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Marie Epstein

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Years active
  
1923—1977

Name
  
Marie Epstein


Role
  
Actress

Siblings
  
Jean Epstein

Marie Epstein dvdtoilecomARTISTES2929147jpg

Full Name
  
Marie-Antonine Epstein

Born
  
14 August 1899 (
1899-08-14
)

Occupation
  
Died
  
April 24, 1995, Paris, France

Movies
  
The Faithful Heart, Children of Montmartre, Ballerina

Similar People
  
Jean Epstein, Henri Langlois, Mady Berry, Madeleine Renaud, Paul Morand

Marie Epstein (born Marie-Antonine Epstein; 14 August 1899, Warsaw - 24 April 1995, Paris) was an actress, scenarist, film director, and film preservationist. Her career is distinguished by three important collaborations. Throughout the 1920s, she acted in and wrote scenarios for films directed by her brother, Jean Epstein. From the 1920s through the early 1950s, she collaborated with the director Jean Benoît-Lévy on sixteen films, serving variously as a writer, assistant director, and co-director. From the early 1950s to her retirement in 1977, Epstein served as a film preservationist at the Cinémathèque française.

Contents

Collaboration with Jean Benoît-Lévy (1928-1940)

Epstein is best known for the films she co-directed with Jean Benoît-Lévy throughout the 1930s. Moving away from the romantic scenarios she wrote for Jean Epstein, her films with Benoît-Lévy employ many of the avant-garde techniques developed in French Impressionist Cinema of the 1920s to explore major social issues facing France in the 1930s, especially poverty, single motherhood, the struggles of oppressed women, and the plight of poor and neglected children. As film historian Alan Williams notes, Benoît-Lévy and Epstein's films "always pay careful attention to the moral choices required by particular social conditions."

While their films reflect the Poetic Realism prominent in 1930s French cinema, their work makes greater use of experimental editing techniques. Describing La Maternelle (1933), a film about state-run nursery education, Williams notes that the film recalls "the tradition of cinematic impressionism" by using "subjective editing" to convey "traumatic events in the life of a neglected slum child" and by presenting a woman's "attempted suicide in a rapid sequence of disparate images" to communicate the episode's violence. Film scholar Sandy Flitterman-Lewis also calls attention to this episode because the woman looks directly at the camera (a rarity in films of this period), "implicating the spectator directly" in the woman's suicide.

Benoît-Lévy and Epstein's films also depart from typical Poetic Realist films in their treatment of social issues. As film scholar Ginette Vincendeau says in her obituary for Epstein, La Maternelle offers a "useful corrective" to Jean Vigo's Zéro de conduite. Whereas Vigo's film portrays the French education system as cruel and ineffectual, La Maternelle depicts "school as an instrument of social liberation rather than repression." Vincendeau and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster also note that Benoît-Lévy and Epstein's films place particular importance on the challenges confronting women and feature a number of strong female characters, both unusual in French films of the period.

1940s

As a Jew, Epstein was arrested by the Gestapo in February, 1944, but avoided deportation and was later released thanks to the efforts of friends in the French film industry and the Red Cross, for which she worked. Epstein's filmmaking career came to a standstill during the 1940s.

Late documentaries and preservation work (1950s-1977)

In the early 1950s, Epstein served as an assistant director for several short documentary films directed by Benoît-Lévy, and in 1953, completed the only film for which she is credited as the sole director, La Grande espérance, a documentary about atomic energy.

Beginning in the early 1950s, Epstein worked as a preservationist of silent cinema under the guidance of Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque française. She is known to have restored Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927), as well as films by her brother, Jean Epstein. She retired from the Cinémathèque in 1977.

Director

  • La Grande espérance (1953)
  • Co-director with Jean Benoît-Lévy

    Given the collaborative relationship between Benoît-Lévy and Epstein, it is difficult to determine Epstein's exact contribution to these films. Epstein likely served as a writer and assistant for some films and as co-director for others.

