# Le Cinéma du diable

## Introduction

Epstein discusses film in light of great technical discoveries that have been questioning political institutions, scientific and religious dogmas since the Middle Ages. Celebrating the rebellious spirit which lies at the crux of the printing press, the astronomical lens, and medical dissection, Epstein provocatively states, “Evil should be considered a benefactor to humankind.” In the wake of these breakthroughs, the cinematographer sets the base of a libertarian philosophy inspired by evil, for the optical device magnifies movement in its slightest variations and reveals *photogénie*. Cinema exerts a subversion of literature, reason, and logic alike by exposing the viewer to a new universal language. Influenced by the latest developments in quantum physics, Epstein devises a conception of cinema that expresses the relativity of space and time through the use of editing, close-ups, slow motion, and time lapse. The last section of the text develops a contrary stance: despite its “evil” nature, cinema should also be regarded as a cathartic experience for the masses. According to Epstein, the cinematic spectacularization of violence and subversion is necessary because it neutralizes the viewer’s negative impulses and therefore reinforces the stability of the social body. *Le Cinéma du diable* thus poses a challenging paradox: while the film medium is intrinsically and historically subversive, it should also be used as a conservative device that aims at social control.¹

– Ludovic Cortade

***

## Indictment

Translated by Franck Le Gac

[Jean Epstein, “Accusation,” *Le Cinéma du diable* (Paris: Éditions Jacques Melot, 1947), pp. 11-20.]
Up to the years 1910 to 1915, going to the cinema constituted a somewhat shame-
ful, almost debasing act, and no person of quality ventured into it until pretexts
had been found and excuses made. Since then, the spectacle of cinema has un-
doubtedly earned a few titles in nobility or snobbishness. Meanwhile, to this day,
the arrival of a fairground cinema stirs trouble and disapproval among honorable
people in some counties. There are even some small towns whose scarce and
struggling theaters remain disreputable places where the local reputable citizenry
would not be seen without embarrassment.

In truth, in this mid-twentiesth century, few people even among believers dare speak the Devil's name, so deft has the trickster been at exploiting the blunders of both his enemies and followers in order to shroud himself in a thick veil of ridicule – not unlike the way hands have to dabble in ink to get to the cuttlebone. Yet how many moralists, even non-believers, loudly claim that cinema is a school of stupefaction, vice, and crime! In Christian terms, what does that amount to, if not the idea that the phantasmagorias of the screen are inspired by the devil to defile humankind?

Should it come as a surprise, in fact, that the Devil is taken as the instigator of
the moving image, since he has so often been held responsible for other achieve-
ments of human ingenuity? Diabolical, the invention of the telescope which, as he
foresaw, caused Roger Bacon to be thrown in jail for twenty years; which exposed
the old Galileo to the severity of the ecclesiastical court and to imprisonment; and
which terrified the cautious Copernicus to his deathbed. Diabolical, the invention
of printing, whose pernicious use religious authorities and their secular counter-
parts rushed to control immediately – for long centuries and counting. Diabolical,
the study of the human body and medicine, condemned by St. Ambrose; anatomy
and dissection, banned and punished with excommunication by Boniface VIII.
Diabolical, da Vinci's secret plans and his dreams for a machine that would rise
up in the air. Tricks of the demon, automatons, be they the work of a saint, shat-
tered to pieces by another saint; the first steamboat, which Papin could not spare
from the terrified wrath of a fanaticized people; the first automobile, Cugnot's
fardier, a steam car which met with a similar fate; the first hot-air balloons, which
pious countrymen tore to shreds with their pitchforks; the first railroads, which
illustrious scientists accused of spreading plague and madness; and finally – to
put a stop to an enumeration that may go on forever – the cinematograph.

