Introduction

Epstein wrote his first book, La Poésie d’Aujourd’hui, in the summer of 1920, and it was published just after he arrived in Paris in 1921. Focusing mainly on aesthetic and literary concerns (it was well received as a statement on modern poetry), it also sketches out several of the issues Epstein would develop over the course of his writings, including intellectual attention and fatigue; the role of reverie, affect, synesthesia and coenaesthesia in comprehending one's relationship to the visible world; and how literature and cinema mobilize these concepts. He turns explicitly to the cinema in a late chapter, excerpted here, to demonstrate affinities between poetic strategies and cinematic ones.

– Sarah Keller

Cinema and Modern Literature [1921]

Translated by Audrey Brunetaux and Sarah Keller

[Jean Epstein, “Le cinéma et les lettres modernes,” La Poésie d’aujourd’hui, un nouvel état d’intelligence (Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1921), pp. 169-180.]

Cinema saturates modern literature. And inversely, this mysterious art is imbued with a great amount of literature. It is true that, to date, the cine-literary collaboration has mostly produced filmic adaptations such as Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard [director unknown, 1919] and Au Travail [Henri Pouctal, 1919], films which would be impossible to criticize too harshly and which have led astray this emerging, still-hesitant mode of expression that nonetheless stands as the most subtle one we have ever known, the most attuned to the moment.

If viewing a second-rate film made by some mindless director who only knows about literature from the French Academy and its cohorts makes us think of modern literature in spite of him, or rather without his being aware of it, that's because there exists a natural interplay between this new form of literature and cinema that functions on several levels.

First of all:

Modern literature and cinema are equally enemies of theater. Any attempt to reconcile them is pointless. Like two different religions, two aesthetics cannot live side by side without coming into conflict. Under attack from both modern literature and cinema, theater, if not already at the point of death, will progressively grow weaker. It is a foregone conclusion.