Let us begin with a puzzle. In the following passage, Jean Epstein is referring to something…

This language of serial and kinetic fusion will be familiar to readers of silent cinema theoreticians who found ever more ingenious ways of describing how the fluid motion from frame to frame and shot to shot produces the effect of filmic animation. But in point of fact, Epstein is not talking about cinema here – at least, not explicitly. He is describing teeth, the human dentition whose beauty is for him “a living crystal,” and “an ivory landscape erecting its scintillating peaks, inclining its soft slopes hollowed with glens.” According to an annotation by his sister Marie, this unpublished text, titled “The Echo of Pythagoras,” dates from the years 1918-1920 and thus predates Jean's first writings on cinema as well as his involvement in the film industry. Although Epstein was then a medical student in Lyon, not only is this lyrical focus on teeth clearly not a medical gaze on the human body, but it strikingly encapsulates what would become over the 1920s part of the stylistic signature of the photogénie movement: the extreme close-up. I take this cryptically cinematic close-up on teeth as my point of entry into Epstein's corporeal vision of photogénie.

The word photogénie has itself been grinded down like a bad tooth. From astronomer Arago's original coinage in 1839, to denote a model, object, or scene having a signal aptitude for photographic capture, photogénie was redirected in 1919 by Louis Delluc into a broad didactic slogan calling attention to the filmic image as such. By the mid-1920s, after Delluc's early death, Epstein became its erstwhile proponent, notwithstanding the fact that his mentor, the poet Blaise Cendrars (also production assistant to Abel Gance, the ‘master’ of early photogénie), assured him the word was, “cucul-praline-rhododendron.”