In this medieval mindset, which has not completely disappeared, the Devil ap-
pears as the great inventor, the master of discovery, the prince of science, the
toolmaker of civilization, the master of ceremonies for what is called progress.
Thus, since the most widespread opinion holds the development of culture as a
notable benefit, the Devil should mainly be considered as a benefactor of human-
kind. However, faith has not yet gotten over the divorce that separated it from
science, which remains suspect in the judgment of many believers and is often
cursed as the impious work of the rebellious spirit.
In primitive society, priest and scientist at first were one. Then, as religion froze its doctrine into dogmas allowing for little variation, science evolved by formulating propositions farther and farther apart from the traditions of theodicy. The disagreement came to tear the spirit into two enemy parts. Through force or persuasion, through the authority of revelation or the subtlety of reasoning, humans long tried to re-form the original unity of their knowledge, both supernatural and natural, either by seeking to subject science to religion, or by trying to reconcile the two harmoniously. That was in vain. Faith repudiated science; science excluded faith. And who, over the course of centuries, enticed a number of orthodox magicians onto a heretical path, turning them into black sorcerers with obscure alchemists for students, the forerunners of lucid scientists? Who if not God's enemy, Satan?

More specifically, the Devil found himself accused of continuously renewing human instruments. In fact, tools have exerted a decisive influence on the evolution of thought that saw cosmogony rise up against theology. As a general rule, each time humans create an instrument after their own idea, the instrument in turn and in its own way reshapes the mentality of its creator.

If, with the help of the Devil, humans invented the telescope, the telescope invented the images of the sky, which compelled Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Laplace, and so many others to think in a certain way rather than another: after these images and not after others. Without a telescope to animate and direct their intelligence, these discoverers could not have discovered anything, nor could they have produced any of their grand theories; and most likely, we would still imagine the earth as immobile, set in an inextricable entanglement of stars revolving around it. In equal measure, the optical mechanism of lenses and the intuitive and deductive organism of humans have played a role in establishing the Copernican system, the laws of Kepler, and a whole magnificent movement of thought that resulted in the current Einsteinian relativism, beyond which it will probably keep expanding.

This scientific and philosophical movement – one of the most important in the history of culture – has mostly been fueled and guided by constantly new appearances collected by telescopes in the peripheral, astronomical universe since the fifteenth century. This effort aims to explore the realm of the infinitely great, and has given rise to a vast metaphysics which should be called a metaphysics of the telescope, for telescopic and macroscopic instruments of this kind play the role of primordial operators in it. Indeed, the existence and use of an instrument is at the root of the immense, immeasurable difference between stages in the general philosophical, religious, and psychological development of a contemporary of Ptolemy and a contemporary of Einstein (a difference that exists from a certain point of view, which encompasses a very wide range of the mind).

A second, large body of scientific and philosophical doctrines originated in another type of instrument – the microscope. Without the microscope, for in-
stance, there would probably not have been any microbes or microbial theories: no pasteurization or glory for Pasteur. There again, lenses provide – that is, they produce – images, select them in order to make them visible within the invisible, separate them from what will remain unknowable, suddenly raise them from non-appearance and non-being to the rank of perceptible realities. And this first selection, on which the whole ulterior development of thought depends, is the product of the instrument alone, according to the arbitrary law of its particular similarities and receptivity. A given magnification and a given coloring make a given form appear, a form out of which a new conception will emerge. If observers did not have this magnification or this coloring at their disposal, the form they derive from formlessness would never be promoted into existence, nor would its theory. And another magnification and another coloring would present a different appearance, leading to a different medicine, to other cures perhaps. The instrument, which in time may more or less be controlled, at its inception involves a completely random empiricism that directs thought according to the data it does or does not provide.

Stemming from the examination of the microcosm, an ideological current developed later but at a phenomenal pace, yielding today's quantum physics and wave mechanics – both systems which will manifest their force of expansion for a long time to come. This movement of thought receives its impetus and its primary orientation from perpetually renewed appearances, which have been for scarcely a hundred years collected by microscopes, ultramicroscopes, electronic hyper-microscopes, spectroscopes, etc., from the so-called central universe: cellular and nuclear, molecular and atomic. In this instance, the goal is to discover the infinitesimal, and multiple biological and ultraphysical speculations have come out of this in-depth exploration. They constitute the group of what should be referred to as the philosophies of the magnifier, since this type of instrument is their main operator.

