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This chapter addresses the early experimental and theoretical works of Jean Epstein (1897-1953) who later became an influential silent era filmmaker. In Today's Poetry, a New Mindset (1921), Bonjour cinéma (1922) and Lyrosophy (1922), as well as essays published in the international avant-garde journal L’Esprit nouveau in 1921, Epstein articulated a theory of modernist literature as fundamentally permeated by the cinema. Modernism, he argues, responded to the same psycho-physiological condition as pulp novels and serial films: perceptual fatigue and sensorial blockages (coenesthesis). French modernist poets and American filmmakers, he added, deployed their new esthetics in parallel, and he called for the ‘superposition’ of poetry and cinema. The theory he limns out, based of embodiment and mass culture, precedes and perhaps influenced a similar approach by Walter Benjamin, who likely read his work. Already in 1921, Epstein had recuperated Guillaume Apollinaire's coinage, ‘surréalisme,’ to denote this new cinepoetics of the postwar. This detailed and remarkably original theory of modernist poetry as refracting specific features of film esthetics has yet to be integrated into the contemporary canon of poetry criticism.

Moving between his illustrative practice as a filmmaker, in experimental landmarks like La Chute de maison Usher (1928), and his recently translated The Intelligence of a Machine (1946), this chapter expands on Jean Epstein’s role as a theorist of radical discontinuity in the time-based “medium” of consciousness and film alike, the latter commenting, as a result, on the “special effect” (or trucage) of the former. For Epstein, one result is the release of an epistemological “venom” in cinematic experience that can infect, or at least inflect, our view (our optics and our attitude) of normal embodied perception. This chapter thus establishes a theoretical baseline for investigating the original photogrammatical intermittence in the filmic apparatus of cinema, including its privileged tampering with the time-based image of bodies in motion, before its later replacement by the different mutability of the digital frame.

The fifth chapter investigates the way in which early avant-garde French cinema takes up the very forms of vegetal sentience and plant-inspired calamity that so terrified Edgar Allan Poe, thereby rewriting the plant once again as an opening onto new worlds. In these films the “inorganic” function of vegetality—as linked to and inspiring new forms of technology and new means of sociability—returns in the visual domain, generating an “electric plant” that retains its utopian dimensions and its power to deprioritize the human. Thus avant-garde vegetal cinema ties the plant once again to a tradition of speculation that extends into the production and creation of new media capable of apprehending and imitating the subtle materiality of vegetal being. The “electric plant” brings to fruition the concept of cinema as a form of pure movement. The French experimental cinema discussed in this chapter reinvents the project of imagining vegetal worlds, this time in cinematic contexts. While filmmakers and theorists Jean Epstein (1897–1953) and Germaine Dulac (1882–1942) turn with excitement toward vegetality, other contemporaneous artists, including Colette (1873–1954), re-inscribe the plant into the domain of ordinary experience and human pathos.

This chapter examines the evocation of Pearl White's star persona by avant-garde theorists and filmmakers ranging from Sergei Eisenstein to surrealist Robert Desnos. The avant-garde's reactions to White fall largely along movement lines. At once the embodiment of a low-culture narrative mode and a spectacular star object who transcended any particular plot line, White's pejorative status as “the most assassinated woman in the world” may have been more revealing than Jean Epstein originally intended. Whereas Epstein decried White's constant near-death experiences and numerous last-minute escapes as unrealistic pulp fiction, surrealists celebrated her as a “marvelous” apparition. This chapter compares the reactions of adherents of surrealism and impressionism to White and considers how Desnos and the surrealists attempted to transpose the “love and poetry” of her films into their own filmmaking practice. It suggests that White's legacy aside from international stardom exerted an influence upon the avant-garde movement, and that her influence had revolutionary potential for challenging the status quo.

The theoretician and leader of Surrealism, André Breton, was a much deeper cinephile than he has represented. This chapter argues that Breton took over Apollinaire's Surrealism by purging its cinepoetic dimension, replacing the cinema by a host of non-technological constructs such as the Unconscious, automatic writing, the marvellous image, etc. Four sub-arguments are presented: 1) Breton's early experiences with cinema were tainted with queer desire which he evacuated from Surrealism in favour of strict heterosexuality; 2) Breton allied himself with the best cinepoets of the time--Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, and Saint-Pol-Roux—although he elided cinema in their poetics in favour of the marvelous; 3) Breton campaigned against other cinepoets such as Cocteau, Paul Dermée, Ivan Goll; 4) Breton knew Epstein's cinepoetic theories and even recycled some of Epstein's formulations in order to define Surrealism. Altogether, this chapter presents a radical new genealogy of Surrealism as based on the erasure and sublimation of cinepoetry, its practitioners and theoreticians.

This chapter discusses changes in screen masking from 1932 to 1952. While the mask of black velour traditionally used to stabilize projection proved mostly unnecessary by the early 1930s, most exhibitors kept the mask partially out of habit. Schlanger, however, argued for its removal, and thus for a conceptual change from the screen as frame to the screen as window. This focus on screen transformation signifies a shift that would culminate in 1950s widescreen technology. Furthermore, greater attention to optical calibration both highlighted exhibition’s relationship to film theory, particularly around the close-up, and helped cement the neutralized theater as spectatorship’s imminent future.

This chapter addresses the spectacular and massive nature of the architecture of the films themselves—that is to say, the way in which the crowd functions metaphorically as a building block of social cohesion. The stories being told by leftist militant filmmaking of the Popular front are analysed as a spatialized discourse where the crowd becomes a living construction. The portrayal of the worker as individual and member of the mass is crucially cinematographic: militant films cast their spectators as extensions of the films’ worlds. Furthermore, the visual rhetoric of these films opens avenues of insight into the spatial representations and politics of more mainstream products of 1930s cinema culture, such as Julien Duvivier’s La Belle équipe.