  • Il était une fois trois amis (1928)
  • Âmes d'enfants (1928)
  • Peau de Pêche (1928)
  • Maternité (1929)
  • Heart of Paris (1932)
  • La Maternelle (1933)
  • Itto (1934)
  • Hélène (1936)
  • Ballerina (La mort du cygne) (1937)
  • Altitude 3200 (1938)
  • Le feu de paille (1939)
  • Assistant director

    Unless otherwise noted, all films are directed by Jean Benoît-Lévy.

  • Coeur fidèle (Jean Epstein, 1923)
  • Agence matrimoniale (1952)
  • Le congrès de la dance (1952)
  • Deux maîtres pour un valet (1952)
  • Le poignard (1952)
  • Sous les ponts (1952)
  • Writer

  • Coeur fidèle (Jean Epstein, 1923)
  • L'Affiche (Jean Epstein, 1924)
  • Le double amour (Jean Epstein, 1925)
  • Six et demi onze (Jean Epstein, 1927)
  • Vive la vie (Jean Epstein, 1937)
  • La liberté surveillée (Henri Aisner and Vladimír Vlcek, 1958)
  • Actor

  • Coeur fidèle (Jean Epstein, 1923)
  • Appearances

  • Citizen Langlois (Edgardo Cozarinsky, 1995)
  • Le Fantôme d'Henri Langlois (Jacques Richard, 2004)
  • Filmography

    Assistant Director
    1952
    Agence matrimoniale (Short) (assistant director)
    1952
    Deux maîtres pour un valet (Short) (assistant director)
    1952
    French Cancan (Short) (assistant director)
    1952
    La noce à Monaco (Short) (assistant director)
    1952
    La Ruche (Short) (assistant director)
    1952
    Le congrès de la danse (Short) (assistant director)
    1952
    Le malade imaginaire (Short) (assistant director)
    1952
    Le poignard (Short) (assistant director)
    1952
    Nymphes de Versailles (Short) (assistant director)
    1952
    Sous les ponts (Short) (assistant director)
    1951
    La mystérieuse Fatima (Short) (assistant director)
    1951
    Quartetto (Short) (assistant director)
    1951
    Quatorze juillet: un jour férié (Short) (assistant director)
    1939
    Le feu de paille (assistant director)
    1934
    L'agronomie au Maroc (Documentary short) (assistant director)
    1932
    L'École Nationale d'Agriculture de Montpellier (Documentary short) (assistant director)
    1930
    L'hyménée des roses ou l'hybridation artificielle (Documentary short) (assistant director)
    1930
    Maternité (assistant director)
    1927
    L'école d'agriculture de Cibeins (Documentary short) (assistant director)
    1926
    L'olivier (Documentary short) (assistant director)
    1925
    La destruction des campagnols (Documentary short) (assistant director)
    Writer
    1958
    La liberté surveillée (writer)
    1937
    La mort du cygne (dialogue) / (screenplay)
    1936
    Hélène (scenario)
    1933
    La maternelle (writer)
    1932
    Coeur de Paris
    1930
    Maternité (writer)
    1927
    Six et demi onze
    1925
    Le double amour
    1923
    The Faithful Heart (writer)
    Director
    1953
    La grande espérance (Documentary short)
    1938
    Youth in Revolt
    1937
    La mort du cygne (co-director)
    1934
    Itto (co-director)
    1933
    La maternelle
    1932
    Coeur de Paris
    1929
    Âmes d'enfants
    1929
    Peau de pêche
    1927
    Il était une fois trois amis
    Actress
    1923
    The Faithful Heart as
    Crippled Woman
    Producer
    1930
    Maternité (producer)
    Self
    1995
    Citizen Langlois (TV Movie documentary) as
    Self
    Archive Footage
    2011
    Jean Epstein, Young Oceans of Cinema (Documentary)

    References

    Marie Epstein Wikipedia


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