The advent of the cinema radically altered our comprehension of time, space, and reality. With his experience as a pioneering avant-garde filmmaker, Jean Epstein uses the universes created by the cinematograph to deconstruct our understanding of how time and space, reality and unreality, continuity and discontinuity, determinism and randomness function both inside and outside the cinema. Time, he says, should be regarded as the first, not the fourth, dimension—and the cinematograph allows us, for the first time, to manipulate it in directions and speeds of our choosing.

The theoretical work of Jean Epstein greatly influenced later generations of cinema philosophers, notably Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, but the bulk of his work remains unpublished. The Intelligence of a Machine, his first major title published in English, is one of the earliest philosophies of cinema.

Although early film buffs may be familiar with Jean Epstein’s films, including an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, not many Anglophones are acquainted with his poetic and provocative prose. Gathered in this wide-ranging collection are new translations into English of every major theoretical work on film theory Epstein ever published, as well a series of essays by other film makers and scholars of art history, French studies, and film, which provide incisive commentary and essential context for Epstein as both a director and a theoretician. As a result, Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations provides an expansive account of the artist and the man, from his beginnings as a student of biology and aspiring poet to his late film projects and posthumously published writings. By both connecting Epstein to his era and offering contemporary criticism of his films, the essays in this book demonstrate his ongoing importance in film history and theory. This collection is a timely reexamination of a filmmaker and author who has much to offer modern audiences and readers.