ It was in Nice, where Cen-
drars was then assisting Gance in the production of *La Roue*. We were speaking
about cinema and Cendrars told me: “*Photogénie* is a word...very pretentious, a bit
silly; but it’s a great mystery.” Gradually, much later, I understood how great a
mystery *photogénie* is.

Each of us, I assume, may possess some object which he holds onto for perso-
nal reasons: for some it's a book; for some, perhaps a very banal and somewhat
ugly trinket; for someone else, perhaps, a piece of furniture with no value. We do
not look at them as they really are. To tell the truth, we are incapable of seeing
them as objects. What we see in them, through them, are the memories and emo-
tions, the plans or regrets that we have attached to these things for a more or less
lengthy period of time, sometimes forever. Now, this is the cinematographic mystery: an object such as this, with its personal character, that is to say, an object
situated in a dramatic action that is equally photographic in character, reveals
anew its moral character, its human and living expression when reproduced cine-
matographically.
I imagine a banker receiving bad news at home from the stock exchange. He is about to telephone. The call is delayed. Close-up of the telephone. If the shot of the telephone is shown clearly, if it is well-written, you no longer see a mere telephone. You read: ruin, failure, misery, prison, suicide. And in other circumstances, this same telephone will say: sickness, doctor, help, death, solitude, grief. And at yet another time this same telephone will cry gaily: joy, love, freedom.¹⁹ All this may seem extremely simple; they may be regarded as childish symbols. I confess that it seems very mysterious to me that one can in this way charge the simple reflection of inert objects with an intensified sense of life, that one can animate it with its own vital import. Moreover, I confess that it seems much more important to me to concern ourselves with this phenomenon of cinematic telepathy than to cultivate two or three almost purely mechanical methods too exclusively.

M. Jean Choux, the film critic of the newspaper *La Suisse*, has written apropos of *Coeur fidèle* the lines that I reproduce below and they do not apply solely to this film.

"How close-ups deify. Oh, these faces of men and women displayed so harshly on screen, solid as enamel and more powerfully sculptural than the Michelange-
lo-esque creatures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel! To see a thousand immo-
bile heads whose gazes are aimed at and monopolized and haunted by a single
enormous face on the screen toward which they all converge. What an excruciat-
ing conversation. An idol and the crowd. Just like the cults in India. But here the
idol is alive and this idol is a man. An extraordinary meaning is emitted from
these close-ups. In them, the soul is extracted in the same way one isolates ra-
dium. The horror of living, its horror and mystery, is proclaimed. This pitiable
Marie, this Jean, and this Petit-Paul, have they no other purpose than to be this
Marie, this Jean, and this Petit-Paul? It's not possible! There must be something
more."

Certainly there is something more.

Cinema is its herald.

***

Amour de Charlot

Translated by Jennifer Wild²⁰

All critics, today, from all journals all over the world marvel at Charlot. He de-
serves perhaps a bit more than that.

In England – August 1914 – I saw one of his first films. Laughing entirely too loudly, I endured my neighbors’ discourteous remarks. In those days I would have been stupefied that some might find a sad genius in Charlot. One critic from
L'Opinion – I have completely forgotten his by-line – had not yet recognized the Bergsonian essence of this comic. Stockpiles of cream pies smacked laughter right on his face. No sooner had twenty-eight shots of a revolver at point-blank range created a sense of malaise than a dive with both feet over the piano dissipated it. In those days Charlot was often drunk and always unrefined. He wasn't very honest, or courageous, or truly agile. He was a fiery man, deceitful, and sensuous. Just as in the Gospels of Childhood, playmates dropped dead as punishment for a practical joke. A drunken hiccup disrupted romantic meditations. With love in his heart, a bum no sooner lifted the skirt than mallet blows on the head settled into a series of fainting spells. There were quite a few dead men and a broken whiskey bottle. There was neither pity nor heroism. Drownings and betrayals, wicked deals where everyone was fooled, failed schemes, the right of the strongest, owners of overly strapping ladies, kisses that Charlot landed as knock-out blows. Ordeals, too.

This ordeal was entirely ridiculous. Everything backfired. We roared. It wasn't even sad, since it was well done. And Charlot was so crudely common that he didn't even garner admiration. Women, as I recall, loathed him. I loved him like a vice. It was a beautiful time.

Charlot has become resigned. He is less unhappy and much sadder. Since he hardly drinks, he is not able to forget the grief he has endured. Without alcohol, he is at the mercy of the worst affairs of the heart. Almost honest, devoted and unhappy, he now uses the mallet and the brick to pave his way to a love life, and these crude instruments poorly serve a passion that is almost speculative. But he has learned how to raise his eyes so sorrowfully that the hearts of beautiful girls capsize like small, over-loaded boats. The women catch him by surprise and vice versa. Then he is naïve and even dopey, each time a bit more so. Having frequented only disreputable bars and shady pastry shops for six years, his seductiveness is now that of a virgin. He can't even be accused of inspired love. Everything happens by chance. But if it's about goofing off or eyeballing something, he immediately regains his powers, becomes transparent and invisible, splits himself in two, displays tails when the coin shows heads, smiles and passes out. The chase goes haywire in the stairway. Three wrong directions converge under a table, leaving a total of three individuals blacked out. Except him, everyone takes the wrong door, picks the wrong pocket or opponent. Policemen run into each on the stairway landing. Saved by a ruse, Charlot's face indulges a sumptuous melancholy that is the luxury of safety conquered. The respite after battles leads to heartache. A distracted and desolate solemnity falls like the night. Iris. End.