There is a hierarchy in the world of machines. Not all of them are key instruments such as those of enlarging or magnifying optics, whose influence stimulated and transformed the life of ideas as a whole. But there are no tools, as humble as they might be, whose use has not more or less marked our mentality and our customs in the long term. Undoubtedly, the cinematographic instrument itself reshapes the mind that designed it. The question in this case, rather, is whether the reaction of the creation to the creator has a quality and magnitude that justify a suspicion of participation in the diabolical work perpetually opposed to traditional permanence.

In this instance, it is not only about the superficial mischief denounced in accusations of immorality against such-and-such film restricted to audiences sixteen and older, which has nothing specifically cinematographic to it. The genuine trial of the moving image introduces problems of a more general scope. Does the cinematograph belong in this category of machines, of operators that, like the
telescope and the microscope, discovered vast original horizons in the universe, of which we would know nothing without these mechanisms? Is it able to bring within the range of our perceptions domains so far unexplored? Are these new representations bound to become the source of an intellectual current so deep and wide-ranging that it could alter the whole climate in which thought moves, that it could deserve the title of philosophy of the cinematograph? Finally, if the screen truly announces its advent, is this philosophy part of the anti-dogmatic, revolutionary, and libertarian – diabolical, in a word – lineage already comprising the philosophies of the telescope and the magnifying glass?

The answers to these questions are not self-evident, as the cinematograph is only fifty years of age and has wasted three quarters of this half-century, in a sense, providing public entertainment, believing it was just an art of spectacle, duplicating the novel and the theater, becoming an industry and a commerce, neglecting the development or even the plain acknowledgment of all its other, less lucrative powers. This gilded make-up and the moving eloquence of the “seventh art” were not able, however, to completely conceal a few signs that let us know that the ghosts of the screen may have something else to impart to us than their fables of laughs and tears: a new conception of the universe and new mysteries in the soul. The reprobation of professional virtue-mongers with their petty scandals conveys an immense, deep-rooted anxiety in the style of the common morality – yet one whose signification can no longer find its full expression. Still, a few of these upholders of the present order know that their tremor of fear and indignation does not only owe to a richly sensual image. Their fear comes from farther away and encompasses more: it can sense the monster of novelty, of creation, pregnant with all the fast-transforming heresy of a continuous evolution.

Let us open the proceedings. The cinematograph pleads guilty.

***

## To a Second Reality, a Second Reason

Translated by Sarah Keller

[Jean Epstein, “A seconde réalité, second raison,” *Le cinéma du diable* (Paris: Éditions Jacques Melot, 1947), pp. 219-233]

That the senses deceive is the most clichéd platitude. It implies that reason – which one also calls common sense – can in unreliable data discover and correct errors committed by five or ten other deficient senses. If the lesson we have been taught by the cinema had to be boiled down to one sentence, it would be this: in its own way, reason deceives us as much as the senses. Our conclusion, itself powerfully logical: how can reason, which works with the results of a deceived
sensibility's experience, yield anything other than a quintessence of misconceptions?

Behaving like a complex, sensorial super-organ, the cinematograph provides new images of the world, which reason suspects at first of falseness, even more than it would with organic and natural data. Nevertheless, though working with information received secondhand, as a sub-part of the brain, reason likes to present itself as some manner of super-reason, with the authority to overturn the judgments arrived at by simple reason on the grounds that, because they are ill-informed, they are therefore incorrect.

Thus, in the most general way, thanks to the *photogénie* of movement, the cinematograph shows us that form is only one unsettled state of a fundamentally mobile condition, and that movement, being universal and variably variable, makes every form inconstant, inconsistent, fluid. Solids suddenly find their supremacy threatened; they are but one particular genre of appearances within systems of ordinary experience on a human scale, which are either in constant motion or only slightly and uniformly varying. Fluidity – the reality of the cinematographic experience – is also the reality of a scientific outlook, which sees in every substance a gaseous structure.

Another important difference between the notions of first reason and second reason is due to the extreme manner in which the cinema mobilizes spatial relations, which is another aspect of the *photogénie* of movement. On the screen, the part can be equal to or greater than the whole. This seemingly absurd correlation, inadmissible to common sense, must nonetheless be admitted as valid, not only in the cinematographic domain, but also in the realm of the greatest mathematical generality, that of set theory.

