REVIEWS 441

tale’s fascinating potential for subversion and questioning via an enchanted realm akin to
cinema itself.

FIONA HANDYSIDE
doi:10.1093/fs/knu129 UNIVERSITY OF EXETER

Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy. By CHRISTOPHE WALL -ROMANA .
(French Film Directors.) Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. xiv +
224 pp.
Amid the recent revival of interest in the work of Jean Epstein, Christophe
Wall-Romana has produced a remarkably complete, intelligent, and sensitive monograph
on Epstein’s philosophy and cinematography. It is refreshing to read a study by one so
well versed in French literature, cinema, and philosophy, able to situate Epstein’s work in
the poetic ferment of the 1920s, and perfectly capable of distinguishing Epstein’s aesthet-
ic concepts (for example, photogénie and lyrosophie) from those of his contemporaries such
as Walter Benjamin, Sergei Eisenstein, and Henri Bergson. Wall-Romana succeeds in elu-
cidating the concept of photogénie as a relation between the viewer and the filmic, ‘an inter-
face where they encounter each other in a virtual embodiment for the viewer’ (p. 28).
The author builds on this foundation to produce a series of brilliant and compelling
readings of Epstein’s fantastic works, such as La Glace à trois faces (1927) and La Chute de
la maison Usher (1928), showing that the filmmaker is ‘pointing to cinema itself as a new
kind of materiality that transcends the elements and approximates ether’ (pp. 39 –40).
Analysing Epstein’s ‘avant-garde working-class melodramas’, the author shows how
these films ‘disrupt the economy of (normal) melodrama’ by refusing happy endings and
instead signalling ‘the sheer impossibility of wholeness’ (p. 59). Wall-Romana also deline-
ates what he calls Epstein’s ‘stealthy queer deconstruction of heterosexuality’ in his films
of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The series of films shot in Brittany are also beautifully
analysed here, and Wall-Romana discovers ‘a radical aim in these films that led [Epstein]
to undo some of the fundamental categorical divides in cinema historiography: (especial-
ly) visual sense vs. verbal meaning’ (p. 129). Particularly gratifying is the way Wall-
Romana moves from his analyses of specific works to a larger synthesis of Epstein’s
approach and thought. Connecting the films to Epstein’s body of writings, he shows
how the two facets of his work constitute an argument ‘in favour of cinema as restoring
a pre-linguistic contact with meaning’ that obviates language’s ‘excessive rationalism of
reduction’ (p. 136). Alone among the published essays on Epstein’s work, this study is
able to demonstrate that the filmmaker is not a film theorist but a philosopher, able to
argue convincingly not only that ‘cinema is about bodies’ but also that it has the capacity
to ‘alter our knowledge of the world’ and is uniquely able to ‘respond to an ethical need’
(p. 168). Wall-Romana also makes a strong case that André Breton probably borrowed
Epstein’s ideas in his own definition of surrealism. If there are any weaknesses in this
book, they would be in the organization of its material, which produces occasional repe-
titions of subjects previously explored, and the decision not to discuss Le Cinéma du
diable, which is certainly among Epstein’s most challenging and radical essays. These
shortcomings do not, however, diminish the overall excellence of Wall-Romana’s contri-
butions. He writes with great erudition but without a trace of pretentiousness. This is a
‘must read’ for anyone interested in this long-neglected genius, or in the evolution of
film theory and philosophy.

T. JEFFERSON KLINE
doi:10.1093/fs/knu136 BOSTON UNIVERSITY