In 1926, film theorist Pierre Porte invokes Jean Epstein's Bonjour Cinéma (1921) in support of his argument for a ‘pure cinema’ whose fundamental principle is “to express itself through the harmony and melody of plastic movement,” regardless of whether such visual abstraction is embedded in a narrative structure. Epstein's response in the same journal two weeks later, an essay called “L’Objectif luimême,” protests this use of his work. While he acknowledges that, at the time, the purely plastic qualities of passages of Abel Gance's La Roue (1922), Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique (1923-24), and the absolute films of Viking Eggeling were products of genuine inspiration, they no longer represented the path of artistic advance for the cinema. The central objective of Epstein's essay is instead to celebrate the possibilities of the camera lens as an “inhuman eye, without memory, without thought,” capable of “escaping the tyrannical egocentrism of our personal vision,” thus also relegating the subjective cinema, until then predominant among the avant-garde, to obsolescence.

That Porte associates Epstein with a cinema of plastic deformation is largely a function of the renown of Epstein's 1923 film, Cœur fidèle. Upon its release, the film created a sensation in the press. Some writers criticized its scenario as merely a melodrama. Likewise, L’Auxiliaire Financier finds it bizarre to have a film with no action, “that is to say, without interest, with a deplorable predilection to adapt cubism to the cinema.” According to Epstein's account, the mobility of the film wreaked havoc when it opened at the Omnia, a theater catering to a bourgeois audience accustomed to films more conventional in execution, prompting its removal from the program within two days. But by 1926, Cœur fidèle was regarded as a classic achievement of the nascent art cinema; the film enjoyed pride of place in the repertoire of the Parisian ciné-clubs until the occupation.