Jean Epstein Finis Terrae Part 2

I have managed to find another clip of Epstein's wonderful movie Finis Terrae which I featured on the 19th Hole back in 2009 and still not available on DVD!



You can see a third clip on Wat.tv

Read a recent review of the film on Wonders in the Dark

Jean Epstein's Finis Terrae 1929

Jean Epstein's Finis Terrae 1929 is the second film in my series of posts on the films shown by the Cambridge Film Guild during Lowry's undergraduate years at Cambridge.

You can view Finis Terrae at Mundosilente website but you will need to download a peer to peer programme to view the film.

In “Finis Terrae”, Herr Epstein forsakes the avant-garde and chooses a more realistic cinema. The film is a kind of documentary set in French Brittany and part of a trilogy (completed by “Mor Vran” (1931) and “L’Or Der Mers” (1932)) dedicated to that French coastal region for which the director had a special predilection.
Though the film belongs in the documentary genre, Herr Epstein is moreinterested in the experimentation he can do. He dramatizes the story in a way consistent with his artistic purposes but does not forget to reflect in it the area, the people and customs with their special characteristics. However, the movie lacks the evident ethnologic importance of Herr Flaherty or Herr Grierson’s films. Read more here



Jean Epstein started directing his own films in 1922 with Pasteur, followed by L'Auberge rouge and Coeur fidèle (both 1923). Famous film director Luis Buñuel worked as an assistant director to Epstein on Mauprat (1926) and La Chute de la maison Usher (1928). Epstein's criticism appeared in the early modernist journal L'Esprit Nouveau.

During the making of Coeur fidèle Epstein now chose to film a simple story of love and violence "to win the confidence of those, still so numerous, who believe that only the lowest melodrama can interest the public", and also in the hope of creating "a melodrama so stripped of all the conventions ordinarily attached to the genre, so sober, so simple, that it might approach the nobility and excellence of tragedy". [1] He wrote the scenario in a single night.

Epstein had been much impressed by Abel Gance's recently completed La Roue, and in Coeur fidèle he sought to apply its techniques of rapid and rhythmic editing as well as the innovative use of close-ups and superimpositions of images. These techniques are most apparent during the first half of the film: the opening sequence establishing Marie's situation in the harbour bar through a series of close-ups of her face, her hands, the table and glasses that she is cleaning; the use of images of the sea and the port, either intercut or superimposed, to convey the yearnings of Jean and Marie; and the film's most celebrated sequence at the fairground in which a highly complex series of rhythmically assembled images charts the tension of the relationship between Marie and Petit Paul. The later scenes of the film are relatively conventional in the techniques employed and depend more upon situation and action than upon photography and processing of the images. Read more at Wikipedia



Though I am unable to show any long clips of Finis Terrae on my blog, I have been able to find a copy of Epstein's Fall Of The House Of Usher to compensate:


The Fall Of the House Of Usher was a significant film to Lowry and I will be returning to look at the film in more detail in another post..

Lowry visited the Valentine Museum in Richmond to see Poe's relics in 1947.

He later copied this down in his notebook from one of Poe's leters:

"It will however be the last time I ever trouble any human being - I feel am on a sick bed from which I shall never get up.. I am wearing away every day, even if my last sickness has not completed it"

Cambridge Film Guild 1929-30 Season

Lowry had a life-long love of cinema which began with his childhood visits to cinemas in the Wirral area.

Paul Tiessen in his essay A Canadian Film Critic In Lowry's Cambridge has given us an insight of how that love of cinema developed when Lowry attended Cambridge University. At Cambridge, Lowry met Gerald Noxon then a Trinity College undergraduate. Noxon was a Canadian film critic and writer who helped shape Lowry's enthusiasm for film in the early part of their friendship.

Noxon was one of the founders of the Cambridge Experiment magazine which published an early Lowry story called Port Swettenham in Issue 5 of the magazine. Noxon was also the founding president of the Cambridge Film Guild.

Noxon with his wife Betty Lane

You can read more about Lowry's friendship with Noxon in Noxon's memoir Malcolm Lowry 1930 available in Malcolm Lowry: Psalms And Songs in which Noxon details their shared passion for cinema and jazz. Lowry and Noxon also exchanged letters for many years which are available in The Letters of Malcolm Lowry and Gerald Noxon, 1940-1952.

Noxon exposed Cambridge University students to the some of the best European cinema of the period - "in order to afford people interested in the Cinema an opportunity of seeing films which are otherwise unavailable to them."

Tiessen in his essay details the following films which were shown:

The 1929-30 programme included:

Pabst's The Love Of Jeanne Ney 1927
Epstein's Finis Terrae 1929
Cavalcanti's En Rade 1927
Feyder's Therese Raquin 1928
Clair's Les Deux Timides 1928
Eisenstein's The General Line 1929
Kozintsev and Trauberg's CBD 1927
Turin's Turk-Sib 1929
Pudovkin's The End Of St Petersburg 1927
Pudovkin's Storm Over Asia 1928

1930-31 programme included:

Pudovkin's The End Of St Petersburg 1927
Vertov's Man With A Movie camera 1929
Dovzhenko's Earth 1930
Room's The Ghost That Never Returns 1930

Some of the above films are referenced in Lowry's letters and other writings.

Tiessen in several pieces and Kilgallin in his 1973 book Lowry have written about Lowry and cinema. However, there is still considerable scope for further research and a larger piece of work pulling together Lowry's visits to cinemas on the Wirral, his Cambridge days and a visit to Germany and his love of German Expressionist cinema, the time he spent in Hollywood as an abortive screen-writer, the fact he married a film actress Margerie Bonner, his film-script for Tender Is The Night (Tiessen did a fine job on the edition published in The Cinema Of Malcolm Lowry), the many references to films in all his work including his letters as well as the impact of cinema on his writing style.

In subsequent posts, I will offer up clips, posters, photographs detailing the films in the Cambridge Film Guild between 1929-31.

Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera 1930