On 22 June 1923, just five days after a violent eruption had begun on the island of Sicily, Jean Epstein and cameramen Paul Guichard and Léon Donnot went to see the volcano. The result was La Montagne infidèle, a documentary in which the filmmaker meditates on the real scenes that would dominate his films from the 1930s onwards, here in the form of natural disaster and the extraordinary.
In 1926, Epstein wrote about this experience in his book Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna, one of his most important writings on film theory. The text is both a speculative reflection on the powers of cinema (such as its animism or its ability to make us question our identity) and a literary account of the film’s shooting. “The place for me to think about this most beloved living machine was this almost absolutely dead zone extending one or two kilometres around the first craters.”
The recovered print is a Pathé Kok 28mm tinted distribution version with Spanish subtitles, distributed by Vilaseca and Ledesma, Pathé representatives in Barcelona, Spain, and comes from the Pere Tresserra collection of the Filmoteca de Cataluña, which restored it between 2021 and 2022 (restoration report at repositori.filmoteca.cat).

Rosa Cardona and Daniel Pitarch

Starting with the earliest episodes of this successful six-part ciné-roman, based on a novel by Charles Vayré (published concurrently in “L’Echo de Paris”), avant-garde cineaste Germaine Dulac sets in motion an original, visually captivating, subtly sentimental, and exhilaratingly suspenseful crime drama, with ample servings of plot twists and cliffhangers. Gossette is an orphan, adopted by a couple whose son, falsely accused of the murder of a wealthy industrialist, is on the run. Feminist and socialist, Germaine Dulac reverses class and gender roles, as Gossette comes to the aid of the vulnerable male heir, Phillipe de Savières, who sets out with the young bohemian in search of the true assassin. Praised for its striking realism, Dulac’s Gossette refreshes and modernizes the genre, through its reduced intertitles, natural settings, expressive close-ups, and a variety of specially designed lenses and effects used to express the characters’ inner visions and mental states. While far from the avant-gardist’s cinematic ideal, Gossette allowed this early pioneer of impressionism to introduce general audiences to new techniques that were seen to boost both the moral and artistic level of this popular genre, and the medium itself. As critic Jean Chataigner asserts, “Mme. Dulac is making the cinema progress step by step, and the public is following her with vigorous applause.”

Tami Williams