Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy

Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy

Wall-Romana, Christophe

Paperback

Series: French Film Directors

Film & Video ArtFilmmakingFrench History

ISBN10: 1784993484
ISBN13: 9781784993481
Publisher: Manchester Univ Pr
Published: Apr 5 2016
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.53
Height: 0.51 Width: 5.06 Depth: 7.81
Language: English

If cinema can be approached as poetry and philosophy, it is because of Jean Epstein. Cocteau, Buñuel (who was his assistant), Hitchcock, Pasolini and Godard, and theoreticians Kracauer, Deleuze and Rancière are directly influenced by Epstein's pioneering film work, writings, and concepts. This book is the first in English to examine his oeuvre comprehensively.

An avant-garde artist and an anti-elitist intellectual, Epstein wanted to craft moments of pure transformative cinema. Using familiar genres - melodramas and documentaries - he hoped to heal viewers of all classes and hasten social utopia. A lover of cinema as cognitive and sensorial technology, and a poet of the screen, he pushed cinematography - as photogénie - towards the experimental sublime, through daring close-ups, rhythmic montage, slow motion, even reverse motion.

Polish-born, half-Jewish, and the author of a treatise on homosexuality, Epstein has been unfairly relegated to the shadows of film history. This book restores him to the limelight of interwar world cinema, on a par with Renoir, Lang, Capra and Eisenstein.

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