A third, critical difference between the reality that is directly perceptible and the reality of the screen, and between the two corresponding kinds of reasoning, again stems from the *photogénie* of movement when it functions in a temporal perspective. As is its custom, the screen presents events in a rhythm of successes more or less rapid than that of normal observation. The ability to discern either the acceleration or slowing of one world in relation to another presupposes a constant speed of movement, common to both, which allows us to establish a comparison. Indeed, this constant does exist: the speed of light. Moreover, this speed – because we don't know any greater velocity and because it guarantees practically instant transmission of every signal – universally serves to mark the present as the starting point for every series, the zero coordinate of time. When an electric discharge occurs in a stormy atmosphere, we know it first by lightning, then by thunder, because the light travels through space faster than sound. It is this quantitative difference in the speed of travel that separates the lightning from the thunder, creating a separation, an interval, a relief, a perspective which we call time, which we believe to be time. If every message that reached us construed the spatial distance in exactly the same way, we wouldn't be able to identify
a notion of time as distinct from space. Between the sight and the sound of a soccer ball bouncing beside us, we note no passage of time. Between the sight and sound of the same ball falling a few hundred meters from us, we already observe a slight lapse in time. This can only be the result of what is different in the two experiences. And yet what has changed is simply a spatial distance.

It's not that, from this perspective, time doesn't exist; rather, it's the allegorization of a certain way of negotiating distance, of a certain action in space, which we estimate by comparing it with the displacement of light. And if the cinematograph manages to create new temporalities, it is precisely because it knows, through acceleration and slow-motion, how to modify the relationship usually observed between the natural movement of people and things and the standard displacement of rays of light. Here, too, time amounts to being only the space consumed, through a quantitative difference with the consumption of space by light. However, in this case, there isn't a virgin space, a place of nothingness where no thing resides, nothing happens. The expanse exists only insofar as it has been traveled; it is space that has been acted upon, traveled through, negotiated; it exists only if it is also time.

In both reality and in classical models, space and time constitute two separate frameworks, where things coexist or occur in series following an unchanging order. Here, phenomena can be localized and assessed with certainty, through means of a system of fixed sizes linked to an absolute standard. This absolute determinism, this fixisme, stems from the fact that here, space and time, which constantly remain as they are, condition a continuity or a discontinuity always equal to itself in all its points, in all its moments. When there is movement in this homogenous domain, it can only be uniform movement or uniformly accelerated or slowed down. As a result of the limited degree of these variations and the slowness with which they occur, this movement grants forms a relative permanence and gives the field in which they exist an apparent symmetry. There derives from all of this an ideology whose multiple branches, while they may contradict each other on a host of points, are all in agreement as to being, in general terms, philosophies of solidity and permanence.

For example, in matters of religion, there is but an immutable God, which is the ultimate conceit, but a conceit to which everything relates and from which everything receives its prize of being unvarying for all eternity. Mathematics, at this stage, is the science of finite numbers only, wherein the Greeks endeavored to exclude any suspicion of the infinite with a trepidation that still resurfaces among many of our contemporaries when confronted with anything that doesn't calculate precisely. Euclidian geometry isn't conceivable anywhere other than in a solid world, in the experiential framework within which it was born. If our habitat were not on terra firma, but were liquid or gaseous, if a Euclid of fish or bird intelligence had composed works of aquametry or aerometry, we wouldn't have such rigorous notions about sea swells or the symmetry of the winds. All physics
taught in the schools – even when it deals with liquids or gases, to say nothing of
radiation – takes the law of solids both as its point of departure and its culmina-
tion. Moreover, the very concept of laws implies permanence and rigidity. All
science is but a search for this permanence, for an invariable law of relations
bridging the changes in things, and that remains immutable at the very heart of
that which isn't stable.

