Jean Epstein’s documentaries are set in coastal Brittany. The director and film theoretician created the concept of paysage-acteur, which means that nature on screen has the same role as actors in dramatic films and is subject to the same detailed study. Nothing – not even the smallest object – is passive: “there are no dead objects on the screen”. Life is made of situations, not stories. It is not a series of Chinese boxes; even the concept of “kaleidoscopic film” is something of the past. Film is “a description of the heart’s illusions”. Epstein’s visionary series in Brittany – his plunging dive into the “documentary” – started almost immediately after his most famous experimental work La chute de la Maison Usher (1928). I would like to mention his most astonishing sea image, a fragment of twenty minutes, Le Tempestaire (1948), because it captures the nature of silence with an almost religious tone: the images of immobile people are like a prayer. The viewer experiences the wind and the waves, sunset and sunrise as he has never experienced them before.

(Peter von Bagh)

Programme curated by Peter von Bagh
Thanks to Laura Vichi