Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nmvwc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-03T08:12:04.561Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Visitings of Awful Promise: The Cinema Seen from Etna

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2021

Get access

Summary

Sometime during late June 1923, in a hotel in Catania, Sicily, the 26-year-old French filmmaker and film theorist Jean Epstein rang for the elevator to the lobby seven floors below. He had come to Sicily to shoot Mt. Etna's eruption for his fifth film, the documentary LA MONTAGNE INFIDÈLE, now unfortunately lost. The plaintive cries of the night concierge trapped between floors in the elevator cabin gave notice that he would need to use the stairs, and Epstein began to walk down a spiral staircase lined with mirrors, what the French call a miroir à vis. He would later recount his descent in one of his most striking, though still insufficiently appreciated, speculative texts, ‘Le Regard du verre’ (‘The Mirror's Gaze’). ‘This immense spiral of stairs,’ he wrote, ‘portended vertigo’:

The entire shaft was lined with mirrors. I descended surrounded by many selves, by reflections, by images of my gestures, by cinematic projections. At every turn I was caught from another angle. There are as many different and independent positions between a profile and a three-quarter view as there are tears in an eye. Each of these images lived but an instant, no sooner caught sight of than lost from view, already something else. Only my memory could hold on to one of their infinite number, and by doing so, missed two of every three.Athird of the images gave birth to secondary images. An algebra and descriptive geometry of gestures came to light. Certain movements were divided over and over; others were multiplied. I tilted my head and to my right I saw only the square root of a gesture, but to the left, this gesture was raised to the eighth power. Looking at one, then the other, I acquired a different conception of my three-dimensionality. Parallel perceptions accorded perfectly with each other, reverberated against each other, reinforced each other, and then were extinguished, like an echo, but with a speed far greater than acoustical ones. Tiny gestures became very large … This staircase was the eye of another sort of tyrant and an even greater spy. I descended as if moving across the optical facets of an immense insect. The opposing angles of other images cut across and amputated each other; reductive and fragmentary, they humiliated me.

Type
Chapter
Information
Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida
Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson
, pp. 91 - 108
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×