In cinematographic representation, space and time indissolubly unite to make
a space-time framework in which things coexist or succeed each other in an order
and at a pace that can be variable to the point of reversibility. There, in order to
define phenomena, there are only systems of shifting relationships that cannot be
linked to any fixed value. This nearly total mobility, this general relativity, defines
a domain that does not always remain as it has been. Continuity on screen is
heterogeneous, because the movement that reigns there is not only variable but
variable in an unpredictable fashion, variable with inconstancy, variable to the
point of being able to reach relatively enormous accelerations and decelerations
that can profoundly alter the nature of first reality. In such a domain of move-
ment, the form is not retained; symmetry disappears. Two instantaneous, succes-
sive shapes of the same object cease to be super-imposable. From this is born an
ideology that cannot be based on the experience of a world of solids: it is rather a
philosophy of the fluid, where nothing and no one are what they are, but become,
rather, whatever they become. In this sense, one could say that the cinematо-
graphic universe is Sartrean, but its existentialism isn't limited to psychology and
morality; it is also and foremost physical, geometrical, mathematical, and logical.

In a universe where everything moves and changes, one risks losing all sense of
rule, apart from those laws defining this mobility and change. This may explain
why one already sees some slack in the defining relations of ultra-physics and
ultra-mechanics, which have become more flexible. In the infinitely small, as in
the cinematographic universe, the invariable has been eclipsed, which may point
to its uselessness and portend its disappearance. The scholar, the philosopher,
and the cineaste all wonder with deep worry what the power of the mind will be
in worlds where permanent structures that seem necessary to any kind of knowl-
edge are loosening, dissolving, and fading away. Probably, like a last haven of
limited security, there will remain the law above all laws, the law of large num-
bers: probability. Except that this is not a true invariable, but a substitute, or ex-
pedient, presented in the form of a limit that is more or less problematic in terms
of variance. It is not a law that characterizes an order; instead it is an indication of
the failings of the absence of laws, which reveals the deficiencies that prevent us
from perfecting disorder.

It isn't surprising that people are anxious as they realize the importance of
change in their own experience and thought. Again, so long as the new reality
seemed destined to remain a rarity, one limited to laboratories where it was pro-
duced at great cost and effort, its revolutionary influence seemed interesting only
to a small number of the most learned speculators, whose theories could hardly have an appreciable impact on practical life, on common sense. But all of a sudden there is Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Bikini islands, with the splitting of atoms suddenly emerging in human customs and morals, bringing far more than the power of a weapon of war – the proof that all we have imagined of the strange organization of the infinitely small is not an utterly wild dream. And then there is Freudian therapy affirming, through the criterion of usefulness, the existence of a deep soul in which the eccentricities of behavior are no longer imaginary, either. And finally there is the cinema, which, playfully it sometimes seems, publicly translates the universe through forms even more confused, more preposterous than all those that scholars managed secretly to guess. Atom-splitting, psycho-analysis, cinema – this grouping, though disparate in appearance, combines three methods of accessing a second reality where rational logic may well not suffice.

It is necessary, however, to point out that this irrationalism now appearing on the cultural horizon is in fact excessively rational and, in a sense, even more rational than the Cartesian method of blind and exclusive faith in the infallible rightness of rational judgment. It is reason itself, in fact, that warns us of its own disadvantages. It is the critique effected by the second reason that reveals the gaps and abuses of the first reason. If a certain public acutely feels the development of irrationalism in the contemporary mentality as a danger, we must also recognize that the despotic expansion of logic that has characterized thought in the preceding centuries has also been fraught with peril.

Though necessary at first, it is misguided to try to rationalize everything, to analyze everything and reduce everything to an abstraction; to attempt everywhere to separate the thing from its attribute, the form from movement, the object from its number; to coerce the mind into valuing only that part of itself formulated according to the classical rules of spoken and written expression. Vocabulary, grammar, and syntax are the machinery with which we translate ideas, which are above all images. But this machinery cannot function without betraying the thought-image: without misrepresenting it; without either impoverishing it or weighing it down; without simplifying it or overloading it, alienating its original sense and sincerity. The more a sentence is a sentence, the more beautifully formed it is, the more it risks being a thick accumulation of lies. From Racine to Valéry, the great art of the writer is the game that has become increasingly difficult in which, according to the rules, he requires the reader to guess the emotions the text hides while claiming to express them. That in the end, nine out of ten readers may not understand anything, or understand whatever comes to their minds, is the ultimate achievement of this style. The author's thought and the psychology of his characters are just word games.

