Jean Epstein

Jean Epstein (Warsaw, 1897 - Paris, 1953) was a French filmmaker, film theorist and writer born in Poland. He worked from the silent era of the 1920s into the years after the Second World War. He is usually linked to French Impressionist cinema and above all to the notion of photogénie, the idea that the camera can reveal qualities in things that the naked eye does not register.

His father was a French Jew and his mother was Polish. After his father died in 1908, the family moved to Switzerland. In Lyon, he worked as secretary and translator for Auguste Lumière and began writing criticism for the modernist magazine L'Esprit Nouveau. He began directing with Pasteur in 1922, and the following year made Cœur fidèle, a melodrama stripped of the usual conventions. Luis Buñuel worked as his assistant director on Mauprat and part of The Fall of the House of Usher.

His style mixed rapid editing, close-ups and a deliberately slow treatment of movement. Early on he was drawn to German Expressionism and Soviet cinema, but later he turned to Brittany, filming documentaries about islands such as Finis Terrae and Mor vran, and setting his two novels there. Chanson d'Armor is considered the likely first film in the Breton language.

After Artères de France (1939) his output dwindled, and he made very little between the end of the war and his death in 1953. During the German occupation he was briefly detained because of his Jewish origin. His lasting reputation rests heavily on his writing: Deleuze drew on his ideas about the shot, and much of his film work was rediscovered on DVD from 2005 onward.