in the grain

I like incorporating quotations into my articles, but with someone like Jean Epstein the temptation is just to string the pearls and leave it that. Feeling some obligation to provide context in my essay for the Harvard Film Archive’s forthcoming retrospective, I lost several choice excerpts from Epstein’s essays—sharp-tongued ones, especially. Although Epstein is rightly celebrated for its boundless faith in the medium’s potential, he could be corrosive when it came to particular films and movements. He had no patience for expressionism (“If you must say about a film that it has beautiful sets, I think it would be better not to speak about it at all; the film is bad”), nor the “pure” abstractions of dabblers like Viking Eggeling and Man Ray. Epstein reserved special animus for the studied effects of the surrealists:

The surrealists were slow to recognize that the instrument of de-rationalization of which they dreamt already existed well within their field of application; and when they finally took notice of cinema, they used it against its grain in such a literary, pictorial and artistic way that their attempts were immediately choked by its esotericism. (“The Delirium of a Machine”).

It’s possible this is just sour grapes from his falling out with Luis Buñuel, who got his start on Epstein productions like Mauprat (1926) and The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), but there’s no mistaking the language of a true believer.