Epstein's film criticism is among the most wide-ranging and poetic writing about cinema; it also constitutes an essential foundation to the history of French film criticism that mainstream Anglophone film studies customarily assigns to André Bazin. Almost as soon as Epstein's writings about literature and then cinema were published, they were held to be among the most insightful and provocative in the new criticism – nowadays we would say ‘theory’ – of the 1920s. Contributing articles to the plethora of newly emerging literary and journalistic venues for the cinema such as Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous and Photo-Ciné in France, Epstein also manages several successful entries internationally, for example with articles appearing in Broom (Rome) and Zenit (Zagreb). There was a wide dissemination of Epstein's films and criticism, seen for example in Pudovkin's mistaken impression that The Fall of the House of Usher was shot entirely in slow motion1 to a fairly substantial knowledge of Epstein among the Czech avant-garde of the 1920s and 30s, some of whom knew of La Lyrosophie. Given this international exposure, it is all the more surprising that Epstein did not immediately rise to the stature his work deserved in cinema studies as it developed as a discipline.

Epstein's critical writing covers a wide range of interests and approaches to cinema. It plays a significant role in developing a language for discussing the potential of film as an art, for example. Moreover, it arrives as an early entry in the debate about cinema's relation to realism. First, Epstein examines the importance of the relationship of the spectator to the world depicted on screen; a bit later, after his first encounters with filming in Brittany at the end of the 1920s, he also develops an understanding of how actors (or inhabitants of the places where he filmed) function cinematically, as part of the landscapes they occupy. In this, his work connects to later iterations of the realism debate, for example through Italian Neo-Realism. While several aspects of Epstein's notion of cinematic realism are examined in exciting and productive ways within the critical essays of this volume – Rachel Moore on the Brittany films and Ludovic Cortade on “the basic ontological problem” taken up in Epstein's work, for two very different examples – many more of the implications of Epstein's notions of realism remain to be explored.