Your people, o fair king, are not made up of critics who admire you. O doleful prince of a celluloid tale, we are three hundred million who love your heart swimming in the throes of passion.

* * *
## Amour de Sessue

Translated by Mireille Dobrzynski and Stuart Liebman

"The will generates minds of a kind with which reasonable minds have nothing in common."

– Paracelsus

As foreigners, it would be a sacrilege if we could understand this notion of honor swathed in silk. In decent films in which kisses are implied, what do we understand? And what do we understand of you, dancer, waiting in the teahouse for five years, faithful to the postcard sent by your fiancé, a servant in Frisco, who is saving unheard of sums? The sweetness of honorable words and genuine manners, both thoroughly out of place in New York. Young girls kneel to read, vertically and from right to left, the great misfortunes that ocean liners import from across the Pacific. There, life is pitched in white contempt, and sometimes one is lucky enough to hold a boxer prisoner by just his little finger. And there, too, is the even paler laughter of American women who would never marry a man of color. As a student, it is about learning medicine without forgetting the ancestral gods and, just because it is termed a suicide, not losing the strength to perform hara-kiri after lighting the candles and carefully laying out the mat. So faithful is he to such a conception, stabbing himself if he fails, can we understand the nature of his vengeance?

This is beyond us, and yet so cornélien, if cornélien were not so closely associated with the baccalauréat.²¹ Hayakawa, the Japanese actor long associated with Forfaiture [The Cheat, Cecil B. DeMille, 1915], alone lives according to what he ought to be. This excessive probity surprises us, kind and fun-loving daredevils that we are. His pride in the purity and pedigree of his style aims at a poetry that, without him, we are no longer capable of.

If comparisons are to be made with such a face, other actors, with the possible exception of Nazimova, do not fight with equal weapons. They begin from nothing, he from a repose that is already at the point of revealing everything. So much so that if he speaks, his words simply contribute to the breakdown of an immobility that is in itself expressive. Tragic, and like the symmetry of snow crystals, this eloquent stillness by nature yields to the thawing of an emotion that then becomes surprise, excess, relief from expectations: spring in the midst of ice. He hasn't performed yet and he has already dispensed with grand gestures. With this spontaneous expression, a blank check for unlimited amounts of sadness, he appears among extras who are suddenly swept away by his violent, forlorn silhouette. And he cannot shoot some pool or walk across a bedroom without our being deeply moved. What is strictly necessary and sufficient in a determined expression is reflected in his natural dramatic performance, which takes on a surprising per-
spective – indirectly and by chance – if not to say two things at once (or at least to speak vaguely).

He calls the young girl, and before leaving he gives her the god who has died for love as a keepsake. He extends his hand, halfway between the two of them; and he pulls it back, having torn through the distance between them with his twisted fingers. One leaves something. One takes something away. He closes a door. In the garden – even though the lawn lies between us – he listens to a voice with all his might, but not to any of the words. For him, when it stops, everything will be over. Then the close-up flares to challenge us; an eyebrow is raised, but it is still a part of the episode, the anecdote, and the game. A prodigious sense of persuasiveness comes over the room in question. Over and above a dramatic screenplay, the screen violently conveys a colossal horde of burning desires and continual worries, of spiritual things, that *photogénie* graces with holiness and poetic personality.

Neither comprehensible nor reasonable, it is sympathy itself.

## Notes

1. The editors wish to give special thanks to Stuart Liebman for his careful reading of this translation and for writing the notes, with the exception of notes 9, 13-15, and 19-20, which were provided by Sarah Keller.

2. Material added at the end of the essay has been taken from the version of the last part of the Etna essay that was originally published as "Le Regard du verre," in *Les Cahiers du mois*, nos. 16/17 (1925): 9-12. These additions will be placed in footnotes.

3. Ricciotto Canudo (1879-1923) was an Italian poet and film theoretician active in France from the early 1900s. His manifesto, *The Birth of the Sixth Art*, published in 1911, argued that cinema was a synthetic “Seventh Art,” “a superb conciliation of the Rhythms of Space (the Plastic Arts) and the Rhythms of Time (Music and Poetry).” In Paris, he established an avant-garde magazine *La Gazette de sept arts* in 1920, and one of the first independent film clubs, CASA (Club des amis du septième art) in 1921. *L'usine aux images*, a collection of his essays, was published posthumously in Paris and Geneva in 1927.

4. Paul Guichard served as Epstein's cameraman for his Etna documentary, *La Montagne infidèle*, as well as for several of his other films including *Coeur fidèle* (1923) and *La belle Nivernaise* (1924). He also filmed Germaine Dulac's shorts *L'Invitation au voyage* (1927) and *The Seashell and the Clergyman* (1928).

