No Reading returns in September with materials on early French avant-garde film. Paul Willemen’s article Photogénie and Epstein, surveys the texts of Jean Epstein and his contemporaries (Louis Delluc, Riciotto Canudo). Willemen characterizes their efforts as some of the earliest attempts to theorize film. As a result, or in addition, Willemen relates their development of the term, Photogénie, to the concept of cinephilia. The ...discussion of medium and theory and—and particularly Willemen’s distinction between how Epstein situates himself with respect to his concepts as opposed to how Bréton and the surrealists do—is of interest; however the bare concept of Photogénie is also resonant for us, in and of itself. Hot on the heels of two different video projects shot/presented in town by French artists Nicolas Boone and Neil Beloufa, which take in the interrelation of civic space and photogenic vision, we will supplement this salon with a sampling of Epstein’s own writings, and film works.
---
Paul Willemen is a British film critic and cultural theorist, who has written extensively on cinephilia, the concept of third cinema and national form in film journals such as Afterimage and Framework. The text we are looking at was republished in his book Looks and Frictions. Jean Epstein was a Polish emigré, who was a key member of the Parisian film avant-garde of the 1920s and 30s. Working alongside the likes of Germaine Dulac, Man Ray, Fernand Léger and Abel Gance, Epstein wrote extensively on film, and shot more than 30 works from the 1920s thru to the end of the 1940s.