Jean epstein’s documentary cinephilia

While Jean Epstein’s film theory and practice attempts to navigate the often antithetical impulses of experimentation with the cinematic medium and the documentation of reality, both are governed by his cinephilia. Through his engagement with the image as a real or imagined spectator, Epstein insists upon the site of reception as the nexus through which we come to understand the world transformed by film. Both Epstein’s visual virtuosity and his tendency towards documentary investigation find a conduit for complex expression through the close-up in particular. In light of surveying the ways in which he discusses the merging of spectator and spectated, this article then highlights the ways Epstein mobilizes close-ups in two films with apparently opposite impulses, Coeur fidèle/Faithful Heart (1923), which is usually noted for its visual experimentation, and Finis terrae (1929), which deals as much with documenting a more primitive lifestyle among the group of islanders on Ouessant as it does with telling a visually penetrating story about them.