5. Epstein is referring to a famous quarry site near the Sicilian city of Syracuse where the rock formations, named after a legendary tyrannical ruler, amplify whispered sounds.

6. Jules de Gaultier (born 1858; died 1942) was a French philosopher and essayist, known especially for his theory of “bovarysme” (the name taken from Flaubert's novel), by which he meant the continual need of humans to invent themselves, to lie to themselves.

On page 11 of "Le Regard du verre," Epstein introduced this paragraph in a slightly
different way: "The lenses of the cinematographic eye possess two major original properties on which all cinematic art should depend. The first of these qualities is its analytic or psychoanalytic force (without any need to bring in Freud or Jules de Gaultier)."

7. Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1838-1889) was a French Symbolist writer and close friend of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. He was perhaps best known for his novel *L'Eve future* (1886).

8. On page 12 of "Le Regard du verre," Epstein concludes this part of the essay as follows: "But I do not wish to say that one ought to work in cinema by following certain theories, neither these nor any others. The symphonies of movement that have lately become à la mode, are now very irritating. Caligarism only offers photographs neither better nor worse than those in the Salon des Artistes Français. Pretentious styles appear as soon as inventiveness ceases, in cubism as much as in 'rapid' montage, or in the sort of cinematic subjectivism that has become ridiculous because of its use of superimpositions. One can only write if you yourself feel and think. I would like to board each of my films the way a traveler does who arrives at the next to last minute with six trunks still to register, a ticket to buy and a seat to locate. He leaves, but does he know where he is going? God's grace is the sole timetable without slip-ups. He arrives in the country of surprises. It is the land that has been promised to us."

9. This chapter first appeared in translation by Tom Milne as "On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie," *Afterimage*, no. 10 (Autumn 1981): 20-23; it was reprinted in *Abel*, pp. 314-318, and appears here with minor changes by Stuart Liebman.

10. Louis Delluc (1890-1924) was one of the first film critics in France to publish a daily column, as well as collections of his essays on the cinema. By 1920, he turned to scriptwriting and directing. Epstein served as his assistant on the film *Le Tonnerre* (1921).

11. The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Zeno (490-430 B.C.) was famous for creating paradoxes about, among other things, motion, distance, and time.

12. Epstein uses the term *cinégraphiste*, a synonym for a film director, but one very aware of the graphic dimension of cinema, which was often used in French critical discourse during the late 1910s and 1920s. He thereby establishes a parallel between a cinema artist and the "draftsman" (*dessinateur*) in the first part of the sentence.

13. Literally this title is translated as "Golden Language," which Epstein takes up in the essay; it also echoes *Langue d'oc* (a dialect associated with southern France) and its counterpart of *Langue d'oïl* (the dialect from which modern French is derived), sounding out Epstein's interest in the localizable facets of a global/universal language.

14. The so-called "law of three unities," — it regulates a play's action, place, and time — was first sketched by Aristotle in his *Poetics*, and ultimately received its most restrictive, "neo-classical" form in seventeenth-century France in the works of Molière and Racine. The concepts held that a play should have one main action, with no or few sub-plots; it should be staged in a single physical space and not represent more than one place. Finally, the action should occur over no more than 24 hours. Epstein's own cinematic practice, as well as that of many of his contemporaries, radically contested this "law."
15. This chapter first appeared in translation by Tom Milne as "The Photogenic Element," *Afterimage*, no. 10 (Autumn 1981): 23-27, and is reprinted here with minor corrections by Stuart Liebman.

16. This chapter first appeared in translation by Stuart Liebman as "For a New Avant-Garde," in *The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism*, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), pp. 26-30; it was reprinted in *Abel*, pp. 349-353, and appears here with minor corrections by Liebman.

17. Francis Poictevin (1854-1904) was a minor French Symbolist writer and notorious dandy who served as the model for the character Des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysman's famous novel. À rebours (1884), translated into English either as *Against the Grain* or *Against Nature*. http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joris-Karl_Huysmans.

18. The Swiss francophone poet and novelist Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961), Epstein's early mentor, helped him publish his first books on French poetry (La Poésie d'aujourd'hui, 1921) and the cinema (Bonjour cinema, 1921) with the avant-garde Parisian house Éditions de la Sirène. Cendrars also wrote several early essays on film in the late 1910s and early 1920s that were eventually published in his L'ABC du cinema (Paris: Les Écrits-vains Réunis 1926).

19. Epstein is here outlining an intuition of what Lev Kuleshov and Vsevolod Pudovkin demonstrated in their "Mosjoukine Experiment."

20. Special thanks are due to Anne Magnan-Park for her insightful assistance.

21. The French adjective *cornélien* refers to a situation in which love and duty conflict. The term derives from the French dramatist, Pierre Corneille (1606-1684), whose works famously stage dilemmas that force characters to choose between passion and honor, and then to suffer the tragic and inevitable consequences of their choice. Epstein disparages the term's superficial popularity among the French *baccaulauréat* exams.