Conversation with Emilie Cauquy and Marie Frappat

Marie Epstein was the third Fate of the Cinémathèque française, the others being Lotte Eisner and Mary Meerson. Of the three, she would have been Lachesis who measured the thread on the spindle, given the immediate similarity with her Moritone flatbed editor. Langlois handed the technical department over to her: she was in charge of the inventory and most preservation work until 1977, leaving the position in 1983 after training Renée Lichtig. Her first projects consisted in preserving La Roue, Napoléon, the Lumière films (working with the Boyer labs from 1961 to 1978) and naturally Jean Epstein’s oeuvre. Epstein completed Langlois’s first-class cast of film representatives: Musidora, Mary Meerson (Lazare’s widow), Eve Francis (Delluc’s muse), Louis Gaumont (Léon’s son), Simone Cottance (Brunius’s sister) and Françoise Jaubert (Maurice’s daughter). Part of the team was dedicated to creating an important network of donors and a committee of historical research collecting vital testimony of early film. With forty years of unwavering devotion, Marie Epstein made her brother’s work visible by restoring materials, offering access to his films, publishing writings (she edited the massive two-volume book published by Seghers) and organizing archive cataloguing.

Emilie Cauquy and Marie Frappat