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THE FRENCH FILM
Of the present directors in France it has been said that the most significant are Jean Epstein, Rene Clair, Abel Gance, Karl Dreyer (a Dane who has recently worked in France with French material) and Jacques Feyder (a Belgian, who has directed in Germany and who is now in Hollywood). The first two of these have developed from the avant-garde movement.
Epstein, who is of Polish origin, is characterised by his philosophy of outlook and his essentially cinematic mind, which has recently been influenced by the constructivism of the Soviet cinema. Amongst his early experimental work, usually conceived with a sense of mysticism and expressed by a variety of trick camerawork, mention may be made of Mauprat, Le Coeur Fidele, L'Affiche, La Glace a Trots Faces, and Six et Demi x Onze. It was with his version of La chute de la Maison Usher that he first claimed serious attention. He succeeded in this somewhat theatrical production in creating an atmosphere of macabre mysticism rather after the manner of Murnau in the earlier Dracula. Chiefly notable were his uses of flying drapery, of lowlying mist, of gusts of wind and of the imagery of guttering candle flames, with which he emphasised the literary value of Poe's story. Regrettable were the poor model shots, clumsily contrived, which were destructive to the poetic atmosphere of the whole. Epstein was hampered by the interpretation of a literary theme in terms of the cinema. Utterly different, however, was his next work, the realisation of Finis Terrce. This was a film with practically no narrative content, taken with actual material on an island off the coast of Brittany. The theme concerned an injury to the hand of a fisherman, who was one of four gathering a harvest of kelp on the island of Bannec, and a quarrel that resulted from the accident. The value of the content rested on the interplay of the emotions and reactions of the characters to the incidental events. For the first two-thirds of his film, Epstein built the theme in preparation for a final climactic ending. In the last third he lost control, and by changing the location from the fishermen on the island to their mothers and the doctor he failed to retain the unity of the earlier portion . Nevertheless , despite this glaring mistake in thematic construction, Epstein made a film of great strength, of powerful psychological and pictorial value, that may be placed almost on the level of Flaherty's Moana. He has recently completed Sa Tetey which, although conceived on the same lines as the earlier film, is said to be more artificial in psychological construction.
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