Thus language transformed that wild and shadowy habitat for feeling that is poetry into a French garden, drawn geometrically, fallaciously clear, and then led it to degenerate into a fallaciously obscure labyrinth just as much as a perfectly
ordered masterpiece, and definitively purged of all sincere emotion. In scientific and philosophical domains, where the sentimental trend develops with less force, rational thinking has made out even better. Words have proliferated like a cancer, spreading a Taoist nominalism, casting a veritable magic through which it is enough to name a thing to bring it into being. The first concrete reality is nothing more than a memory of a distant starting point for so many systems that reason derives from itself, and, having never met its own image, it takes this reflection as if it were a certified copy.

All of this is too specious for it to last indefinitely. Over the last few dozen years, there have emerged islands of another, scandalous reality – a reality that refuses to conform precisely to a rational framework. There, logical thought finds itself disoriented and at times impotent. The game of induction and deduction misfires, fails. To understand the innovation in the structure of things, we need innovation in the nature and organization of our thought processes as well. In returning to the concrete – but to a second form of concreteness – we develop and restore to favor an ancient mode of thinking through images and analogies, through visual representations and metaphor, which had fallen nearly into obsolescence. This analogical and metaphoric order pervades the more narrowly rational order, adding to it but not necessarily destroying it, much as a knight on a chessboard, with its indirect, bounding progress, makes its way rectilinearly through other pieces that advance in straight lines, and joins with them to complete an overall strategic position.

The majority of the islands of the new reality are difficult to access. Only shrewd physicists and audacious psychiatrists manage to get to them – and only by breaking in. Only cinema invites the general public in. To even moderately attentive viewers, the screen shows at least a hint of the fluid and metalogical universe, of a mobility with four variables, of a becoming that conforms to no standards, of a reality that is just an inconstant association among numerous movements. And even the inattentive spectator receives from film a mental orientation that encourages him to think outside of rational, grammatical, and syntactic rigor, estranged from and on the margin of words, beyond and before them, to think according to the sentimental and magical mystique of images.

If this mystique is dangerous because it draws on what is deepest and most human in mankind, because it stirs the best and the worst of the soul's secret powers – well then, the cinematograph is dangerous and it's high time people began reacting. Already, the book – that ultimate synthesizer of classical language – let itself get contaminated: it is now ashamed of an overwritten, overly correct text, as if this were equivalent to lying. Already, the newspapers present their accounts rendered like “films” of this or that, composed in a telegraphic style, in which, moreover, as many words as possible are replaced by pictures. Already, walls abound with posters meant to be understood by passers-by who don't have to stop or slow down, and which employ all methods of the moving image: close-
ups, superimpositions, parts bigger than the whole, etc. In frequenting the cine-
mas, the public have unlearned to read and think as they read or write; it grows
accustomed to looking and thinking as simply as it sees. Among producers of
films, the word "visualizing" became fashionable for some years. In fact, there is
no better way to characterize film than by saying it visualizes thought. Thus, after
the craftsman and the scholar, one sees the spectator appearing, a new sub-vari-
ety of reasoning being. The knowledge acquired through slow, abstract, rigorous
reasoning has been pervaded by knowledge gained directly through feelings, one
that is immediate, practical, and supple - a kind of poetry that we acquire above
all through what we see. Paradoxically, the return to the concrete is also a return
to the mystical, to the mystique of a beauty, a goodness, a truth that is no longer
immutable but perpetually moving, always relative, and infinitely transformable.
The old battle between the Ancients and Moderns ceases to be undecided. The
new man of the street, the new average French person, has taken the side of mut-
ability over fixed forms, of becoming over permanence. And, certainly, the cine-
ma has played a role in this. If this is a work of the Devil, well then, cinema is
diabolical, and it's already too late to declare holy war against it, for that war has
already been lost.

Note

1. For a detailed examination of *Le Cinéma du diable*, see my article, “Cinéma du diable: Jean Epstein and the Ambiguities of Subversion,” *SubStance* 34, no. 3 (2005): 3-16.
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