Introduction to Esprit de cinéma and Alcool et cinéma

These last two books of Jean Epstein were published posthumously in 1955 and 1975 respectively. Esprit reprises a number of articles Epstein published in journals in the years 1946-49 (with one short text from 1935), and Alcool may be considered in part a variant of Esprit, since half of it recapitulates sections of that book almost verbatim. Taken together, these works represent a last summation of Epstein's thoughts about cinema. They echo central themes and ideas found in two of his other synoptic efforts, L’Intelligence d’une machine (1946) and Le Cinéma du diable (1947), notably the insistence that cinema as a mechanical apparatus discloses our universe anew. Photogénie, close-ups, reverse and slow motion, and a loosening of cause and effect, display a different face of nature which paradoxically accords both with certain discoveries of modern physics and aspects of pre-Socratic, pagan, and materialist thought.

The fundamental dualism of Epstein may be seen in the parallel oppositions of ‘intelligence’ and ‘evil,’ and ‘spirit’ and ‘alcohol’. On the one hand, we find an Apollonian tendency to understand cinema as an idea, a development in the realm of the mind and science, while on the other hand, cinema directly and challengingly reconnects modern viewers to a Dionysian embodiment, to art and poetry. Since Epstein rarely cites Nietzsche, we might do better to point to Charles Baudelaire's duality of le moderne, which combines a deeply material belonging to the present moment with a much more ethereal relationship with the past and the eternal. While Baudelaire is cited scarcely more than Nietzsche, Epstein's reverence for Poe together with his apology of evil, alcohol, and corporeal experience are unmistakably Baudelairean.

But Esprit and Alcool also contrast with L’Intelligence d’une machine and Le Cinéma du diable, the latter two centrally concerned with time and temporality and written in a taut lyrical-philosophical style. Both compilations of articles published in mainstream journals, Esprit and Alcool display a register akin to cultural chronicle – indeed close to our current cultural studies – more so than philosophical critique.