The essence of technology, Martin Heidegger explains in “The Question Concerning Technology” (1953), is nothing technological. It is a matter of the Erscheinung (“coming to presence”) of Being of the work of art. The later writings of Jean Epstein also identify a question of technology to be answered in the realm of aesthetics and in processes of subjectivity. Instead of serving the development of a necessarily strained and reductive analogy between Heidegger's concepts and Jean Epstein's writings on cinema – indeed, Heidegger's apparent techno-skepticism and Epstein's celebrations of film technology immediately seem irreconcilable – this relationship may prompt us to ask which is the “question concerning technology” informing Epstein's theory. The “automatic subjectivity” of cinema asks the essential question of technology: whether it acts isomorphically in relation to our consciousness and our perception, and thus serves as a mere tool for our actions and for our thinking, or if it invents an intelligence and a philosophy of its own.2 Anyone familiar just with the titles of Epstein's books and articles knows his immediate answer to this question: there is a philosophy of the cinematograph and an intelligence of the machine. However, as the essence of technology is nothing technological, the answer is more complex than a complete separation between human and technology. How does this other perception, this differing space-time, relate to “everyday” human perception? How does it produce different ways of thinking and other forms of subjectivity?

I will approach these questions by looking at a central paradox in Epstein's writings: if the technology of cinema automatically sets off other perceptions of time, space, and movement, this difference should apply to all films. That is not the case, however. There is clearly an aesthetics of cinema informing Epstein's writings, where only some films in certain ages of cinema fulfill this potential for transgression of the human boundaries of time and space. The relative lack of analyses of specific films in his writings indicates that Epstein instead describes an un-realized cinema yet to come. The paradox that these transgressive qualities only exist in certain films at certain times while remaining an automatic aspect of the technology is highlighted in Epstein's description of the configuration of the senses in cinema, namely in the relationship between the ocular and the haptic.